The Green Revolution Will Not Be Televised
Note from Connor:
I wrote this piece over the past 2 month before the landmark decision by the supreme court gutting the ability of the EPA to curb carbon emissions from power plants. This is going to make meeting our emission targets all the more difficult. I know it can be disheartening to hear news like this, but it’s all the more reason to educate ourselves and make a change in whatever way we can.
Intro:
I am a tech-optimist. I believe many of the world’s problems can be successfully addressed through technology. So after years and years of hearing our politicians, scientists and media talk about how we need to invest more in our renewable energy infrastructure, I started to wonder how we would actually build a fully sustainable energy grid.
This question brought me down a rabbit hole that has occupied many hours of reading, watching youtube videos, and listening to podcasts. Through this process, I have come to three conclusions:
1: It’s the responsibility of wealthy countries to get their emissions down.
2: Transitioning our grid to fully renewable energy is…hard
3: We are making tremendous progress
1: It’s the rich countries responsibility to get their emissions down first.
I grew up in a generation that has known about climate change almost our entire lives. The constant talk of human-caused “end of days” burns a pretty deep hole in your psyche. So much so that I have always had an underlying guilt with using electricity. It’s hard to live the life that most of us living in a wealthy first world country have because we know what it is doing to the environment, and thus to our future. If you are an average American, you use something like 12k KWH per year; that compares to around 2k for people living in Mexico. Although there are additional factors like climate at play here (especially the cold and darkness associated with our winter), there is a well known connection between GDP per capita and energy usage per capita. Look at this chart from the World Bank. While the causal relationship between these two variables is yet to be determined (although there are multiple studies on this very question), the fact remains that people in richer countries tend to use more energy.
Not only does the United States use more energy, it is also lagging behind in renewable energy consumption in comparison to the rest of the top energy consumers. Of the top 15 energy consuming countries, the United States ranked 10th in terms of renewable energy percentage.
This leads us to a few uncomfortable points. As many of these poorer nations become richer and more developed, their energy needs will increase. In 2010, 54% of the world’s energy usage was from developing nations. That number is expected to rise to 65% in 2040. The expectation is that just like the industrialized nations, these nations will grow their economies and improve their GNP by burning fossil fuel. And while this has massive implications for the environment, it is also a good thing. Increased energy demand means that these countries will see huge leaps in standard of living, healthcare, and food security. It is unrealistic for rich countries that built their empires on fossil fuels to expect developing nations to do anything different.
But even as energy use within developing countries continues to grow, it remains the case that the United States is still using a disproportionate amount of energy per capita. And that energy is insufficiently renewable. We need to do better.
I may be a tech-optimist, but I am also a realist. It is the responsibility of nations like ours– rich, more developed, higher polluting nations–to lead the way in building sustainable, large scale energy grids. But it is not realistic to foresee or demand a massive shift in the way people use energy in wealthy countries. There are certainly initiatives that we can undertake to mitigate our effect on the environment, but our nation’s high energy usage will remain, and perhaps just increase.
Although this seems like I’m arguing this is an unsolvable equation, I am not. The piece of the puzzle that can help us is that energy does not have to necessitate CO2 emissions. We have made progress in this regard. Last year (2021), ~60% of all energy used came from fossil fuels. And because our reliance on coal has dropped considerably, mostly replaced by natural gas, we do not produce as much carbon. If we could continue this trend, and develop energy that is not a CO2 producing source, then we can produce the energy we need with significantly fewer environmental repercussions.
Everyone knows this, but our progress has not kept up with the dimension of the problem. After decades of “Green energy” talk, why are we still getting so much of our energy from fossil fuels?
2: Getting our grid fully onto renewable energy is…hard
The US has made massive efforts over the past decade to switch its energy grid from primarily coal to a mixture of coal, natural gas, nuclear, and renewables. And it is working. Renewable energy surpassed coal in terms of energy production in the US for the first time ever in 2019. From 2011 to 2020, wind energy production tripled, and solar energy grew 23x.
Some states are far ahead on the renewable energy game, with California leading the way in clean energy production. In fact, on May 8th 2022, for the first time ever, California produced enough renewable electricity to meet over 100% of consumer demand.
While all of this looks promising, the reality is more complicated. Although renewables account for a larger and larger portion of our energy production, our energy consumption has lagged behind. For example, on that same day, May 8th, natural gas power plants were generating about 10% of the electricity on the California grid. This brings us to one of the main issues facing the green energy switch — energy storage.
