Energy Wonks Have A Meltdown Over The US Going 100 Percent Renewable. Why?

The Conversation - Joshua D. Rhodes

You may agree the U.S. should move to renewables, but how quickly can we do it and how? Duke Energy/flickr, CC BY-NC-ND

Science is messy, but it doesn't have to be dirty.
On June 19, a group of respected energy researchers released a paper in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) that critiqued a widely cited study on how to power the U.S. using only renewable energy sources. This new paper, authored by former NOAA researcher Christopher Clack and a small army of academics, said that the initial 2015 study had "errors, inappropriate methods and implausible assumptions," about using only the sun, wind and water to fuel the U.S.
What followed was a storm of debate as energy wonks of all stripes weighed in on the merits of the PNAS analysis. Mark Z. Jacobson, a Stanford University professor who was the lead author of the 2015 study, shot back with detailed rebuttals, in one calling his fellow researchers "fossil fuel and nuclear supporters."
Why the big kerfuffle? As an energy researcher who studies the technologies and policies for modernizing our energy system, I will try to explain.
In general, getting to a clean energy system – even if it's 80 percent renewable – is a well agreed-upon goal and one that can be achieved; it's that last 20 percent – and how to get there – that forms the main point of contention here.

'Energy Twitter' on fire
Jacobson's seminal paper, which was also published in PNAS, tied together a significant amount of work of his own and others showing that all energy used for all purposes in the U.S. could come from with wind, water and solar (WWS) by 2050.
What about when the sun doesn't shine, the wind doesn't blow or water is unavailable? His findings postulated that significant amounts of energy storage would be needed, mostly in the form of heat and hydrogen, to meet energy demand when there isn't enough renewable energy and to store it when there's too much. They also concluded this scenario would be cheaper than a world that relies on other technologies such as nuclear, carbon capture and other methods of reducing carbon emissions.
The Clack rebuttal was blunt and cut deep at the assumptions that underlie the work of Jacobson and colleagues. The same PNAS issue also included a counter-rebuttal to Clack from Jacobson.
Energy Twitter – that is, energy wonks like me on Twitter – exploded.

IMAGE

IMAGE

So why all the fuss?
Much of the heat from this debate seems to stem from Jacobson making some pretty bold claims in and about his paper, going so far as to tell MIT Technology Review that "there is not a single error in our paper." That is a very, very bold claim and, depending on how it is interpreted, could be read to say that the study authors' model is perfect, which of course it is not, as none are.
This debate may seem arcane, but it has significant political and societal implications.
Some celebrities have signed on to Jacobson's vision and have pressed for policies formed around his analyses of the feasibility of an entire energy system that runs 100 percent off of wind, water and solar. If policymakers buy into the technical and economic assumptions in the paper, it has big implications for the direction of state, local and national policies.
Detractors, meanwhile, have raised a number of concerns. In particular, they argue that decisions made based on Jacobson's analyses alone could lead to serious overinvestment in only the technologies considered, which could possibly backfire if the costs turn out to be higher than expected.

The nitty-gritty
To make projections around how the future energy system will work, researchers create computer-based models, input assumptions and then run simulations.
The rebuttal from Clack and co-authors focused on four major issues they saw with the WWS paper: 1) modeling errors, 2) implausible assumptions, 3) insufficient power system modeling and 4) inadequate scrutiny of the input climate model, which informs how much solar and wind power are available for power generation. Here are some highlights with my own thoughts sprinkled in.

Up for debate: hydropower can provide steady power when solar and wind sources are not available, but can they be expanded without much economic and environmental cost? BriarCraft/flickr, CC BY-NC

Clack takes issue with the amount of hydroelectric power that Jacobson assumes is available. In their rebuttals, they spar over the exact numbers, but Jacobson assumes there is about the same amount of total energy produced from hydropower in 2050 as today, although when, and at what rate, that energy is produced is a crucial question.
In Jacobson's model, there is a significant increase in hydropower capacity – up to 1,300 gigawatts (or about 10 times current capacity), which appears to run for at least 12 hours straight in some days of the model output. Jacobson says this is possible by installing more turbines and generators at existing dams, just not using them very often.
But dams are built with specific maximum flow rates because if you let too much water flow through a dam, you can flood areas downriver. Jacobson has since admitted that providing this much extra power from existing dams would be hard.

IMAGE

I recently took a tour of Hoover Dam. One of the first things they tell you is that the dam was built for irrigation and flood control, and that electricity production is a nice side product. So expecting that dams in the country could boost their output might be harder than the analysis implies.

