Can we meet the IPCC goal of 50% renewables by 2030, and 100% before 2050?
tl;dr Yes, we can. Yes, we will.
We can have more than 16 terawatts of clean, reliable wind and solar electricity generation capacity, enough for the whole world today, and more as we need more for EVs and Carbon Capture (No, not the absurdity of Clean Coal).
We will follow the logistic curve above, very roughly, as we have done so many times before with so many other innovations since our distant ancestors started banging the rocks together. There will be extreme laggards, of course, so at some point we will have to get serious about going Carbon Negative. (Did you know that there are still places in the world where cars run on leaded gasoline?) Yes, another Diary. We won’t run out of topics this year.
The first problem people have with such questions is in understanding exponential growth. It means that the rate of growth increases as fast as, well, whatever it is we are looking at. The bigger a population grows, the bigger it can grow (until the girls get to learn about how to use birth control without letting the boys know they are doing it). The more people who have the latest gadget, the more people find out about it. And it very likely gets cheaper and possibly better, too. In the cases of phones and Internet-connected computers, the more people are connected, the more useful and desirable it is to connect.
In strict exponential growth the time to double something is constant. We never have exactly exponential growth, but we often get a fair approximation. Bloomberg New Energy Finance, as we have seen, has said that the world has a terawatt of wind and solar, and that the next terawatt, that is the next doubling, should take five years, from 2018 to 2023. So then maybe we could get to four in 2028 and eight in 2033, which is a bit more than half way there. That would leave us seventeen years to get to 16 TW of wind and solar by 2050. Or we could fit the slack in elsewhere as needed. As you can see in the diagram at the top here, the last doubling takes longer than the earlier ones. But there is no reason for it to take more than three times as long. Which is one of the reasons why I believe that we will get to 100% years before 2050, possibly before 2040.
Slack! Our greatest resource!
But there is more.
Let us begin with an actual plan of what that world would look like, at The Solutions Project out of Stanford University. Their scientists and engineers and data mavens have looked at the geography of each US state, cities with major plans for renewables, and nearly every country, and recommended a mix of wind, solar, geothermal, hydro, and ocean power (where available) for each. You can join the 100% Campaign there to be informed of new developments. (I have added that to Renewable Friday: Data Sources.)
They add to the narrative their calculations of jobs created, money saved by consumers on electricity bills, health care costs saved, and lives saved by cutting out fossil fuel pollution. However, their models do not include electricity exports, which are quite important in reality.
Just as one example, West Virginia would need about two-thirds solar and one third wind, with a tiny bit of hydro. This would produce 54,000 construction jobs and 23,000 ongoing maintenance jobs, many more than remain in coal.
Alaska would be 70% wind, with hydro, geothermal, and a bit of solar making up the balance. Hawai’i, 30% geothermal, 28% wind, and the rest solar. Iceland is at 100% now, with hydro, geothermal, and wind. (Don’t you love volcanoes?) Mexico City, 60% solar, 35% wind. And so on and on.
All of that is fine. And many cities and states and nations have published preliminary plans to get to some percentage of renewables, and to tackle agriculture and manufacturing sources of greenhouse gases, and other measures that we will get into on other Fridays. I put some of that into Renewable Friday: Data Sources, which I will update as I find more, and let you know in these Diaries when I do.
Given the known costs investment opportunities in wind and solar and storage today, we could do a rough estimate of the investment required for getting to 16 terawatts, the approximate requirement today. Then we can subtract for conservation measures and increased efficiency, and add for EVs and ending poverty, and divide by however fast costs for renewables continue to go down. I used to get paid for doing that, but I’ll pass today. It is sufficient for our purposes that the required trillions of dollars in investments will be profitable the whole way through, and that the managers of the companies concerned, plus Bloomberg New Energy Finance and others, are doing their own calculations.
What really concerns us is how fast we can shut down money-losing as well as polluting coal and gas power plants, and also roll out EVs.
Business Insider: There's new evidence that fossil fuels are getting crushed in the ongoing energy battle against renewables
The world added more solar power capacity than fossil fuels in 2017, a sign of the sector's strength.
