RE: Clean and green10 Jun 2020 19:56
As the price of wind and solar have come down dramatically, the...conventional wisdom that wind is only cost-effective in the wind belt in the middle of the country, solar is only cost-effective in the sunny Southwest — that's not true anymore,” GridLab’s Ric O’Connell said on the call. “While we still need to build significant transmission, most of that transmission is more regional as opposed to interregional.”
The focus on “transmission spurs” results in transmission costs that are “modest,” according to the report.
The analysis does not examine demand response or controllable load; such technologies could result in less gas burn for peak capacity and, potentially, cheaper approaches to balancing the grid.
Similarly, a raft of zero-carbon firm resources in the early stages of commercialization (small modular nuclear, hydrogen-powered turbines, long-duration storage) could make the goal even easier to reach, but the analysis makes things work with tools on the market today.
To achieve 90 percent clean status, the U.S. would have to build 1,100 gigawatts of new wind and solar capacity in the next 15 years, the study found. That averages to roughly 70 gigawatts' worth of deployments per year, more than triple the combined wind and solar additions completed in any one year to date.
The U.S. added 65 gigawatts of gas capacity in 2002 alone, the study notes, so this level of power investment has happened — just not with renewables.
Previous assessments show the danger of underestimating future renewables growth based on the past. The report includes solar and wind cost estimates from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s Annual Technology Baseline; costs today already beat what NREL predicted for rosy 2050 scenarios just four or five years ago.
“The key thing that was very exciting to us, and why we were prompted to do this study, is that the cost declined much faster than all the experts in the field anticipated, including us,” Phadke said.
Clean energy continuously outperforms expert expectations; even so, 70 gigawatts a year is an unprecedented lift. For comparison, the study’s No New Policy case, which leaves the market to pick new capacity on its own, only gets to 53 percent clean by 2035. The 37 percent gap between the two scenarios, a gap carved by unpriced externalities and market imperfections, must be bridged by policy.
Sign In
Follow the stocks
