A Plan to Power 100 Percent of the Planet with Renewables

I just heard speech by Professor Mark Z. Jacobson at Stanford University on this. There was recent paper by him in Scientific American on details as well. Electric cars are mentioned as main ingredient for transportation in this plan.
I thought this is very relevant for all those saying that Leaf would be driven on "dirty" electricity from coal, etc.

A Plan to Power 100 Percent of the Planet with Renewables: Wind, water and solar technologies can provide 100 percent of the world's energy, eliminating all fossil fuels. Here's how

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-path-to-sustainable-energy-by-2030

leafetarian said:

I just heard speech by Professor Mark Z. Jacobson at Stanford University on this. There was recent paper by him in Scientific American on details as well. Electric cars are mentioned as main ingredient for transportation in this plan.
I thought this is very relevant for all those saying that Leaf would be driven on "dirty" electricity from coal, etc.

A Plan to Power 100 Percent of the Planet with Renewables: Wind, water and solar technologies can provide 100 percent of the world's energy, eliminating all fossil fuels. Here's how

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-path-to-sustainable-energy-by-2030

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Interesting article. Thanks for citing it; I just skimmed it. I think he is far more optimistic about wind power (calling for 50% of the need to be met by wind) than most other sources (20% by wind). I used to work for a Solar panel manufacturer, and have read up a fair amount on this topic. It's not an easy problem to solve, at least not in the next 10-20 years. You need to build a lot of solar panel factories before you make much of a dent. We need to start working on it, but it's going to take a while to get there. Not that it shouldn't stop us from encouraging government action in feed in tariffs, renewable portfolio standards, etc. By the way, the best book I've found on the subject is "Without the Hot Air", by David MacKay. You can read it free on-line, or buy the book - I've done both. http://www.withouthotair.com/

I like the way they said in the movie "who killed the electric car" that GM wouldn't use the strongest arguments in favor of the EV-1 because they reflected too negatively on the rest of their (gasoline-powered) product line. For me, the most important factors on the Leaf are energy independence (and not funding petro-dictatorships and oil wars), the ability to use more sustainable forms of energy (even coal or natural gas are improvements because we have hundreds of years of supply, rather than perhaps 50-70 for petroleum at current projections), and greatly reduced maintenance costs. No air pollution comes next, and global warming below that on my motivation scale. So it's a different order than Nissan, which puts the hardest problem to solve - global warming - first in their advertising.

- Bob

rwherrick said:

For me, the most important factors on the Leaf are energy independence (and not funding petro-dictatorships and oil wars), the ability to use more sustainable forms of energy (even coal or natural gas are improvements because we have hundreds of years of supply, rather than perhaps 50-70 for petroleum at current projections), and greatly reduced maintenance costs.

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I hate to burst your bubble, but the "hundreds of years left" for coal is probably not true:

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/8064

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2697

rwherrick said:

Interesting article. Thanks for citing it; I just skimmed it. I think he is far more optimistic about wind power (calling for 50% of the need to be met by wind) than most other sources (20% by wind). I used to work for a Solar panel manufacturer, and have read up a fair amount on this topic. It's not an easy problem to solve, at least not in the next 10-20 years. You need to build a lot of solar panel factories before you make much of a dent. We need to start working on it, but it's going to take a while to get there. Not that it shouldn't stop us from encouraging government action in feed in tariffs, renewable portfolio standards, etc. By the way, the best book I've found on the subject is "Without the Hot Air", by David MacKay. You can read it free on-line, or buy the book - I've done both. http://www.withouthotair.com/

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I don't think 50% is out of line. While a now 10 year old report shows that 20% wind by 2020 is very do-able, Pickens and others have shown that we can do much, much better than just 20%.

MacKay's book is excellent! We've talked about it here before, but in the early days of the forum. Everyone needs to read this book!

rwherrick said:

I like the way they said in the movie "who killed the electric car" that GM wouldn't use the strongest arguments in favor of the EV-1 because they reflected too negatively on the rest of their (gasoline-powered) product line. For me, the most important factors on the Leaf are energy independence (and not funding petro-dictatorships and oil wars), the ability to use more sustainable forms of energy (even coal or natural gas are improvements because we have hundreds of years of supply, rather than perhaps 50-70 for petroleum at current projections), and greatly reduced maintenance costs. No air pollution comes next, and global warming below that on my motivation scale. So it's a different order than Nissan, which puts the hardest problem to solve - global warming - first in their advertising.

- Bob

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Please strongly consider inverting the order of the to-do list. The coal and natural gas estimates are based on the assumption that we'll continue to use the fuel in future at the same rate we're using them today. That's absolutely not going to happen.