All of the added renewable capacity is balanced against increases in demand and decreases in old, inefficient, pollluting plants, because supply and demand necessarily balance, except during major market failures like that provoked by the Enron disaster.
Dumping money-losing coal entirely should be a no-brainer, but we are dealing with a lot of businessmen and politicians where that criterion fails.
In the case of electricity, we have to balance capacity, the basis of supply, with demand and intermittency, which is somewhat more complicated than farmers hedging in wheat futures to get a guaranteed price in advance. (Don’t get me started on the speculators who have lost their companies billions of dollars, or crashed whole economies. It’s always a “sure thing”, you know.)
Intermittency plagues all electrical grids. Plants get knocked offline by raging floods or damage to power lines or software errors, or are taken down for maintenance, so reserves have to be brought in. Demand goes up and down, so reserves have to be brought in or taken offline. Some of the reserves have to be available to be added at a moment’s notice, while others can be allowed to take a few minutes to spin up, allowing for adjustments at other plants that can take hours. Brownouts and blackouts occur with depressing frequency, mostly due to predictable effects of storms. The math is not trivial, but it is well-known, and taught in engineering colleges everywhere. There are commercial software packages for managing power plants and grid segments, and for planning improvements. Grid designers also know how to make the grid far more resilient, but there are often financial, legal, or political obstacles to doing it right. Like Texas refusing to connect to any other state so that it won’t be subject to Federal regulation.
The most basic mathematical fact about managing intermittent sources is that in general, for a fixed mix of sources, the amount of reserves needed grows as the square root of the size of the grid. Four times as much capacity requires only twice as much storage. So the problem gets easier as we grow. We know that intermittent wind and solar require more reserves for load balancing, and also for time shifting. For example, we can store heat from the sun to boil water and run steam turbines at night. Or we can use batteries, whose prices have tumbled so far and so fast that grid-scale battery installations have just emerged as an important growth market, eventually to reach hundreds of billions of dollars in installations.
So our first question is trivially answered: Yes, we know how to build out renewables, and we know how to manage the grid at 100% renewables. The Denialist lies on these points have not entirely fallen down yet, as we will see below.
We currently use peaker natural gas power plants for most of our load balancing, and pumped hydro and other mechanical and thermal forms of storage for time shifting, since solar power is only available during the day. So we need comparable capacity in batteries, and here they are at record low and still falling prices.
Renewable Friday: Grid Storage
Getting to 100% means ending thermal coal for boiling water to run steam turbines, leaving metallurgical coal for making steel (and the residual gas and coal tar for the petrochemical industry). It means ending natural gas for electricity outright. That leaves several other industrial uses for gas that are also threatened by technological advances. Batteries in EVs means getting rid of petroleum except for petrochemicals and for ships and airplanes and heating in some places. We’re working on those. At some point cheap electricity should enable cheap synthetic fuels, including hydrogen, as both fuels and storage media, but that is a topic for a different Friday.
In short, it means Carbon Neutral electricity, but not a completely Carbon Neutral economy. Guess what? Yet another Friday.
As I said to begin with, the real question we are addressing today is whether we can meet the IPCC goal of 50% renewables by 2030, and 100% before 2050.
The technological and financial answer is of course Yes, as I laid out above.
That leaves politics. Ah, well, other Fridays.
Global Progress
Now, let us go back and take another global look, this time at the amount of installed renewable energy by region. This puts in stark relief the gaps in several of those regions relative to population.
International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) Global Atlas for Renewable Energy
Here is an example of their more detailed reporting by region. IRENA also has reports on the other regions of the world.
IRENA RENEWABLE ENERGY MARKET ANALYSIS: GCC 2019
(Gulf Cooperation Council)
The project pipeline has grown to almost 7 gigawatts (GW) of new power generation capacity.
Renewable energy, although a relatively recent entrant to the GCC energy landscape, holds vast potential to cut fuel costs, reduce carbon emissions, conserve water and create jobs.
In parallel, they recognise the need to plan for the post-oil era, when demand for fossil fuels might [?] subside regardless of supply outlooks.
