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.