This thread is fascinating for me, particularly when most of us are probably far more enthused than any other subset of the populace almost anywhere on earth. Still the discussion is very North America-centric.
There are huge swaths of the world with vast potential for solar and wind that have essentially none, and make any use of either extremely difficult. Sadly, Brazil is a case in point. I have solar hot water in my house in Rio de Janeiro, but so far have not managed the bureaucratic nightmare for either solar or wind, both of which are entirely practical in my location. Storage of any type is prohibitively expensive and hard to obtain. Most of the densely populated world is similar, and the cleaner countries are pleased to export their pollution to those countries like Brazil, India and China that are unrelenting polluters and feel entitled to repeat the errors of those which industrialised centuries ago and created the mess we have. There are plentiful statistics to back up my assertions, but we do not really need them. We do need a serious global cooperation to build incentives for those countries to clean up their act. China, to a degree, is doing that themselves. OTOH, the Amazon River Basin supplies about 1/5 of the worlds fresh water and a similar percentage of carbon absorption. We are destroying the entire ecosystem bit by bit in order to produce soy for much of Asia, beef (itself the single largest source of methane in the world) for US and worldwide cheap hamburgers, and all sorts of minerals and metals. Nothing we are discussing here will have material positive effect so long as we do not address these larger issues also.
Nothing I just said detracts from my enthusiasm about our subject in the thread, just that I hope we'll do some thinking about how to expand our sights to help address the Morgan Freeman video discussed issues.
As for the specifics here. Several people allude to energy storage as a key. JB, among others, raises that issue quite specifically from time to time when he speaks about Tesla. A vast variety of storage options can easily be deployed at national scales by adopting everything from mini-cycle hydro (pumping water up at peak generation times, using it at peak demand times) which is cheap but not too efficient, to Tesla Powerwall, molten metals (aluminium smelters, for example), compressed gases (even Hydrogen) and so on. As many people have pointed out, these solutions can quite easily be deployed piecemeal on a distributed basis thus alleviating much of the huge scaled capital outlays. The key to having all this work is the Smart grid, about which much is written and proposed, but little done, so far. Without Smart Grid, utilities will be unable to adequately plan to avoid the overcapacity they now require to meet peak demands. As most of us probably know, if the demand can be stable, even dirty fossil fuels can be used much more efficiently than if they must have rapid fluctuating demand curves. We will not be able to use all the wonderful storage without a Smart grid to help do capacity planning and management to deal with the increasing peaks and valleys in both production and consumption of energy.
No comprehensive solutions are going to happen without a dramatic change in incentives for power utilities. In most countries and sub-national utility jurisdictions power pricing is based on a combination of amortised capital and marginal production costs, virtually always on a marginal cost basis. That gives utilities a perverse incentive to increase capital costs and overbuild marginal capacity, but generally minimal or no incentive to reduce peak generation capacity in favor of storage solutions. At best they play with the issue. Any of us who, like me, have provided services to power utilities, may be accustomed to the frequent request to increase the size and duration of a project in order to qualify for inclusion in a rate base.
Thus, I suggest that if in the US, in particular, we expect to meet any of the 2030 objectives the process MUST include provisions for utilities to:
1) fund and capitalise in their rate base distributed storage;
2) fund and capitalise in their rate base distributed power generation, with tiered incentives based on 'greenness' hopefully based on objective criteria without specific technologies specified;
3) Cease authorising new large scale power generation plants to meet peak demand unless steps 1 and 2 are proven to be inadequate to meet demand;
4) Include Smart Grid enabling technologies in rate base with accelerated recognition.
All of that and a few other steps might induce some short term price hikes, but also a plethora of tired rates, just as is already happening. Overall rates will gradually decrease.
The EU might be a good model, and Denmark in particular, since they already produce 39% of electricity from wind, and are linked in the European grid. Norway is a great example too, maybe for us especially given their addiction to our favourite car.
Energy in Denmark - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
If we do some serious thinking we might all agree that the impediments to these developments are truly no longer technological nor scale. Both technological development and scale issues are problems to be solved, but not real impediments.
The impediment is political will. The problem if political will in the US is a combination of ignorance, usually wilful, and a hypocritical objection to anything that might threaten the oil and gas industry specifically including traditional auto manufacturers, their franchised dealers, gasoline stations and old-fashioned public utilities.
it is no accident that Michigan and Texas are two tesla-hating states. It is also no accident that national politicians in the US are loath to upset so many of their large political contributors. So, is there a way to deal with these issues? Are not these the core issues impeding the nice graphs we all make?
We might well also note that the collective subsidies for the oil and gas industry, from depletion allowances to US Coast Guard protection of Persian Gulf oil rigs, to direct support of several OPEC governments add up to roughly 75 US cents per gallon of gasoline sold in the US, according to one report I saw.
If the US obtains energy from domestic wind and solar in 2030 at the level that Denmark does today, how much imported oil would be needed? How much coal-fired production would be needed?
Sorry for a polemic without many numbers or charts.
