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Opinion | What Will It Take to Clean Up the Electric Grid?:
rjzimmerman:
Excerpt from this Op-Ed from the New York Times:
Most of the Democratic presidential candidates have embraced a goal that is more limited, but still challenging: cleaning up, to a large degree, the electricity grid by 2030, just 10 years from now. Turning to cleaner energy sources to generate that electricity would not eliminate emissions from other sources like cars and buildings, but it would be a huge step in the right direction. It appears the 2020 election may feature an argument about whether such a rapid cleanup is possible. So is it?
To figure that out, we used the Energy Policy Simulator, developed by the climate policy research group Energy Innovation, to calculate the scale of the required construction program. The results are sobering, but they point to a strategy.
Most of the dams built in the first half of the 20th century, and most of the nuclear plants built in the second half, are still supplying power. More recently, wind and solar plants have grown to supply nearly 10 percent of our electricity. Altogether, 38 percent of American electricity already comes from low-emission sources.
Getting the rest of the way in a decade, our modeling suggests, would require a national project of immense scale. New nuclear plants take too long to plan and build, and have incurred disastrous cost overruns, so they are largely off the table for a 2030 target. Instead, American workers would have to build about 120,000 new wind turbines and about 44,000 large solar power plants in a decade.
The pace of construction would need to be three to four times as fast as the maximum annual pace we have achieved so far, in 2012 for wind turbines and in 2016 for solar panels. We would most likely need more than 60,000 miles of new power transmission lines, and many grid batteries to store electrical energy on a large scale and balance the variable wind and solar output.
A fast renewable power construction program would require an acceleration of the cumbersome procedures required to put up power lines and other infrastructure. That would have to include speeding up environmental reviews, which can easily take a decade on large projects. We support strong environmental standards, but the reviews should be much faster.
Opinion | What Will It Take to Clean Up the Electric Grid?:
rjzimmerman:
Excerpt from this Op-Ed from the New York Times:
Most of the Democratic presidential candidates have embraced a goal that is more limited, but still challenging: cleaning up, to a large degree, the electricity grid by 2030, just 10 years from now. Turning to cleaner energy sources to generate that electricity would not eliminate emissions from other sources like cars and buildings, but it would be a huge step in the right direction. It appears the 2020 election may feature an argument about whether such a rapid cleanup is possible. So is it?
To figure that out, we used the Energy Policy Simulator, developed by the climate policy research group Energy Innovation, to calculate the scale of the required construction program. The results are sobering, but they point to a strategy.
Most of the dams built in the first half of the 20th century, and most of the nuclear plants built in the second half, are still supplying power. More recently, wind and solar plants have grown to supply nearly 10 percent of our electricity. Altogether, 38 percent of American electricity already comes from low-emission sources.
Getting the rest of the way in a decade, our modeling suggests, would require a national project of immense scale. New nuclear plants take too long to plan and build, and have incurred disastrous cost overruns, so they are largely off the table for a 2030 target. Instead, American workers would have to build about 120,000 new wind turbines and about 44,000 large solar power plants in a decade.
The pace of construction would need to be three to four times as fast as the maximum annual pace we have achieved so far, in 2012 for wind turbines and in 2016 for solar panels. We would most likely need more than 60,000 miles of new power transmission lines, and many grid batteries to store electrical energy on a large scale and balance the variable wind and solar output.
A fast renewable power construction program would require an acceleration of the cumbersome procedures required to put up power lines and other infrastructure. That would have to include speeding up environmental reviews, which can easily take a decade on large projects. We support strong environmental standards, but the reviews should be much faster.