Implausible assumptions
Clack questions a long list of input assumptions of Jacobson's model. A number are related to how quickly technologies can mature and be used at large scale, including underground thermal energy storage, phase change materials to store solar thermal energy, and hydrogen as a usable fuel. Other critiques focus on assumptions around how flexible the demand for energy can be – a key consideration when dealing with variable sun and wind power. Then there's the amount of electric transmission power infrastructure needed, the costs of all the capital required, the pace of investment needed and land use issues.
Some criticisms are probably fair. I tend to be bullish on the potential of technology to advance rapidly, but having worked in residential energy use, and energy retrofits in particular, I find the amount of geothermal energy storage retrofits for heating and air-conditioning in buildings Jacobson assumed hard to fathom.
I have some reservations on the ability of 67 percent of demand to be flexible. I also have some questions on the pace of investment required in Jacobson's scenario.

Insufficient power system modeling
Clack attacks LOADMATCH, the power system model in Jacobson's analysis, as being too simplistic. The main criticism of LOADMATCH is that it does not consider frequency regulation – the need to keep the frequency of the power grid steady at 60 Hz, which is a very important aspect of keeping the power supply reliable.
One piece of anecdotal information: Jacobson states in the paper Supplementary Information that it takes LOADMATCH about three to four minutes to simulate an entire year. Our simulations of just the Texas electricity market can take hours to run, and can take significantly longer for simulations of high levels of renewables.
After reading both papers, both supplementary information sections, the counter-rebuttal, a lot of news articles and tweetstorms (from other energy folks I trust), I find myself thinking that the burden of proof is still in Jacobson's court. There are many lessons to learn here.

IMAGE

But, in the end, my view is that the body of scientific understanding will be stronger for it. The peer review process is slow, uses imperfect human volunteers and doesn't always get it exactly right the first time. The list of authors on the Clack rebuttal is impressive, and should be paid attention to. However, if Jacobson's work can survive this challenge, I figure it will stand the test of time.

Links

• The cheapest way to scale up wind and solar energy? High-tech power lines
• How fast can we transition to a low-carbon energy system?
• The old, dirty, creaky US electric grid would cost $5 trillion to replace. Where should infrastructure spending go?
• The other reason to shift away from coal: Air pollution that kills thousands every year

“Baseload”: An Outdated Term That Should Not Be Confused With “Reliability”

RenewEconomy - Giles Parkinson

The “coal versus no new coal” debate has come to define the battle lines over Australia’s energy future. It can basically be boiled down to one concept: the assumption that we have to rely on baseload power for the reliability and security of out electricity supply.
A new report from the US highlights how the concept of “baseload” is really just an artefact of an old industry, and points out that baseload should not be confused with reliability. The two do not go hand in hand, and hanging on to the term is getting in the way of planning for the future.
“Baseload power”, however, is a line encouraged by the fossil fuel industry, happy that “baseload” has become a marketing tool, in the same way that it has exploited the idea of “clean coal” and “energy poverty” to pursue their interests.
The Brattle Group report was commissioned by the NRDC, a US-based NGO, just as the Trump administration prepares its own battle over the future of “baseload” in a rapidly changing energy market. It prompted this series of tweets.

