In this ClimateGen episode, I’m speaking with Dr Alexander McDonald, a former head of climate research at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, NOAA. Alexander outlines the need to urgently upgrade electrical energy generation in the US and around the world using supergrids. The vulnerability of existing grids was illustrated recently in Spain and Portugal, where an outage hit the entire Iberian Peninsula in May 2025.
Without a massive transition to resilient electrification, we are all exposed to huge risks posed by power outages. In the next episode, I speak with Dr Sumitra Das about the proposed cooling plan for India. What we have found last year, 37 cities crossed 45 degrees Celsius and with humidity that means 55 degrees to 65 degrees Celsius, real fill that you’d have.
90% of the people do not have air conditioning today. Dr Sumitra Das and his colleagues have proposed a national cooling policy plan in an effort to counter the deaths caused by extreme heatwaves. This includes geoengineering techniques that many will find controversial.
And yet, as the emissions keep rising, so do the temperatures and the humidity. Thank you to all members and subscribers for supporting this channel. There are more episodes in the pipeline covering interrelated climate topics from experts across the globe.
Thank you for listening.
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Transcript
Alexander, thank you very much for taking the time to speak to me today. We’re going to talk about the whole supergrid proposal that you’re very involved in.
And I just wanted to ask you to give a brief status quo in the US for electricity generation and transmission and also considering the future demand for, especially when we’re talking about new technologies like AI, for example.
[Dr Alexander MacDonald]
The importance of electricity is because ultimately it’s going to be the lowest cost and only way we can decarbonise. So these don’t happen overnight. And my proposal is that we can decarbonise the world over 40 years, but we’ve got to get going pretty quick.
And what you discover when you look at electricity is it kind of grew just haphazardly globally. It’s crucial to our civilisation and it is not the same as other goods. In other words, when you build a little power plant and you want to sell your electricity, you can sell it generally in the region that you live in, but you can’t get it any further.
And that’s because of the nature of alternating current power. So like other economic goods, if you have something called a supergrid, which is this large continental scale transmission system, you can then sell your electricity over that whole area. And it turns out that if we’re going to have wind and solar and decarbonised electricity become dominant, we have to have those large scales because the weather itself varies on a continental scale.
So you got to be able to move it around that far.
[Nick Breeze]
And can you give us some characteristics of this idea of a supergrid? What does it look like? What does it entail?
[Dr Alexander MacDonald]
In the US, I like to say it looks like the interstate highway system. And in fact, that might not be a bad way to do it. I once published an op-ed in the Washington Post proposing that we do it along our interstate highway system.
Europe was actually a leader in this. They’ve had proposals since the 1980s talking about desert tech and ideas that would have a big transmission system that would bring the abundant solar energy of Southern Europe and even the Sahara and the abundant wind energy that’s in Northern Europe and put them together in a big grid. So this was an idea that really originated in Europe and I got involved with it to basically pursue the idea here.
The characteristic is we use high voltage direct current electricity. So we’re used to alternating current electricity because it’s really much better for its current use, moving electricity around short distances. But when you go a long distance like 1,000 kilometres or 1,000 miles, when you go a long distance, it’s much less expensive and works better to use direct current.
So these big grids move energy around the continent from where the wind is blowing and from where the sun is shining to where it’s needed minute by minute and hour by hour. So they’re a wonderful new technology that can help us.
[Nick Breeze]
On the generation side, how do you see the mix? How would you supply America’s needs in terms of if you sort of got the kickstart to start implementing, how would that unfold?
[Dr Alexander MacDonald]
The answer is that you can’t turn a 90-degree corner. You have to do a transition. So the proposal that I’ve made is that we start with the three lowest cost energy in the U.S. today, which are natural gas energy, which is available for about 4 cents a kilowatt hour, wind and solar energy, which is in the Great Plains, now getting as low as 2 cents a kilowatt hour. And you start with those three and you basically, if you have a super grid, a market will settle on those three as the way to generate electricity over the nation. The trick is that there’s a number of companies, Siemens has been a leader in this, who basically allow a natural gas plant to be built so that it can transition to hydrogen. So what the idea over about 20 or 25 years is that we start with natural gas plants, wind and solar plants.
And over 25 years, you transition to manufacture decarbonised gas using electrolysis. So we can ultimately have a fully decarbonised economy, not just in the U.S., but in Europe, China, everywhere on earth, actually. And that’s the key.
It isn’t a local or national or even, you know, super national among nations. It’s basically a global problem. And this is a global solution.