Contrary to common perceptions, some GCC countries – particularly Kuwait, Oman, and Saudi Arabia, – also have good wind resources.
I don’t know where that misperception would come from. How can anyone who watches adventure movies not know about wind-blown deserts and sandstorms?
The performance of Emerging Markets should give us all hope.
The Developing World Is Taking Over Renewable Energy
In 2016, renewable energy investments in poorer countries eclipsed investments in wealthier countries for the first time ever. Since then, the upward trajectories of their growth have held steady or increased.
Egypt grew renewables investments by 495 percent, the UAE by 2,815 percent, Rwanda by 8,665 percent, and Jordan by 26 percent.
That’s hydro in Rwanda. They are going to be net exporters of electricity until they can build out their grid to every town and village. And Internet. And give every schoolchild a One Laptop Per Child computer.
Developing world invests more in renewable energy than rich countries for first time, new study says
"Countries are opting for renewables because they are not only the most environmentally sound, but also the cheapest option," Ms Lins said. "It's a clear signal of its economic viability."
While developing nations were creating new electricity supplies, richer nations had to phase out existing fossil-fuel power stations, she added.
But what this means is poor countries are more than pulling their weight in terms of moving towards a fossil fuel-free world to limit the effects of global warming.
Another lie meets the facts.
Obviously, that isn’t all poor countries, but it is heartening that so many are burying that old Denialist lies that they would prefer coal, or that they would demand that rich countries pay their freight.
The Opposition
OK, that’s good news. But is it good enough?
I have previously said, in Renewable Friday: Grid Storage
One of the moldy old lies about Renewable Energy that I didn’t bother with...was that we can’t get to 100% renewables with wind and solar being intermittent.
That was BC (Before COP21). This lie still hasn’t realized that it is dead and should fall down now, as I explained there and again here.
But here is a different excuse.
New York Post: The numbers show we just can’t get to ‘100% renewable energy’ any decade soon, by Robert Bryce, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute (of which the less said, the better).
The Post really, really hates renewable energy. And Democrats. And plans for renewable energy put forward by Democrats. (BTW, do not under any circumstances confuse the New York Post with the New York Daily News, which loathes and despises Trump and all his works. Both are tabloids with provocative covers. There the resemblance ends.)
Bryce is peddling basic arithmetical nonsense: The rate of growth of renewables is less than the global increase in demand for electricity, so it can never catch up. Imagine the Paradoxes of Zeno narrated by Franz Kafka under the direction of Ed Wood.
Except that we are more than halfway to Bryce’s benchmark. More renewable energy capacity is now built each year than fossil fuel capacity. Far more. The growth of renewables roughly matches coal plants being shuttered, and will, going forward, also match natural gas plants being shuttered. EVs coming on the road will someday outmatch gas guzzlers being scrapped.
There are still plenty of people getting paid plenty of money to try to convince us otherwise, but getting less and less traction. Just like the collapses of lead denial, DDT, acid rain, ozone, tobacco and the rest. But not Creationism or Market Fundamentalism, at least not yet.
There is now a determined strain of Greenwashing in the fossil fuel industry, claiming that natural gas and even oil, or, perish forbid, clean coal, are parts of the solution rather than parts of the precipitate. (HT to Steven Wright)
Of course this includes promoting natural gas peaker plants for load balancing, even though they are ferociously expensive now, relative to the best options. Yes, burning gas emits half the CO2 of burning coal, but that does not reckon with methane leaks from oil and gas wells.
powerpastimpossible.org
Powering past impossible – that’s what natural gas and oil help Americans do every day. They are the leading fuels for our modern economy, and they furnish the molecular building blocks for products that Americans use throughout their day – from smartphones to fabrics to lifesaving pharmaceuticals. They’re also essential to technologies and innovations that help solve some of society’s greatest challenges. Today’s natural gas and oil industry is smart, high-tech and is essential to an advancing society.
Bo-o-o-o-ogus, as they used to say on Car Talk.
I have been pointing out that Peak Gas is imminent, now that batteries are cheaper for load balancing, and also enable time shifting.
