NREL Releases New Wind Study

The DOE, in conjunction with Black & Veatch and AWEA, finally released its long awaited 20% Wind Energy by 2030 study (PDF) yesterday. I haven’t read the whole thing yet as I’m still swamped at work, but here are some quick highlights from the DOE press release:

1. Annual installations need to increase more than threefold.  Achieving 20 percent wind will require the number of annual turbine installations to increase from approximately 2000 in 2006 to almost 7000 in 2017.
2. Costs of integrating intermittent wind power into the grid are modest. 20 percent wind can be reliably integrated into the grid for less than 0.5 cents per kWh.
3. No material constraints currently exist. Although demand for copper, fiberglass and other raw materials will increase, achieving 20 percent wind is not limited by the availability of raw materials.
4. Transmission challenges need to be addressed.  Issues related to siting and cost allocation of new transmission lines to access the Nation’s best wind resources will need to be resolved in order to achieve 20 percent wind.
5. Most notably, the report identifies opportunities for 7.6 cumulative gigatons of CO2 to be avoided by 2030, saving 825 million metric tons in 2030 and every year thereafter if wind energy achieves 20 percent of the nation’s electricity mix.

More to come on this once I’ve had a chance to go through it carefully.

Feel good clean energy video of the day

You can read more at William’s blog.

Soon it’ll be even easier to put your money where your mouth is

According to Seeking Alpha, two new solar ETFs are on the way.

Solar sentence of the day

The energy in sunlight striking the earth for 40 minutes is equivalent to global energy consumption for a year.

From “A Solar Grand Plan” in last month’s Scientific American. While I’m a little skeptical about some of the numbers used (although I think they’re probably too pessimistic on the costs side, given recent developments), it’s definitely worth checking out. The authors lay out a surprisingly clear and coherent plan for getting large scale solar farms off the ground. Nevertheless, I have a few small questions/ gripes about the plan:

• Not sure if we should pick compressed air as the storage mechanism of choice just yet. Nanotechnology/ batteries are still promising; and a look at R&D expenditures quickly reveals that the DOE knighted hydrogen some time ago.
• On a related note, I’m not sure if the authors properly considered how installing DC lines across regions would alter the competitive landscape. Ignoring any political/ siting barriers, I think interregional HVDC is a worthy aim and real possibility in the medium term. But those wires would be open to all generators, not just solar. The authors go on to vaguely assert that total electricity demand would go down under their plan. If DC is involved, I highly doubt this.
• The authors suggest that society could pay for the $420 billion overhaul with a carbon tax of “0.5 cents per kWh”. I’m going to assume that this tax is listed per kWh, as opposed to per ton of carbon, strictly for illustrative purposes. Taxing all electricity generation equally regardless of carbon usage would be insane.
• Finally, I’d just like to state my categorical annoyance at the opening statement of the last paragraph:
  • “The greatest obstacle to implementing a renewable U.S. energy system is not technology or money, however. It is the lack of public awareness that solar is a practical alternative….”

  The US and other developed countries have been funding solar research since the ’70s. Californians, some of the richest people on the planet, periodically endure rolling blackouts. Given the obviousness of the solution (duh, the sun’s hot and free) and the amount of money at stake (the total of the electricity system was around around $130 billion), I don’t think solar’s prolonged infancy can be simply attributed to some information asymmetry.

H/T The Energy Blog.

A website named desire

The Database of State Incentives for Renewables & Efficiency (DSIRE) is a really great resource for navigating the clusterfuck that collectively constitutes America’s renewable energy and efficiency policy. Enjoy.

Renewable energy penetration - it’s all relative

I’m finally back in DC after heading home for Christmas and skiing in Maine. Though a lot has happened since we last posted, I wanted to start off with an obvious, but oft-forgotten observation: when projecting market penetration of a given product, what matters is relative price changes, not absolute ones.

