What if everything you thought you knew were not exactly true?

"Conventional wisdom" in the utility-scale renewable energy world says that we can never reach a high penetration of renewable sources of electricity generation because of the intermittency of wind and solar. Also, based upon assumptions of traditional transportation analysts, we will be limited in the number of electric cars that we can plug into the grid because of the significant increase in infrastructure that will have to be added because these vehicles will all tend to plug in at precisely the time we experience the peak electricity demand (after work on summer evenings). Because of this, we have had to temper our goals of increased use of non-damaging energy sources; if the grid cannot handle them, and we need to invest in much more battery storage and upgrades to transformers and transmission lines, it will be a long time before we reach even modest goals.

Thankfully, I have stumbled back into podcast listening, and have reconnected with the work of Steven Lacey who now hosts the Energy Gang podcast at GreenTech Media. I originally found Steven's work when he hosted the This Week in Renewable Energy podcast, and I find the work that he does provides the best balance of what's ahead and what's possible. In just the few weeks I have been listening, I have come across information that takes down the assumptions about interconnecting electric vehicles and renewable sources to the grid...and it's all for the better.

Electric vehicles and the 1950s version of the average American's day

Thanks to some research by Pecan Street Research Institute out of Austin, we know that EV charging habits would not be quite so deleterious to our grid infrastructure as originally thought. Even ignoring for a moment the opportunity available in using energy efficiency to create capacity for new load, the habits used to predict the dire circumstance no longer exist on a grand scale. The load spike assumption relies on a model that predicts people work 9 to 5, and drive home to immediately plug in the car that they have driven to work. Over the past forty years, we have moved to a much less reliable model of employment. Some people work from home, many use alternative transportation, and still others will follow price signals and plug in when it costs less. All of these factors and other contributed to the result that EV charging nowhere near approached the models predicted; that means good news for widespread EV adoption. This will contribute to opportunity related to the next misconception.

A high penetration of renewables may have equal or lower intermittency to conventional fuels...even without storage

Economic estimate of the cost to integrate renewables have almost always added the "gotcha" cost of adding energy storage in order to deal with intermittency. Work at the Rocky Mountain Institute, as well as real-world data from Germany, has shown that when taking into account the variability of loads - and when those loads appear - that the higher the penetration of renewables, the more the grid acts like the current grid. Non-renewable thermal plants already have expected downtime rates of 10-15%, and their failure is much less predictable than solar or wind plants. The existing grid management strategies to deal with that intermittency can carry over to the renewable intermittency without a loss in reliability. Add into that the opportunity presented by the storage capacity of say, 100,000,000 electric vehicle batteries, and we have - at worst - the same reliability with significantly lower environmental impact.

In order to achieve widespread adoption of both of these sets of technologies, we will need to make significant improvements to our grid. It will need to become smarter, more reliable, and better and communicating with the end user. All of that improvement needs to happen anyway as our grid in many eras exceeds the average age of the population. These targeted improvements are necessary regardless of the energy source, so renewables and EV offer no additional requirements. Also, if we move toward more distributed renewables and deeper dives into energy efficiency, we will need to spend less and less on the upgrading of the utility-scale power lines. If planned out, this means we could actually achieve this transition to renewables for much less than expected. Amory Lovins points out during his visit with the Energy Gang that with no new technology adoption and no new policy, a transition to an almost entirely renewable electricity generating grid would SAVE us $5 trillion over the next 35 years.

I know we can do it faster...and that was before I found out how wrong some of my assumptions were.

Friday Five: March 28, 2014

We hold onto a shaky hope that the use of fossil fuels to power our lives has little to no consequence on our quality of life. The truth is far more certain: our reliance on fossil fuels harms our lives, albeit unequally. For those with the means to live far from threatened areas near mines, power plants, and waste facilities, life goes along without complaint. For those not so lucky, they at best lead a life that is less healthy, and at worst die younger than those more fortunate.
When the rivers run black
"The result is that the exhaust that emerges today is far cleaner than it was decades ago. But cleaning up the airborne emissions means that the solids remaining after the burn are far dirtier than before. In fact, coal ash is often loaded with arsenic, mercury, lead, and other contaminating elements. A 2012 study published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology found that cleaner air emissions are traded for 'significant enrichments of contaminants in solid wastes and wastewater discharged from power plants.'"

The anti-regulation economist believes that in the absence of regulation, business will always do what is best for quality of life because its customers will demand it do so and business always responds to its customers. Except, that what its customers don't know....
Activists catch power plant on hidden camera
"...a hidden camera set up by the Sierra Club ... shows a power plant regularly discharging coal ash pond water into the Ohio River, apparently permitted via a very liberal interpretation of the meaning of 'occasional.'"

The coal industry requires subsidies to stay profitable. An industry over a century old still needs government help to remain afloat. If you think that to be a bunch of environmentalist lies, here is but one example of the over $650 billion in worldwide subsidies to the fossil fuel industry.
Why are we hauling Pennsylvania coal all the way to Germany?
"'The industry was struggling, and the Pennsylvania delegation wanted to do something to help it,' says Jim Dyer, who today is a lobbyist with the Podesta Group, but began his career four decades ago in the office of Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Joseph McDade. 'The one way it could help it was ... to get the federal government interested in buying some of it.'"

Even with these subsidies, we know that the coal industry - without a game changing technology breakthrough that addresses the myriad health and environmental issues - cannot survive economically. This is not conjecture, but a fact of the marketplace.
Pacific Power's reliance on coal sends Oregonians' electricity bills soaring
"The OPUC hearing comes in light of Sierra Club’s analysis of reports from the Edison Electric Institute (EEI) showing that Oregon Pacific Power customers have seen their electricity bills increase by 61% since 2006, the year after Warren Buffet started operating the utility. Pacific Power customers saw a greater rate increase than customers of any other major utility in the six states that Pacific Power serves. The costs of continuing to operate old, outdated coal plants continue to rise, and Pacific Power’s parent company, PacifiCorp, will seek rate recovery from Oregon customers for its $4.2 billion coal fleet expenditures. PacifiCorp owns the largest number of coal plants in the West, and Pacific Power customers in Oregon get 63% of their energy from out-of-state coal plants."
Goldman Sachs declares solar energy will soon be cheaper than fossil fuels, and Elon Musk is a genius
"'…our Clean Energy team believes the number of households hitting grid parity will continue to grow as the cost of the systems comes down … SolarCity has seen a 40% decline in the per watt cost of PV panels since the second quarter of 2013 driven by improved scale which is expected to continue,' state clean tech analysts Brian Lee and Thomas Daniels. 'This has been true for Tesla’s battery costs as well, which have declined from of $500/KWh in 2008 to $250/KWh for the Model S to potentially $125/KWh at the gigafactory. As a result we should note that the quantitative grid parity and return calculations we show above are arrived at without any Federal or state credits.'"

This past winter showed us that fossil fuel electricity generation has intermittency issues on par with those of wind and solar. That does not mean that we should trade one intermittency for another (although the environmental costs should force that decision on us), but we should solve the issue regardless of energy source chosen. Batteries will not solve the problem, and although hydro and flywheels have promise, I like simple solutions. This one is "in the book" as Paul Erdos might say.
Energy storage hits the rails out west
"Compared to the mechanics of chemical batteries, the idea behind rail storage is simple. During periods of low electricity demand, power is dispatched from the nearby grid to pull a chain of weighted train cars uphill. And there they will sit—losing no power to degradation—until the grid has a period of high power demand. Then they are sent rolling downhill. Their momentum sends electrons back to the grid through a system of regenerative braking that uses the turning power of the wheels to generate electricity."

Happy Friday!