Today’s show continued our discussions around the future of electricity and grid reliability as we were joined by Eric Holdsworth, Managing Director of Clean Energy and Environmental Policy for the Edison Electric Institute (EEI). EEI’s members generate electricity that powers the homes of over 200 million Americans and Eric joined to share perspectives from years of supporting policy needs and advocacy for EEI members.
EEI members’ climate and carbon reduction goals permeated our conversation throughout and also started our discussion as we explored the challenges facing utilities and our grid in meeting these aggressive decarbonization commitments. Eric then shared some perspectives around what the industry and EEI members are most focused on to move forward the adoption of clean energy technology and introduced us to the Carbon Free Technology Initiative, a policy development process and set of policy recommendations around clean energy technology that saw adoption in the Inflation Reduction Act and other recent legislation. Eric then shared a bit about EEI itself and the motivations driving EEI and its members before our conversation pivoted to the reliability challenges of today, as well as tomorrow, and how to combat them. We closed our conversation with shifting from the utility mindset to the consumer one and trying to understand what best role ratepayers and the average citizen can play in helping combat reliability challenges as well as supporting adoption of new clean technologies.