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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.
click to enlarge
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).
click to enlarge
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).
click to enlarge
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
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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)
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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.”
posted by Herman K. Trabish
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)