The National Academy of Sciences recently sponsored a panel on renewables as part of its America’s Energy Future project. When I started doing some research for the electricity component of this project, my boss directed me to an interesting survey paper she did at RFF a few years ago. Though cost effective energy from renewable sources has received a lot of attention in the popular press lately, its been an academic and DOE goal since the 1970s. Yet over the ensuing years, renewable sales and capacity have consistently fallen short of government projections. Most policy makers and passive observers simply attribute these persistent shortcomings to technology holdups, ie they assume that the technological development hasn’t met projections. But when Palmer and her co-authors looked at the performance of renewables projections from the 1970s and ’80s they saw a different story. While renewables market share has consistently fallen short of predictions, cost reductions have largely exceeded or met expectations. This is because during the same period, the costs of conventional sources fell by even more. Therefore the culprit in this tale isn’t technological delays on the renewables side, but technological advancements and input price reductions on the conventional side.

These days it seems everyone wants to know how much the market for renewable energy is going to grow in the coming decades (Yesterday the NYTimes ran a chart depicting the EIA’s 2030 market share projections). While most fossil fuels will probably remain high for the foreseable future, we need to remember that clean energy sources are still chasing a moving target. Given the market’s past experience, this uncertainty alone could be significantly deterring investment (periodically allowing the PTC to lapse probably isn’t helping either). Though it wouldn’t alleviate all the variance in price, firmly committing to some sort of carbon tax or cap would counter this uncertainty.

Some good news on renewables

1. A recent study by two Stanford professors found that up to 1/3 of wind capacity can be used to supply baseload electricity once a large enough number of wind turbines are linked together. To date, wind’s market penetration has been hindered by its perceived intermittence.  If the authors’ findings are correct, they might suggest that government should focus on subsidizing inter-turbine transmission, not turbine production.  Read the press release and download the paper here. H/T The Energy Blog.

2. Today’s NYTimes has an article on Nanosolar’s new thin film PV panels.  The Google backed company plans to start selling photovoltaic systems for as low as $2 a watt. Assuming a ten year life and a very conservative 8 hours of sunlight a day, that’s less than 7 cents a kilowatt hour.

More evidence that we may not even need an RPS. H/T Thom.

Are you sitting down? I’m going to defend W.

Today on NYTimes’ The Board, the editorial board derides President Bush’s opposition to a 15% Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) as flip flopping. This is because as Governor of Texas, Bush implemented a very forward looking and successful statewide RPS. Therefore, clearly his opposition to a national RPS can only be the result of Cheney, Rove, and industry “getting to him”. However, while it is certainly possible that some undesirable influence got to Bush, the premise that what’s right for Texas’ electricity market is necessarily right for the country as a whole is far from true. Texas is unique for two important reasons. The first received only cursory mention from the Board, while the second was ignored entirely.

RPS quote of the day

“If that passes, I’m stocking up on flashlights.”

That was Pedro Pizarro, senior Vice President of Southern California Edison, yesterday after being asked about the prospect of a 50% RPS in California. This statement highlights a reality that those of us who’ve attempted to model renewable penetration have know for some time. Even if you were to overcome what appear to be substantial renewables supply constraints, the technology itself is still too nascent to play a major role on the grid. Without storage and better input estimates, even a 33% RPS, which is California’s current target, would come with an enormous price tag and intolerably low reliability.

Reagan was an, um, environmentalist

In John McCain’s new “Environment” issue brief video he channels the legacy of Teddy Roosevelt and Ronny Reagan. (Actually the clip is funny because he says “Teddy Roosevelt was a great environmentalist, Ronald Reagan was a (verbal pause) environmentalist.”) Now usually I try to avoid politics on CT, but I thought this was a good time to bring up Ronald Reagan’s legacy on renewable energy. This may be old news to many of you, but I just learned recently that Ronald Reagan literally ripped the solar panels off the roof of the White House when he became president.

