Mini-Episode: Le-Quyen Nguyen
The Brightline Podcast: Season 2, Episode 6
Check out our mini-episode featuring Le-Quyen Nguyen, the Deputy Secretary for Energy at the California Natural Resources Agency. Learn about how she is working towards equitably achieving California's decarbonization and energy goals via community and coalition building.
Transcript:
Le-Quyen: These are really hard conversations. The positive of that is that that means people care.
Aubrey: This is The Brightline Podcast from Brightline Defense. We explore environmental justice issues, or EJ issues, in the Bay Area and California, highlighting the work of community-based organizations, including our own. My name’s Aubrey, and today we're bringing you a special mini episode featuring one of California's top energy administrators.
Le-Quyen: I'm Le-Quyen Nguyen. I'm Deputy Secretary for Energy at the California Natural Resources Agency, which you'll often hear me say or refer to as resources Agency or maybe C N R A
Aubrey: Le-Quyen is finishing her first year at the California Natural Resources Agency. Before that, she spent nearly 15 years at the California Energy Commision, which focuses on policy and energy planning for the state.
Le-Quyen: You know, joining the Resources agency, I kind of got a crash course in the work that the California Geologic Energy Management Division does.
Aubrey: The California Geologic Energy Management Division - or CalGEM-oversees oil, natural gas, and geothermal industries in the state. Le-Quyen's interactions with CalGEM taught her an early lesson about working across differing agendas.
Le-Quyen: You know, at the Energy Commission, it was a lot of work on terms of advancing renewable energy, you know, providing incentives, a lot of conversations where people really had the kind of like the same way of thinking about things in terms of yes, we can agree on renewable energy, we just can't agree on how fast. And working with the CalGEM, you know, it was a little bit different, in terms of some of the conversations where there wasn't even just broad agreement in terms of what we were doing, right? There's even still disagreement from some stakeholders as to whether or not we should be transitioning away from fossil fuels.
Aubrey: Le-Quyen's new role at the Resources agency involves having conversations with stakeholders whose interests may conflict with her own agency's clean energy goals. And that can be really challenging. But Le-Quyen's decided not to get bogged down by disagreement. Instead she focuses on trying to understand where their opposition is coming from.
Le-Quyen: So I think when I have these difficult conversations with people, really, [I] try and understand and learn where people are coming from, right? you know, so for example, maybe their concern with transitioning away from fossil fuels is jobs, right? What happens to the current workers who are employed in the oil and gas field or industry? Or maybe the concern is affordability.
Aubrey: See, for Le-Quyen, the key is that people ask tough questions, so that the agencies she works with can come up with the best possible solutions. She's spent the last year trying to soak up as much as she can.
Le-Quyen: So last year I was at this conference talking about clean energy and I was talking about, you know, the clean energy goals and it was a very positive conversation, that I was having, in terms of talking about, you know, here's what we wanna get in California, here's how far we've gone. We've already, you know, achieved like X percentage of renewables. We're ahead of our goals, and there's federal funding and state funding that we're expecting that will help us achieve our goals. And we're planning to do all these great programs. And I talked about transportation, electrification. I talked about building electrification, you know, all things that we were going to do to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Aubrey: Later in the conference, she attended a panel of community advocates who offered their perspectives on clean energy.
Le-Quyen: One of the advocates,, he's like, I wish I could be talking about, you know, transportation, electrification with my community, building electrification. That's all great. But when there's people in my community who don't even have streetlights, how can I even, how can I even talk to them about buying an EV?
Aubrey: This was a wake up call.
Le-Quyen: Like How could I make sure everybody has equal access to transportation electrification, if I've forgotten that some people don't even have electricity, if we're not making strides on that front,
When we talk about building electrification, you know, how can I make sure that when we talk about people, you know, installing different technologies, you know, maybe like the heat pump, water heaters, or going all electric. How could we even talk about that when some people don't even have housing? Or some people who are in housing, they're either renting or they don't have the ability to upgrade their appliances, to make all these things that we talk about so casually sometimes in terms of, we just need to do X, Y, Z and we'll achieve our goals. Everybody just needs to do it and it, it's not as easy as that.
Aubrey: As Le-Quyen builds her understanding of equity and access, her optimism about California's energy future as a whole- is growing too.
Le-Quyen: I think most importantly to me is the people I work with are super passionate about their jobs. And they're trying to think about a thoughtful solution to do this. They're open to having conversations. So that gives me hope. Sometimes these are really hard conversations, but the positive of that is that that means people care. If we were having easy conversations, that could be because maybe people aren't paying attention and people aren't in the room. It gives me hope that we're, we're getting all the information we need that we're doing this right.
Aubrey: This episode was written and produced by me, Aubrey Calaway and our assistant producer Will Entwisle. Original music by Maya Glicksman Thank you to Eddie Ahn, Sarah Xu Cecilia Mejia, and to Le-Quyen Nguyen for sharing her story. This podcast is funded by the Environmental Justice Small Grants from the California EPA.
For more information about Brightline, you can visit our website at BrightlineDefense.org or on social media @brightlinedefense. You can also find a transcript of this episode on our Medium Blog.
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