As in Australia, conservatives in the US are fighting back against renewables – and variable sources like wind and solar in particular – on the basis that baseload power should be protected at all costs.
It was the central theme of former prime minister and back-bench rabble-rouser Tony Abbott’s latest salvo into Coalition party politics, and his desire for the government to build a new coal-fired power station, under the fantasy that this will somehow reduce costs.(It will do the opposite).
He was followed by George Christensen, the Queensland MP wanting a baseload coal generator in the north of the state, to give people “power that they can rely on” and not have it derailed by “sacrifices to the climate gods”.
Christensen clearly did not read the Finkel Review, or the latest BNEF analysis, because he thinks coal is half the price of solar.
And it’s the line pushed by the Trump administration and its energy secretary Rick Perry. It’s a coal industry marketing point. But it’s a lousy argument that makes no sense in a world full of technology alternatives.
Increasingly, more energy regulators, such as the head of the UK’s National Grid, and other energy experts are accepting this point. Perry’s comments were slapped down almost immediately by one of the country’s senior energy regulator. “It is absolutely not true,” she said on Perry’s false claims on wind and solar.
And energy users are starting to come to this idea too. The best example is Nectar Farms, who were ready to abandon the building of the country’s biggest glasshouse for vegetable growing, and build it overseas, instead of western Victoria, before discovering that wind energy and battery storage could deliver the same reliability at a fraction of the cost of grid power and gas.
“Why would we do it any other way,” says the CEO Stephen Sasse. Extraordinary, this tale of a half a billion dollar investment, 1,300 jobs and 100 per cent renewables was completely ignored by the mainstream media. You’d think it would be a great story for prime minister Jobson Grothe.
And that explains the battle over baseload. The media runs with the coal industry talking point, it is infused in their discussions. How else could we deliver reliable energy, they ask.
Well, by using smarter, cleaner, faster and more reliable technology for one thing, would be the answer from the likes of AEMO boss Audrey Zibelman.
The new demand management recommendations coming from ARENA and the Institute of Sustainable Futures shows how these concepts like demand management can deliver the flexibility that the modern energy system needs, and save heaps on the cost of poles and wires.
The key point is that it is important to have enough power to meet demand at all times – but there are smarter ways of doing this than simply relying on large, inflexible generators – that just happen to be dirtier and more expensive than the alternatives.
The Brattle Report, like a similar analysis by the Climate Policy Initiative, and so many others before it, tries to puncture some of the myth-making around baseload.
Just because a coal generator is big, and can go for 24 hours uninterrupted, does not make it reliable.
To start with, the they can and do have unexplained outages, and the need for maintenance means that system planners have had to build in significant system upgrades, back-up and transmission infrastructure to spread generation over a larger region.
The planners also  had to provide “contingency” management processes to avoid blackouts when one or more of these large power plants experienced unexpected outages. All the redundancy that critics say have to be built for wind and solar, have already been built for coal and gas.
Brattle points out events in Texas in 2011 when an unexpected cold snap forced 7GW of coal and gas-fired generation offline as equipment froze. Some 3GW of wind power was uninterrupted and helped keep the lights on.
Similarly, during the 2014 “Polar Vortex,” many coal and gas plants had difficulties generating power, as equipment froze and coal deliveries were stopped. Wind resources in the Midwest consistently produced power that helped to save electricity customers more than $US1 billion in two days.
In Australia, heat waves are having similar impacts. Reports into the various outages, load shedding and price spikes in Australia this past summer almost always point to the loss of capacity at coal and gas plants due to heat stress as the heart of the problem.
But still, to many people, the basic premise of the traditional utility planning processes developed over the last few decades remains unchanged today, despite the fact that wind and solar are killing coal on costs, and battery storage and other smart software has emerged to provide faster and more efficient controls, and do things that big coal-fired power stations could never do.
Brattle argues that system reliability is achieved through a mix of resources, not by any single unit. “There is no special need for continuous power supply to come from a single unit (when available and not on outage) rather than a mix of resources,” it notes.
“It is a misconception that “baseload” plants (or any plants, for that matter) are 100% reliable,” it says. “Coal and nuclear plants periodically go on outage, and when they do, their outages tend to be long.
“No generating plants operate 100% reliably in all hours of the year. All generators are prone to occasional unexpected outages and must regularly go offline for maintenance outages.
The report from CPI reached the same conclusion, affirming that baseload is an outdated term and that “reliability is a technology-neutral concept.”
“Electricity systems have always been managed ‘flexibly’,” it notes. “Weather, work patterns, industry, or even sports schedules create predictable or unexpected drops or spikes in demand.
“Sudden system failures, such as power station or transmission outages, mean that backup generation has always been required to keep the lights on. “

If renewable generation and battery storage prices continue to fall in line with forecasts, meeting demand in each hour of a year with 80 per cent of electricity coming from wind and solar could cost as little as $US70/MWh – even when accounting for required short-term reserves, flexibility and backup generation.
In Australia, with even greater wind and solar resources, this is expected to be around the same price, but in Australian dollars. Either way, it is cheaper than what we have got now.
And the US modelling was done with cheap gas prices. Australia’s Finkel Review came up with a much higher number because it assumed that gas would be needed to replace coal, a highly contentious assumption that seems to perpetuate the “baseload” myth.
The CPI looked at grids and energy mixes in the US, India, Europe and Scandinavia.
“A lack of flexible capacity is often cited as a constraint on the amount of variable renewable energy we can add to the grid. But in our report, we found that most systems already have enough latent flexibility to meet over 30 per cent of their electricity demand from solar and wind.”
That is exactly the conclusion of the CSIRO, which points out that in Australia there is so much back-up already built into the grid, that anything less than 50 per cent wind and solar might be considered “trivial” in some areas.
And they both agree on the second point: “Moreover, technologies that exist today could support much higher shares of wind and solar; 80% or more.” That means little if any “baseload”. Reliability is they key. Nectar Farms now understands this, it is time for politicians and mainstream media to move on.