Global warming/climate change/climate destabilization is the number one problem this planet has - bar none. It's directly responsible for the growing number of climate refugees, famines, crop failures, droughts, floods, and spread of tropical diseases. Even if we could sequester 100% of the carbon from burning coal, and capture 100% of the mercury, sulfur compounds, radioactive elements, and other problem emissions, coal still has to be mined - and that's as damaging to people living in mining areas as burning the coal. There's nothing 'clean' about coal.

While it's a nice rallying cry, we'll stop sending money to people that dislike us as soon as we get more windmills and solar facilities planted. That problem will take care of itself when we focus on number one - carbon emissions.

Yes - we need more wind turbine factories in the US, and more solar panel production. And trained installers and maintainers. And since we just happen to be trying to climb out of a recession, have high unemployment, and need to restore our manufacturing base, this seems like a match made in heaven.

AndyH said:

Please strongly consider inverting the order of the to-do list. The coal and natural gas estimates are based on the assumption that we'll continue to use the fuel in future at the same rate we're using them today. That's absolutely not going to happen.

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It just doesn't matter very much. The facts are that we need to eliminate gasoline use AND coal use. The most important thing is to squelch the notion that we have to eliminate coal before bothering to eliminate gasoline vehicles. Both efforts are herculean (vehicles possible more than coal), and we need to make progress on both of them at the same time.

How ironic that the author uses the development of the interstate highway system "changing commerce and society" as an example of how major change can be made to happen relatively quickly. Indeed the interstate highway system did change commerce and society, and not for the better with respect to the hot topic of the day global warming.

The article is almost 2 years old - still relevant, perhaps more relevant than ever - but not recent. And as the insurance ad tells us, "things come at you fast", including Pickens having backed off a bit on his wind development plans, as have many other wind developers.

Regards, JEff

leafetarian said:

I just heard speech by Professor Mark Z. Jacobson at Stanford University on this. There was recent paper by him in Scientific American on details as well. Electric cars are mentioned as main ingredient for transportation in this plan.
I thought this is very relevant for all those saying that Leaf would be driven on "dirty" electricity from coal, etc.

A Plan to Power 100 Percent of the Planet with Renewables: Wind, water and solar technologies can provide 100 percent of the world's energy, eliminating all fossil fuels. Here's how

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-path-to-sustainable-energy-by-2030

Click to expand...

Yodrak said:

... And as the insurance ad tells us, "things come at you fast", including Pickens having backed off a bit on his wind development plans, as have many other wind developers.

Regards, JEff

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Pickens did reduce his wind plans a number of years ago - in Texas - because the state didn't install the necessary infrastructure to get the wind to consumers. Some turbines were cancelled, but most were installed in wind farms in more northern states.

Across the board, however, according to the American Wind Energy Association:
http://www.awea.org/learnabout/industry_stats/index.cfm

The first quarter of 2011 saw over 1,100 megawatts (MW) of wind power capacity installed -- more than double the capacity installed in the first quarter of 2010. The U.S. wind industry had 40,181 MW of wind power capacity installed at the end of 2010, with 5,116 MW installed in 2010 alone. The U.S. wind industry has added over 35% of all new generating capacity over the past 4 years, second only to natural gas, and more than nuclear and coal combined. Today, U.S. wind power capacity represents more than 20% of the world’s installed wind power.

Today, the U.S. wind industry represents not only a large market for wind power capacity installations, but also a growing market for American manufacturing. Over 400 manufacturing facilities across the U.S. make components for wind turbines, and dedicated wind facilities that manufacture major components such as towers, blades and assembled nacelles can be found in every region.

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Certainly wind farm development is ongoing, and at a good pace. No doubt about that.

My experience is that:
- fewer new wind farm projects are being proposed today than were being proposed 5-10 years ago, but the projects that are being proposed today are more likely to succeed.
- maybe 1/3 of the wind farm projects that have been proposed in the last few years make it to commercial operation, the rest are cancelled somewhere in the development phase for one reason or another. Of those that were proposed 5-10 years ago, maybe 1 in 10 made it to commercial operation.

The industry is maturing, early over-enthusiastic and under-prepared developers are being replaced by, or are becoming, more savy and realistic in their expectations and in their planning. There is a lot of consolidation going on - smaller start-up developers that were successful are merging with each other or being bought up by large, often international, companies.

A significant factor these days is obtaining financing for projects.

AndyH said:

Pickens did reduce his wind plans a number of years ago - in Texas - because the state didn't install the necessary infrastructure to get the wind to consumers. Some turbines were cancelled, but most were installed in wind farms in more northern states.

