The Pathway to 100 Percent Renewable Energy Is Globally Viable, says Mark Z. Jacobson
Part 1 of “Powering Earth 2050” Debate
California’s renewable energy march is on: State-regulated utilities must now get 50 percent of their electricity from wind, water, and the sun by 2050 — no fossil fuels or biofuels, no nuclear power. But even if the Golden State can achieve these goals, are they a roadmap for the rest of the United States — or the world?
Four experts debate. You decide.
On the pro side: Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University. To read other positions, click here.
Mark Z. Jacobson: We’ve been developing energy plans, clean energy plans, for 100 percent renewable wind, water, and solar for states and countries since 2009, primarily myself and Dr. Mark Delucchi, who is at UC Berkeley, and over 60 other scientists and students. And we’ve written papers, on the order of 15 papers, including six or seven that are specific energy plans that have been reviewed by over 35 peer reviewers in the anonymous peer-reviewed literature. And these plans look at whether we can transition to 100 percent clean renewable wind, water, and solar for all purposes.
And so we first looked at the global scale, and then we went down to the U.S. scale, and then we went down to the individual states, and then we went back up to look at individual countries. So we have developed plans now for all 50 United States and 139 countries of the world.
And just to give you a summary of what we found: For 139 countries, which represent about 95 percent of all emissions, the end-use power demand — that’s what people actually use today for all purposes — is on the order of 12 to 12.5 terawatts or trillion watts. If we go to 2050, that goes up to about 19.5 terawatts. But, if we electrify all sectors — that’s electricity, transportation, heating and cooling, industry, agriculture, forestry, and fishing, which is what we intend to do through these plans — we reduce power demand, first, 32 percent by the efficiency of electricity over combustion without even changing your habits. That’s not even end-use energy-efficiency improvements. There’s a 32 percent reduction of demand. And then another 7 percent, we try to squeeze out due to end-use energy-efficiency improvements, which is very conservative compared to a business-as-usual case. So we get down 39 percent end-use power demand. So we have about almost 12 terawatts to satisfy in 2050 of end-use power. And then we say, “Can we power this 12 terawatts of end use with wind, water, and solar?” That’s onshore and offshore wind, solar power, either PV on the rooftops or at the utility scale, concentrated solar power with storage, geothermal power, tidal and wave power, and existing hydroelectric without growing conventional hydroelectric capacity.
And we find that, indeed — we’ve done plans for all 50 states and 139 countries — we can in all cases. And these are the benefits. By doing this, we would eliminate global warming as we know it. We can actually — by implementing these plans — get 80 percent conversion by 2030 and 100 percent by 2050. We’d get CO2 down to 350 parts per million by 2100. Even if we get 80 percent by 2050 and 100 percent by 2100, then we still get it down to 370 parts per million. We would create 22 million net jobs worldwide by such conversions. We’d use about 1 percent of the world’s land — 0.4 percent of that is for footprint on the ground and 0.6 percent is spacing for onshore wind turbines that can be used for multiple purposes.
When we account for the storage and long distance transmission that we also examined, the cost of energy is similar to a fossil fuel infrastructure in 2050, but because we need less energy, actually each person saves in their pocket on the order of $140 per year per person from energy costs. And we also save another $3,000 to $5,000 per year in health and climate cost because we eliminate 4 to 7 million air pollution deaths worldwide. We eliminate global warming as we know it. We stabilize prices because the fuel costs of wind, water, and solar are zero, and we reduce international conflict because all energy is local. Almost all energy is local. We don’t have to have international transfers of energy like we do now. We have more separated plants, distributed energy sources. So that would reduce the chance of terrorism risk or massive power outages like we have now with much larger conventional sources. We reduce energy poverty worldwide. You know, 4 billion people are in energy poverty, including 1.3 billion who have no access to energy worldwide. We reduce that.
There’s little downside. So you might ask, “Well, why don’t we use, like, nuclear power — which I’m sure my cohorts are going to address that — in our plans and other things like coal with carbon capture?” Well, I’ll just address nuclear. Part of it is because, first of all, we can do it with what we have, with 98 percent existing technologies, so we don’t need it. And there’s a large risk in terms of national and international security, weapons proliferation, meltdown risk: 1.5 percent of all nuclear reactors ever built to date have melted down to some degree. Five countries of the world have secretly developed nuclear weapons under the guise of civilian nuclear energy programs or research reactors. We have unresolved waste issues where we have to store waste for hundreds of thousands of years, and my colleagues want to increase nuclear by up to a factor of 10. I mean, if we wanted to power the whole world with nuclear, we would need about 16,000 850-megawatt power plants, and we have about 400 today. So, even if we have nuclear plants for 5 percent of the maximum we need, that would double it to 800. We would have more countries of the world, who don’t have nuclear energy right now, and might be interested in converting that into nuclear weapons.
In terms of cost, right now wind is the cheapest form of electric power in the United States. Today, unsubsidized, it’s 3.6 cents per kilowatt hour. Subsidized, it’s about 2 cents a kilowatt hour. Solar at the utility scale is 5 to 7 cents per kilowatt hour. Natural gas is 5.2 to 7.5 cents a kilowatt hour. Nuclear, because there’s only one plant that there’s cost data for that’s recent, is 12.5 cents per kilowatt hour unsubsidized in the U.S. So if you invest one dollar in nuclear, you’re getting one fourth the energy output. Plus, it takes so long to put up a nuclear plant — between 10 and 19 years on average versus 2 to 5 years for a wind or solar farm — that while you’re waiting around, spinning your wheels for this nuclear to come up, you’re burning coal, gas, and oil on your regular electric power grid. And that plus the emissions due to refining of uranium which is done with fossil fuels, results in six to 24 times more CO2 emissions per kilowatt hour than wind on average.
And so these are the reasons we don’t want to go there, because we don’t need to. It may be better than some other technologies, but it’s not so good as wind, water, solar, and there’s no need, because we can solve the problem with clean renewable energy with existing technologies.
This debate took place as part of the Oppenheim Lecture Series at UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. To watch the whole debate, click here.