Links

• Electric vehicle charging networks rolled out across WA, Qld
• Stellata wins approval for 120MW solar farm, largest in W.A.
• GTM predicts 27% drop in solar prices by 2022
• Energy storage already cost-competitive in commercial sector, finds study
• NSW Coalition: Time to move on from notion of "baseload"
• Flagship "clean coal" project abandoned, despite $10bn investment
• Nectar Farms on 100% renewables: "Why would you do it any other way?"
• Solar and wind tipping points: One down and one to go
• Abbott's death-wish on industry: Freeze RET, ban wind, build coal
• APA takes step closer to big wind-solar energy park in W.A.
• The Swiss company hoping to capture 1% of global CO2 emissions by 2025
• NSW follows Victoria, South Australia in major push to demand management

Solar Costs Are Hitting Jaw-Dropping Lows In Every Region Of The World

GTM - Eric Wesoff | Stephen Lacey

How low can you go? Mind-blowingly low 65-cents-per-watt solar system pricing emerges in India.
This may sound a little repetitive, but it's impossible to ignore: The decline in solar costs is not slowing down.
GTM Research expects a 27 percent drop in average global project prices by 2022, or about 4.4 percent each year. Those improvements are not limited to the U.S. They are occurring globally, and in some cases resulting in even sharper price declines than those America is experiencing.
The data comes from a new PV system pricing forecast from GTM Research Solar Analyst Ben Gallagher.
The plunges in system pricing won't just come from modules -- they'll come from reductions in inverters, trackers and even labor costs. And every region will benefit.
"Component prices are beginning to lose their price variance from country to country," writes Gallagher. "Beyond a handful of local content requirements, many of the policies that created regional hardware pricing have been eroded by market forces." In the U.S., it's only stubborn soft costs such as customer acquisition that have actually risen.
And it's seemingly only trade disputes that can derail the price-decrease train.

65 cents per watt?
GTM Research finds that India's system of tenders has produced extremely competitive bidding, and, as a result, almost unimaginably low system pricing. India is seeing the lowest system prices of any major solar market in the world, ever.
The report finds that India has utility PV system pricing of 65 cents per watt.
The secret to these low prices? It turns out that a great way to reduce your soft costs is to pay your labor force and engineers next to nothing. (Markets with low-cost labor are more likely to use fixed-tilt systems, lowering turnkey system prices even more.)
As the report points out, even in China soft costs are 11 cents per watt higher than in India.
The compression in India's soft costs is well illustrated in the following chart.

Source: GTM Research's PV System Pricing H1 2017

Is that sustainable? Or even a positive thing? The reports points out the negatives of low pricing.
"The competitive tender process has a harmful side effect: There are reportedly widespread concerns about the viable lifetimes of many of the systems currently installed, as it is suspected that many were hastily constructed using poor-quality components. Developers will look to [engineering, procurement and construction providers] to safeguard their investment by raising installation and procurement quality-control standards and reduce long-term O&M headaches," writes Gallagher.
The report also takes a close look at price trends in China, Mexico, India, Germany and the U.K.
Japan is the highest-priced market, with systems landing at $2.07 per watt, driven by heavy wind, earthquakes and mountainside erosion that add additional engineering scrutiny and costs.
The U.K. has the lowest-priced solar in Western Europe, largely because of common adoption of string inverters, which shaves a few pennies per watt.

America's new trade case is a crapshoot
The Section 201 trade complaint from Suniva and SolarWorld hangs like the sword of Damocles over the solar industry's head.
Pricing for multicrystalline modules fell by 12 percent from H2 2016 to H1 2017. But in H2 2017, module pricing will increase: The U.S. market will see pull-in as buyers look to build up inventory before the final ruling.
Although the result of the case won't be known until much later in the year, the filing suggests a possible penalty on all imported silicon PV modules of $0.78 per watt -- $0.41 cents higher than current U.S. module pricing. Suniva advises that the floor price step down to $0.72, $0.69 and $0.68 per watt in years two, three and four, respectively. It is also asking for a minimum price of $0.40 per watt on imported cells.
GTM Research also just released a brand-new analysis on the potential impact to demand. According to Cory Honeyman, the associate director of GTM's solar practice, those penalties could result in the destruction of tens of gigawatts of solar installations in the U.S. through 2022.
"In our latest report, we found that between 2018 and 2022, total U.S. solar installations would fall from 72.5 gigawatts cumulatively to just 36.4 gigawatts under a $0.78 per watt minimum module price scenario," writes Honeyman.
Here's how pricing for utility-scale solar would be impacted:

Links

• 10 Battery Gigafactories Are Now in the Works. And Elon Musk May Add 4 More
• No, Tesla Batteries Are Not a Global-Warming Disaster
• Could Renewables Be The Majors' Next Big Thing?
• 10 Battery Gigafactories Are Now in the Works. And Elon Musk May Add 4 More
• The Rising Tide of Evidence Against Blaming Wind and Solar for Grid Instability
• What Scotland's Renewables Record Means for the Grid