In the 1970’s the US faced an energy crisis due to the oil embargo. Under the Carter administration the US embarked on an unprecedented effort to reduce our dependence on foreign energy. One of the more ambitious areas of focus was on solar power, and, in addition to funding a massive amount of R&D and substantial tax credits for solar installation, Carter installed solar hot water heaters on the roof of the White House a sign of the nation’s intent.

Enter the actor from California. Reagan came into the White House and quickly cut funding for solar research and revoked the the solar installation tax credit (Evan has a good story about Reagan’s effect on the National Labs). Then, as a signal of his intent, he pried the solar panels off the roof and put them in the dumpster. 25 years later, we’re frantically scrambling to increase our national renewable capacity. Meanwhile, countries like Germany who invested heavily in solar in the past are acheiving impressive levels of renewables penetration.

Today, we’re lucky that Dutch’s old state, California, and companies like Google are picking up the slack. Nevertheless, Reagan’s pettiness and lack of foresight on this issue should be a source of embarrassment, not inspiration, for the current GOP candidates.

Google drops a dime or two (or a billion) on solar

From the Guardian:

The web portal Google aims to develop cheap and clean sources of energy to replace polluting fossil fuels and tackle global warming…The company’s clean technology initiative, called REC, aims to develop renewable energy sources that are cheaper than coal, the cheapest, most abundant and dirtiest fossil fuel.

This initiative was slightly disparaged by one of the discussants at yesterday’s RFF U.S. Climate Policy rollout because it seems unlikely to attain its goal of making solar power cost-competitive with coal. I agree that this is a pipe dream for the near future, but essentially carbon-free energy sources such as solar must be aggressively pursued to successfully create a suite of clean energy. Clearly Google is setting a tanglible, discrete goal (cost of solar ≤ cost of coal). They aren’t necessarily expecting to achieve this goal, but if they feel like investing hundreds of millions of dollars to edge us toward cheap renewable energy, I think that’s great. It would be encouraging if more concentrated sources of capital undertook major green initiatives instead of simply greenwashing. At any rate, isn’t this a great situation for everyone? We basically have a private enterprise willing to accept potentially massive technology spillovers due to their organization’s preference for monumental green investment. This is the kind of R&D for which the federal government normally has to accept responsibility, and if private enterprise wants to absorb the costs for society, I’m totally willing to live with that.

The “make-work bias” meets energy policy

Last week I attended an Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI) event at the Hart building on “Green Collar Jobs”. The event was co-sponsored by the American Solar Energy Society, which was presenting its study on how many jobs energy efficiency and renewables would create in the US over the next 25 years. The answer? 40 million new jobs by 2030.

Now this “study” was about as rigorous as the Power in the Public Interest electricity deregulation paper the NYTimes cited last week. When I saw the title for the talk, I naively assumed that said study would involve some sort of macro model, with efficiency and renewables supply curves and labor explicitly defined as a factor input. Clearly, as the tone of this post indicates, I was mistaken. Yet what I really want to talk about today is not the shortcomings of the ASES study, but the fact that nobody at the briefing cared. Among the attendees were Senate Energy Committee member Ken Salazar and Washington Director for the State of Ohio Drew McKracken. Despite the glaring lack of substance or specificity, both felt compelled to loudly tout the study as justification for the renewables and efficiency spending bills currently being pushed through Congress.

Leave it to the hippies

RenewableEnergyAccess.com reports that Berkeley, California is set to become the first city in the U.S. to allow property owners to pay for solar system installation and energy efficiency improvements as a long-term assessment on their individual property tax bill. As the article reports, “The City’s plan eliminates the two major financial hurdles to solar electric and solar hot water systems—the high upfront cost and the possibility that those costs will not be recovered when the property is sold.”

We’ve talked about the perplexing persistence ‘negative cost’ energy-saving opportunities before on CT. Large upfront costs and risk of transferability are two of the most likely causes. While the details are still being worked out, Berkeley seems to have come up with a clever way to solve these problems.