ALL NEW ENERGY BY 2030?

Shifting The World To 100 Percent Clean, Renewable Energy As Early As 2030: Here Are The Numbers
October 19, 2009 (ScienceDaily)
and
Study: Shifting the world to 100% clean, renewable energy by 2030 – here are the numbers
Louis Bergeron, October 20, 2009 (Stanford Report)

SUMMARY
How much New Energy is it practical to hope to build in the immediate future? Are fossil fuels inevitable for the foreseeable future as oil industry mavens insist?

According to Mark Z. Jacobson, Professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University and Mark Delucchi, researcher at the University of California-Davis, the potential to get 100% of the world’s energy from New Energy by 2030 exists.

In a preview of their forthcoming Scientific American (November issue) paper, Jacobson and Delucci said the payoffs for shifting away from Old Energy combustion to the New Energies (solar, wind, hydrokinetic and geothermal) would be a reduction of nearly a third of world energy demand, the virtual elimination of greenhouse gas emissions, newfound energy supply security and tremendous cost savings both to consumers and to the world economy that bears the brunt of the environmental and health harms of Old Energy.

As with all important transitions, there are obstacles. Moving to a New Energy economy would require overcoming entrenched economic interests and the existing policies that sustain fossil fuel dependency.

It would also require new transmission. Possibly a lot of new transmission.

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COMMENTARY
Jacobson and Delucchi argue, as do so many others, that the resources are more than adequate to shift entirely to New Energy.

Both Jacobson’s Review of solutions to global warming, air pollution, and energy security and Benjamin Sovacool’s Energy and Environmental Policy: The Outlook for Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency present convincing arguments that it is no longer necessary or even economically sensible to continue depending on Old Energy.

Jacobson’s first rule is to eliminate energyu generated by combustion (burning). That means a transition to electricity generated by wind power, distributed solar photovoltaic and concentrated solar power plant technologies, the hydrokinetic energies in waves, tides and currents, and geothermal energy. It also means transitioning away from fossil fuel-consuming internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles to battery electric vehicles (BEVs).

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From Jacobson’s purely rational perspective, the problem with combustion is simply that it is inefficient. It might have seemed like the logical step when humankind was moving from the primitive technology of burning wood to more efficient fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas. But in the combustion of fossil fuels and biomass, 80% or more of the energy generated is wasted as heat. That is true whether the combustion generates electricity or powers vehicles.

When vehicles are powered by electricity, however, 80% of the energy is converted to motion and 20% is lost as heat.

Across a wide spectrum of fuel sources, transportation powered by electricity is more efficient than that fueled by fossil combustion.

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According to Jacobson-Delucci calculations based on U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Energy Information Administration (EIA) statistics, the current worldwide energy mix will result in a 2030 energy demand of 16.9 terawatts. If the world shifts away from the combustion of fossil fuels and biomass to generate electricity and power transportation, world 2030 energy demand drops to 11.5 terawatts, about a third less.

To make this transition would be expensive, Jacobson and Delucci admit, but less expensive than continued reliance on Old Energy. The cost of New Energy infrastructure – tens of thousands of wind turbines on the plains, the mountain ridges, out in the Great Lakes and off the Eastern seaboard, solar across the nation's rooftops and solar power plants filling available open desert spaces, geothermal sites across the West, hydrokinetic wave and tidal installations along the coasts and current devices beneath the river and streaming ocean surfaces and Smart transmission to deliver the massive amounts of resources harvested to the nation’s urban and suburban demand centers – would be significantly less than business as usual (BAU).

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Jacobson and Delucci chose wind, solar, hydrokinetic and geothermal energies because they require no combustion and came out at the top of Jacobson’s analysis, a ranking of available energy sources by (1) energy content, (2) security of source and (3) health and environmental impacts. The New Energies, it turns out, are also immensely abundant both in the U.S. and around the world.

Of the land-only energy sources, world wind power assets are 5-to-15 times greater than projected demand. World solar energy assets are some 30 times greater.

About 1.3% of world land would be adequate for enough wind and solar generation to meet 2030 demand. The land necessary for the wind turbines is about the size of Manhattan. Adequately spacing them would take about 1% of world land but the space in between, Jacobson pointed out, could be used for crops, grazing or wildlife habitat. Non-rooftop solar would take up another 1/3 of 1% of world land.

Jacobson was one of the authors of the 2007 paper that dispelled the notion that the New Energies' intermittency makes them impractical. That paper demonstrated, for instance, that 19-to-20 wind installations in a 500-square mile region could adequately integrate and shift the load demand to eliminate variability issues. As grid operators know, all energy sources are variable. No source, Old or New, is 100% certain and without fluctuation or failure. The key to meeting society's fluctuating 24/7 energy demand is the integration and management of a varied supply.

Something else to consider. (click to enlarge)

Jacobson and Delucci highlighted the need for certain raw materials for which demand is now and will continue to skyrocket. New sources of lithium for lithium-ion batteries and platinum for fuel cells may be necessary and new industrial infrastructures will likely emerge to recycle them. The need for such pivotal materials could drive technological breakthroughs to replace them with more abundant materials.

From the point of view of New Energy advocates around the world, there are 2 crucial obstacles to reaching the New Energy economy. Both involve the mysterious and dangerous complexity of humans with vested interests.

Essential? Perhaps. Doable? It's up to NIMBYs and BANANAs. (click to enlarge)

New Energy cannot get from the regions where it is harvested to the places where it is needed without new, Smart, high capacity transmission. The humans, in this case, with vested interests are citizens of generally good conscience with sometimes nearly impenetrable NIMBY (Not-In-My-BackYard) and BANANA (Build-Absolutely-Nothing-Anywhere-Near-Anything) attitudes. Transmission cannot traverse the vast distances it must to deliver New Energy without confronting them. Their willingness to work in the present to protect the future while minimizing harm to the past will be crucial to meeting the needs of 2030 with emissions-free energy.

Far more dangerous are the Old Energy interests. Their financial power makes them seem almost intractable. But the public grows more aware of global climate change day by day. Even the well-paid deniers of the Old Energy lobby cannot tell their lies indefinitely.

But will they be smiling much longer? (click to enlarge)

QUOTES
- Mark Z. Jacobson, Professor, Stanford University: "If you make this transition to renewables and electricity, then you eliminate the need for 13,000 new or existing coal plants…Just by changing our infrastructure we have less power demand."

Efficiency is the best deal there is. (click to enlarge)

- From the conclusion to the Jacobson paper on solutions: “In summary, the use of wind, [Concentrated Solar Power], geothermal, tidal, solar, wave, and hydroelectric to provide electricity for [Battery Electric Vehicles] and [Hydrogen Fuel Cell Vehicles] result in the most benefit and least impact among the options considered. Coal-CCS and nuclear provide less benefit with greater negative impacts. The biofuel options provide no certain benefit and result in significant negative impacts. Because sufficient clean natural resources (e.g., wind, sunlight, hot water, ocean energy, gravitational energy) exists to power all energy for the world, the results here suggest that the diversion of attention to the less efficient or non-efficient options represents an opportunity cost that delays solutions to climate and air pollution health problems.”