Across the board, however, according to the American Wind Energy Association:
http://www.awea.org/learnabout/industry_stats/index.cfm

The first quarter of 2011 saw over 1,100 megawatts (MW) of wind power capacity installed -- more than double the capacity installed in the first quarter of 2010. The U.S. wind industry had 40,181 MW of wind power capacity installed at the end of 2010, with 5,116 MW installed in 2010 alone. The U.S. wind industry has added over 35% of all new generating capacity over the past 4 years, second only to natural gas, and more than nuclear and coal combined. Today, U.S. wind power capacity represents more than 20% of the world’s installed wind power.

Today, the U.S. wind industry represents not only a large market for wind power capacity installations, but also a growing market for American manufacturing. Over 400 manufacturing facilities across the U.S. make components for wind turbines, and dedicated wind facilities that manufacture major components such as towers, blades and assembled nacelles can be found in every region.

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Armory Lovins, in one of his recent talks about the Rocky Mountain Institute's "Reinventing Fire" program, confirmed that one reason for a slower pace of land-based wind generation deployment is due to a lack of required infrastructure. The other significant factor is the drop in the price of natural gas.

See this video for example:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_EKZvb7gc8[/youtube]

48:47 "Wind power now stuck in the queue awaiting grid interconnection - 300GW or so - could displace about 2/5 of the coal power. All the profitable wind power on available land could displace coal about 19 times over."

I can't find the Pickens-specific comment - it's in the Q/A section of one of RMI/Lovins recent talks. (I watched four presentations yesterday and haven't yet rediscovered the comment. )

(Interesting to see that PV on 3% of US roofs can displace all US coal plants - and can be done less expensively and in a shorter amount of time than building new coal plants.)

edit...sorry Reddy - too many windows open. Your quote is from another thread.

Reddy said:

I think the real issue is balancing...

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Nice job - thanks for these links!

For a big-picture look at balancing in general and how it looks on the ERCOT (Texas grid - not well interconnected and not well diversified - in other words 'worst case' ), fast forward to 49:50 in the video above.

"We're often told that only the coal and nuclear plants can keep the lights on because they're 24/7 while wind power and photovoltaics are variable and thus unreliable..." "Coal and nuclear plants fail about 10-14% of the time losing a GW in milliseconds, often for weeks or months and without warning. Now, grids routinely handle that intermittence by backing up failed plants with working plants. They can handle solar and wind variability - which is forecastable - in just the same way. So my team has been doing hourly simulations and we've found that very large renewable fractions can deliver highly reliable power when forecasted, integrated, and diversified by both type and location."

Toss in some climate change and conventional generation gets worse...
http://app1.kuhf.org/articles/1312581138-Again-Conserve-Electricity-During-Peak-Hours.html

It's been so hot — even in the evenings — that the lake water used to cool some generating plants is too warm.
"They can't really efficiently condense the steam that's used to make electricity, so that causes unit D-ratings that they can't generate as much as they could if the lake were cooler."

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http://energyandenvironmentblog.dallasnews.com/archives/2011/08/texas-power-grid-operator-issu.html

He said around 3,000 megawatts of generation capacity had stopped working on Tuesday, but he didn't say which plants. He said such outages aren't unusual in the hot summer, and Texas is getting some juice from surrounding states and from Mexico.

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While more heat makes more wind...

One of the things we've seen pretty consistently the last several days is an increase in wind generation from the coastal wind. The coastal wind generation follows our load pattern very well. It starts coming up about one o'clock and, you know, gradually increases, you know, into the evening.

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AndyH said:

"We're often told that only the coal and nuclear plants can keep the lights on because they're 24/7 while wind power and photovoltaics are variable and thus unreliable..." "Coal and nuclear plants fail about 10-14% of the time losing a GW in milliseconds, often for weeks or months and without warning. Now, grids routinely handle that intermittence by backing up failed plants with working plants. They can handle solar and wind variability - which is forecastable - in just the same way. So my team has been doing hourly simulations and we've found that very large renewable fractions can deliver highly reliable power when forecasted, integrated, and diversified by both type and location."

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Yup, the nuclear plant is still off-line (planned shutdown, but started earlier than planned due to excess hydro and outage extended due to slow work):
http://www.kvewtv.com/article/2011/aug/03/columbia-generating-station-closure-extended/
Another interesting tidbit (I don't remember where I read it) is that BPA must keep at least 1200 MW excess capacity available 24/7 for that millisecond event you describe. This excess capacity is therefore UNAVAILABLE for balancing the wind power. That cost should therefore be attributed to the large reactor. Is it? I don't know.

