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.