There is also a strain of Greenwashing in the Republican Party, as demonstrated by Bob English at the Chris Hayes/AOC town hall special on the Green New Deal, which I wrote about last week.
Renewable Friday: AOC and the Green New Deal
He cited the insultingly titled
which demonstrates that these three leading Congressional Republicans are only interested in obfuscation, not solutions.
Well, Denialists will be Denialists. Fortunately, we can ignore them and get on with business most of the time.
Let us close with more good news
India
Here is another Denialist lie falling down.
India could generate all of its power from renewables by 2050
While the Indian government is looking at meeting 40 per cent of electricity demand from non-fossil fuels by 2030, an all-renewable energy system in 2050 is technically possible and economically viable for India, with the levelized cost of electricity expected to fall from the current €58/MWh to €52 under one scenario in a recent report, and to €46 in another that included demand for power, water desalination and non-energy industrial gas sectors.
A reliable inter-state transmission system would overcome monsoon interference with solar power generation.
The energy system envisioned would be mainly based on solar PV, with batteries supplying electricity at night and in early morning hours.
Batteries could provide 2,596 TWh, pumped hydro storage 12 TWh and gas storage 197 TWh of electricity. The combination of PV and battery storage would evolve as the low-cost backbone of Indian energy supply, resulting in 3.2-4.3 TWp of installed PV capacity, depending on the scenario applied in 2050.
This plan includes power-to-gas storage, that is splitting hydrogen from water using electricity. We will have to look into that in a future Diary in this series.
Ah, so many facts, so few Fridays! :þ
China
China Is Set To Become The World's Renewable Energy Superpower, According To New Report
The global energy transformation driven by renewables can reduce energy-related geopolitical tensions as we know them and will foster greater cooperation between states. This transformation can also mitigate social, economic and environmental challenges that are often among the root causes of geopolitical instability and conflict.
China's 2018 renewable power capacity up 12 percent on year
China Proposes 75% Increase To 2030 Renewable Energy Target
China’s National Development & Reform Commission (NDRC) has written a draft policy that would increase the renewable energy target from 20% to 35% by 2030.
For a long time, it has seemed that the Chinese 2030 renewable energy target of 20% was incredibly low given the amount of renewable energy it has been adding. For example, in 2017, China installed more than 52 gigawatts (GW) of solar, which is about as much as has been installed in the United States since … forever.
Well, they started late. But I bet they raise it again before 2030.
Percentages can be confusing, percentages of percentages doubly so. China wants to go from 20% renewables to 35%, an absolute increase of 15%. Relatively, however, 15% is ¾ of 20%, so that is a 75% increase as a %/%. There will not be a quiz on this.
Because we don’t care about the math. Those who can do it can bother themselves over it. What we care about here is the next dinosaur whose time to fall down has come.
Portugal
Portugal’s EDP confirms plans to divest generation assets and invest in renewables
The utility could invest up to €7 billion in renewable energy projects up to 2022.
Hybrid projects are among the options reportedly being considered by the Portuguese utility.
Portugal’s state-owned power company EDP has announced in a filing with the Portuguese Securities Market Commission that its strategic update for 2019-2022 will include more investment in renewables and a plan to dispose of conventional generation assets.
Dispose of? Sell or shutter or what?
Actually, I could have picked a multitude of countries to end with. And now,
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
as someone said.
Wind And Solar Each Beat Natural Gas For New Generating Capacity In January
According to an analysis by the SUN DAY Campaign of newly released data from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), new solar and wind generating capacity took the lead over natural gas and all other energy sources as of Jan. 31.
FERC’s “Energy Infrastructure Update” report notes that 18 units of new solar capacity (631 MW) and four units of new wind capacity (519 MW) each beat new natural gas capacity (one unit at 465 MW) in January. No new capacity additions were reported for any other energy sources, says SUN DAY.
EACH.
Sunday, Apr 14, 2019 · 5:36:56 PM +00:00
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Mokurai
Wow! Republished to
Thanks, everybody! (I am joining some of those groups on Climate and technology that I didn’t even know about until helpful people came along to republish this Diary.)
I also greatly appreciate going from Trending all the way to Community Spotlight.