One of the sources for electric power that some of you may have not seen, is the Solar Tower going up in AZ in the near future. I believe it will go online in 2015 and will be able to power over 150,000 homes for 80 years! It uses no water! IMO, this is what we should be building instead of nukes!

http://www.azfamily.com/news/Massive-solar-tower-in-Arizona-to-be-worlds-second-largest-building-126157183.html

I look forward to the day when daytime is the low cost abundent power and night is the expensive old generation systems.

Thanks for the links.

Impressive to see an Aussie company leading the efforts.

There's also Solar Roadways: http://solarroadways.com/intro.shtml

Here's hoping their tech actually works.

A timely counterpoint to Dr. Lovins from Dr. Hansen?

http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2011/20110729_BabyLauren.pdf

- "Merchants of Doubt" not a complete explanation
- A look at PV and incentives
- Government greenwashing
- The power mix and how renewables aren't enough
- Cap and trade plans promote more energy use rather than support transition

AndyH said:

A timely counterpoint to Dr. Lovins from Dr. Hansen?

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Glad to see I wasn't the only one who considered Jevons Paradox after listening to Lovins' talk. If you build super efficient cars without addressing the cost of gasoline, you'll get super efficient cars... that burn gasoline. More of them, because now they are less expensive to operate. Net effect is higher consumption.

The price of nonrenewable fuel absolutely must increase to push the market away from it. We can either wait until we run out (and incur the environmental and economic costs of that) or start pushing with tax policy and similar schemes to inflate the cost artificially.

However I disagree just a little bit with this:

As long as fossil fuel energy is cheap, efficiency encourages more energy use. For example, solid state lighting is much more efficient, but it encourages more extensive lighting.

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YMMV of course, but we have energy codes that limit energy usage in certain circumstances. For example, lighting would be limited to a certain watts-per-square-foot depending on the space usage. Yes, more efficient lighting means more light for the same energy, but in this particular case it is still bounded. This, of course, is also a good way to force the issue instead of economic policy: quotas! I agree overall with what Hansen says here, but I just wanted to discuss this particular example and why I think it's not a great one...

Basically I agree wholeheartedly with Dr. Hansen. (I still pre-ordered "Reinventing Fire," though, because I think it will still be a good source of ideas.)
=Smidge=

Nicely said, Smidge. I'm beginning to think I need to buy one of Fox Mulder's UFO posters.



Considering how defective at least one branch of our gov'ment seems to be, Doc Lovins' "we can do it without federal government intervention" plan really calls to me. I don't think there's a chance in Hades that we'll get anything resembling a carbon tax or a "Dr. Hansen carbon credit redistribution plan" in my lifetime. And that leaves me feeling a bit like I've been sitting on a rocky shore in late October on a very, very bone chilling gray day.

That's two of us on the Reinventing Fire pre-order list.

Found this today while looking for some geographic info systems data files. It's a report of a San Diego survey of roof space suitable for solar collection. It appears to be using 2006 data.

Given the existing building stock, the current technical
potential for roof top photovoltaics in the San Diego region
is just over 4,100 MW (8,947 GWh). By 2020 as the
building stock expands, the technical potential is projected
to grow to about 4,691 MW (10,224 GWh). Given the
relatively small commercial industrial sector in the region,
the residential sector represents about 63% (2,965 MW) of
the technical potential for photovoltaics in 2020. The
commercial sector accounts for the remaining 37% (1,726
MW) of photovoltaic potential.

To put these results into perspective, in 2005 San Diego Gas
& Electric (SDG&E) had a peak demand of 4,058 MW and
total sales of 19,214 GWh. Therefore, the technical
potential represents over 100% of peak demand and 53% of
energy needs.

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http://www.sandiego.edu/epic/research_reports/documents/060309_ASESPVPotentialPaperFINAL_000.pdf

Meanwhile articles like this keep getting posted, when are these Texans going to get with the program?, it may be time to start selling our properties and start moving inland, before ocean levels get out of hand.

http://www.chron.com/business/energy/article/N-American-oil-output-could-top-40-year-old-peak-2193837.php" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

"N. American oil output could top 40-year-old peak

North America appears headed for an oil renaissance, with crude production expected to hit an all-time high by 2016, given the current pace of drilling in the U.S. and Canada, according to a study released by an energy research firm this week."

Herm said:

Meanwhile articles like this keep getting posted, when are these Texans going to get with the program?

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Some Texans, Herm, are getting with the program. Unfortunately, in this state run by oil companies, it can be difficult at times...

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlNQWbN4O_U[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8t4NbGeEdY[/youtube]