[Nick Breeze]
But even if you take the U.S. on this sort of national scale, you’re proposing a grid that crosses state lines. You must have territorial issues, licencing issues. How do you go about creating a grid that literally spans so far it can transport the energy from where it’s generated to where you need it to be?
[Dr Alexander MacDonald]
The point about it is if you want the lowest cost energy, because everything that we do with energy, drive cars, trains, everything can be electrified. There’s now home heating. So if you want the lowest cost energy and the best kind of foundation for your economy, it requires a national solution.
The United States has faced this several times in its 246 year lifetime. One of them was back in 1938 when the Texans had huge amounts of natural gas and they just said, we are not going to be able to sell this natural gas to the Northeast United States unless we get an interstate law. So they went to the Congress and they got a Congress that says you can bury underground gas pipelines and oil pipelines using a national interstate law.
And they got it. Eisenhower saw the same thing. He said the United States has a federal state local highway system, but we need the interstate highway system that’s basically federally mandated in law to have the kind of trade that this country needs and the kind of military capability.
So it was basically both defence and commercial reasons that a national law was drawn up in 1956. Democrats and Republicans supported it. Actually Al Gore’s father was one of the democratic supporters of Eisenhower’s interstate.
And that’s the moment we need again. We need Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. to come together to say electricity is crucial for everything that’s happening. Artificial intelligence is going to increase the demand for electricity, the ability to decarbonise the lowest cost energy, which affects everything in your economy from exports to your internal standard of living.
So that’s what we need is an interstate electricity system. And that’s what the super grid does.
[Nick Breeze]
You highlighted a couple of precedents there in U.S. history. And there’s a sort of a common factor there is displays of great political will and leadership. Where would that come from today when everything’s so polarised and divided?
Do you even see that it’s realistic as we’re talking now?
[Dr Alexander MacDonald]
Well, I see it as a uniter. I published a article in a well-known U.S. publication that tracks whether people like it. And they say that almost every issue is 50-50.
This one was 80% in favour of the electricity interstate because everybody sees that a low cost energy future is crucial. It’s crucial in Europe. It’s crucial in the United States.
It’s crucial in China, who’s leading in a lot of the areas that the world will need to do this kind of thing.
[Nick Breeze]
You say low cost future, but actually the implementation, it sounds like it’s going to be astronomic. How do you cover that cost? And how does that feature in the deployment plan?
[Dr Alexander MacDonald]
The interesting thing is that the cost of transmission is not astronomical. It turns out that like a lot of things, you might want to mine gold in your backyard, but there’s probably not any gold there. So what happens is there’s big differences in wind energy and solar energy, and even natural gas energy.
There’s places where the wind gets five times, 10 times as much energy as it does in other places. So it’s like every economic question when you are somewhere that doesn’t have a lot of wind, and there’s parts of the United States that have very little wind. The simple question is, what is the cost of getting energy, electric energy?
And the answer is, well, you can create it somewhere where it’s really windy, and you can move it for only two or three cents a kilowatt hour to anywhere in the country. And that two or three cents covers all the costs of these giant networks. Two cents a kilowatt hour would basically pay for it.
So another example that I’ve used is like toll roads. We had a very overcrowded road that was a mess, and the state government said, well, we’re not gonna build a new one for 30 years. And then they said, but wait, if we do it as a toll road, we can get it built in three years, and they did.
So moving things costs money for this national network. It’s not actually much at all compared to the cost of, say, coal and nuclear electricity. The latest nuclear plant in the United States cost 18 cents a kilowatt hour.
There’s places in the Great Plains where we can produce wind and solar for two cents a kilowatt hour. So what I say to my friends, there’s two gas stations, one selling gas for $2, another selling it for $18. Which one are you gonna buy your gas from?
That’s what we’re really talking about here.
[Nick Breeze]
And in the literature that I was reading, there’s discussion of, you create this mesh across the country, and to do it, you’re using a lot of either underground or underwater transmission cables. How does that actually get implemented?
[Dr Alexander MacDonald]
We really have three fabulous new technologies that we didn’t have even 10 or 20 years ago. One of those is wind power, which 20 years ago was 10 times as much as it is today. Likewise, solar power.
The cost of solar panels has come down so far. It’s really inexpensive. The third one is a little more complicated, and that is direct current, high voltage direct current power.
The first line was built by the Swedes from Sweden to Gotland Island. They built a high voltage DC line way back in the 1920s. And they’ve been working on it, everybody has been working on it ever since.
And there’s a very important property of high voltage direct current. And that is it’s more controllable than high voltage alternating current. So alternating current is what we want to use for everything we now use it for.
