Stanford’s Uncommon Dialogues

Solar siting, the future of hydroelectric dams, and grid
transmission buildout have been some of the most contentious and
important areas needing attention as the U.S. builds out the
electric grid of tomorrow. 


In this episode of Grid Talk, host Marty Rosenberg interviews Dan
Reicher who is a former Assistant Secretary of Energy and is
associated with the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, as
well as Dartmouth’s Irving Institute for Energy and Society.


The discussion centers on a program at Stanford called Uncommon
Dialogues which aims to sort out divisive issues and make
progress solving them.


“I started to look into this Uncommon Dialogue program, and I was
really quite intrigued given the difficulties we have in
resolving some of today’s big energy, climate and environmental
issues,” said Reicher.


The idea is to get opposing parties together at least once and
see if there’s any interest in really trying to resolve some of
their big differences.


“I think we’ve got a good process, and we’ve tested it now in
both hydropower and big solar, and I think it could work well on
a lot of other issues. We got some of the biggest solar
developers in the United States to sit down with some of the big
environmental groups including The Nature Conservancy, the
largest U.S. conservation group, and with tribal representatives
and a whole host of others.”


The result was the groups bought in on an agreement about how to
proceed.


“We’ve been moving forward ever since to really try to improve
the way we site, operate, and transmit the power from these big
solar projects, often measured in the hundreds and hundreds of
megawatts and some of them approaching 1,000 megawatts.”


Dan Reicher is a former Assistant Secretary of Energy in the
Clinton Administration. Mr. Reicher is currently attached to the
Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. Mr. Reicher joined
Stanford in 2011 as the executive director of Stanford's
Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy & Finance. Before
joining Stanford, he was the Director of Climate Change and
Energy Initiatives at Google.


Mr. Reicher holds a B.A. in biology from Dartmouth College and a
J.D. from Stanford Law School.