This may seem obvious, but the biggest downside of solar energy is that that is only collectable when the sun is shining. This means generally speaking, peak energy production from solar panels will be around noon, and then go to 0 when the sun sets. For reasons that I will explain, that means that when the sun goes down, energy grids need to switch to a different power source, and in most cases, natural gas and coal fill that gap.
While we are making leaps in renewable energy production, there remains an underlying problem — how do you bridge the energy gap when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing? According to many experts in this field, part of the answer is energy storage, but that too has challenges.
Unfortunately, even as green energy rises as a percentage of total production, we currently don’t have nearly the amount of storage capacity as we would need to make this production usable/viable at all hours of the day. There are currently a variety of different large scale energy storage solutions deployed around the country, all with their own acronyms: Pumped Hydroelectric Storage (PHS), Compressed Air Energy Storage (CAES), Advanced Battery Energy Storage (ABES), Thermal Energy Storage (TES), and Hydrogen Energy Storage (HES). But because many of these technologies are new, the cost of implementing them on a large scale is astronomical.
Right now, fossil fuel is just too cheap and too reliable to replace fully. In peak demand times, we can easily just turn on a “peaking” gas plant to account for the additional energy needs. Simply put, fossil fuel is just easier. All the infrastructure is in place and it can be turned on and off with relative ease.
Alright, Ive just thrown a lot of doom and gloom at you for the past two sections. I promise the next section will be more fun. To thank you for getting this far, and to give you a little reprieve, here’s a cute picture of my dog as a puppy. ;-)
3: We are making tremendous progress
Undoing a hundred years of fossil fuel reliance takes time, but we are doing it. It may not feel like it, but every day, new discoveries are made, new theories tested, and new technologies brought to market. We have a lot to look forward to over the next decade in renewable/sustainable energy.
To start, we are making incredible progress in energy storage. Batteries have never been the sexiest business, but the advancements made in the past 20 years have changed the way we live in fundamental ways. Since the advent of the lithium-ion battery, we’ve seen the price of energy storage drop dramatically. In 2010 the cost of lithium-ion packs were about $1,100/kWh, prohibitively expensive for most large scale projects like cars or grid storage. But thanks to economies of scale and advancements in energy density, that cost is now down to below $156/kWh. It has already become cheaper to build a new battery farm rather than a new “peaking” plant, meaning as those fossil fuel plants go offline, they will most likely be replaced with grid energy storage. This same storage technology has begun to be seen on the consumer level. Tesla Powerwalls are just giant batteries used for this exact same reason, just on a smaller scale. This is one of the largest reasons that electric cars have finally begun to take a hold in the consumer market, and as costs continue to fall, we will see grid storage become more prevalent.
At the same time, we are developing better renewable energy solutions to ensure a reliable stream of energy. For example, tidal power is a growing field that harnesses the energy produced by waves and underwater currents. Some estimates from the International Energy Agency suggest that tidal power could produce 20,000 to 80,000 terawatt hours of electricity. That is more than the world’s current energy consumption of almost 20,000 TWh.
Another example: Next generation nuclear fission plants are safer, smaller and produce less waste. Although public opinion has soured on nuclear energy in the past few decades, there is a push to begin building these plants again. These “Gen 3” reactors have improved fuel technology, higher thermal efficiency, significantly enhanced safety systems, and standardized designs intended to reduce maintenance and capital costs. As the push for reliable and sustainable energy grows, we may see this technology start to come back.
4: Final Thoughts
There are a few other technologies that could play an important role in the future of clean energy. Some of these sound outlandish, but we are making serious progress on all of them. I may even write another paper on some of these topics in the future.
- Hydroelectric dams
- Graphene batteries
- Gravity based energy storage
- Nuclear Fusion (Yes seriously)
One of the large challenges with the current goals of reaching global carbon neutrality is that most of the wealthy countries got to where they are on the back of coal and oil. While emerging economies establish themselves, it is on these wealthy nations to curb their emissions and help the rest of the world leapfrog the stage of oil reliance that is causing so much havoc.
This was definitely a much heftier topic than I anticipated when I took on this paper (who knew the US energy grid was so complicated?!). There are a lot of things I skipped or glossed over for the sake of simplicity, but I urge you to learn about where your energy comes from from your provider. Most will offer you “green button” access, allowing you to see a lot of your own data.
Till next time,
Connor