But for this long distance movement on a mesh network, we have the ability to basically route the electric energy wherever we want over the mesh network. The reason that you and I can talk is there’s a global communications network that’s a mesh network. Anybody, anywhere that gets on the network can send a signal to anybody anywhere else.
Well, we don’t have that with the alternating current electricity system. But this high voltage DC system allows, what I like to say is if there’s a big electricity shortage in Miami at midnight, you know, maybe they’re parting too much on Miami Beach, and there’s extra electricity at Grand Coulee Dam all the way across the country in the state of Washington, it’s immediately available through a mesh network to solve that problem. You can’t do that with our existing alternating current network.
So it’s a very powerful anywhere to anywhere network.
[Nick Breeze]
And when you saw on the global news, this outage right across the Iberian Peninsula and Portugal and Spain, did that suggest anything to you regarding risk or any kind of fallibility with this?
[Dr Alexander MacDonald]
Yes. There’s two kind of pieces to a solution. One piece is with a high voltage DC super grid.
You basically always have the ability to bring power from large distances when you have outages. So the outage may be that, for example, a substation can go offline and overload and so on. But with the super grid, you always can bring power in.
There’s a second thing that I think is important. And that is that electricity becomes even more important in our lives in the future. So you imagine that right now you have a power outage.
Okay, maybe I have natural gas heat. So I still have a warm house and my car runs on gasoline so I can still drive. Well, in the 2060s, probably all those are going to be electricity.
So you really can’t get anywhere. You can’t heat your house. You can’t get your water because they all depend on electricity pumping the water and so on.
So for the future, we have to make everything more robust. And the key centre of that is a super grid built with high security in mind. There’s even threats by what are called EMP bombs.
And the sun itself throws off these giant coronal mass ejections that can ruin the electricity network. We’ve been lucky. The day could come where most of the world loses electricity at exactly the same time.
So we have to modernise the electricity centred around the super grid that protects the flow of electricity because it is life-giving. Being without electricity for a week, you can survive. For a month, bad things start to happen.
For a year, there’s huge loss of life.
[Nick Breeze]
So you see this is the resilience of the civilisation level.
[Dr Alexander MacDonald]
Huge, huge. And the last huge coronal mass ejection that got Earth occurred when electricity was just starting. So there were these poor telegraph operators in the United States that all at once, they’re running their telegraph and there’s northern lights covering the whole sky and they start getting electricity running through their fingers.
So that was the famous Carrington event, which occurred late 1850s. I think it was 1858. If we get another one of those, we would globally have giant electricity outages in many places, very hard to recover from.
[Nick Breeze]
To end on, I just want to come back to this idea that there’s a lot of political turmoil at the moment and America as this power in the world, how closely do you relate this to enduring America’s status in terms of innovation, technology, and all of these other things? How critical is this proposal to that position that the US holds?
[Dr Alexander MacDonald]
I think it’s really critical. In fact, the problem we have now is that China is doing great things. They supply over 75% of the solar photovoltaic panels.
They’re building giant transmission and so on. Europe has had the idea and the leadership and they’re doing quite a bit, especially in Germany. UK is making progress.
The United States is basically not been showing the leadership that it could. I’m making an argument that there’s an urgency in dealing with the rise of carbon dioxide. My career shows that if we start now, start building the super grids and start building the wind and the solar and the other things we need, we can have a low cost decarbonised energy economy by the 2050s in the US, but not with current policies.
And the same is true of China, the same is true of Europe. So if the United States would really turn a corner and fight for the energy future that the world needs, I think it would be a great positive for the world.
[Nick Breeze]
To make that happen in real time, because we’re talking about now, this all really has to happen in real time. What’s the big change agent that you see is absolutely required now?
[Dr Alexander MacDonald]
The big thing to know is that this isn’t just that it puts us on a road to be able to have better lives with cheaper energy. It’s better lives because we take away the existential threat of climate change and cheaper energy makes everything better. In other words, it makes your economy better.
I happen to drive an electric car and I never pay for, you know, my fuel costs are one third of what they used to be. In fact, that’s true almost every time you use electricity instead of fossil fuel, your costs go down. So we have an opportunity for a better life for everybody that protects the planet.
[Nick Breeze]
Well, look, that’s a great place to end on. So Alexander, thank you very much. Okay, thank you.
If you are concerned about the future, then why not travel with me through every COP conference from COP21 in Paris to COP28 in Dubai by ordering my book COPout, How Governments Have Failed the People on Climate. In COPout, you’ll gain insights into what is actually going on in these supposed world-saving conferences and how we have ended up in this dire era of dangerous consequences. You can order COPout via the link in the notes or on any online bookstore worldwide in paperback or audio version.
