10 Steps in 10 Years to 100 Percent Renewable Power
Below is a conceptual plan for achieving the goal of 100% renewable energy by 2018. We will be updating this document with specific recommendations and additional resources in the near future.
| 1. Reduce | 6. Reinvest |
| 2. Share | 7. Relocalize |
| 3. Diversify | 8. Reengineer |
| 4. Distribute | 9. Reskill |
| 5. Store | 10. Remobilize |
1. Reduce consumption and reduce waste—not just of fossil fuels but of energy overall and of raw materials, almost all of which require energy to exploit and transport. Reducing consumption is vital in making the goal of 100% renewable electricity achievable, both to reduce the amount of renewable power we need to generate and because it will greatly reduce the cost of installing it. Such reduction will need to be planned in order to make sure that new jobs and opportunities demanded by renewable energy are brought on even as jobs dependent on cheap, abundant energy are removed by depletion. Americans need to become energy smart and self-reliant again—these were once defining aspects of the American character, and need to be revived.
2. Share—sharing things we do not use all the time can dramatically reduce consumption. For instance, we can reduce the energy we use for transportation by sharing both trips and vehicles. Such savings are already being achieved by ride-sharing and car-pooling, and more recently by membership-based car-sharing services.
Public transportation, especially when widespread, frequent, cheap and regularly scheduled—and thus widely used—is also a highly efficient form of sharing vehicles. It has the further great advantage being much easier to power with electricity.
Sharing is already an integral part of our energy use. The electricity grid itself is a system of sharing and balancing electricity production and load, but it’s outdated and excessively wasteful. We will need to re-engineer both the physical structure of the grid to make it easier to add all kinds of distributed power sources, and we will need to make the actual wires open to the public so that local power produced by businesses and homes can be added with economic advantage to both the user and the nation.
In general, if we share more, we will use less energy while building a self-sufficient and efficient society and economy.
3. Diversify sources of electricity, both in terms of generator size and location, concentrating on whatever renewable resources are locally available, such as wind, sun, biomass, geothermal, tides, and waves. There will be no single “silver bullet” renewable energy technology that works everywhere all the time; therefore harnessing efficient, practical, and abundant local sources will be vital. One of the best options for generation in many parts of the US is solar photovoltaic panels (PV). The solar industry in the US has suffered from a very unstable tax credit environment, and currently PV panel production in the US is minuscule by comparison with that of Europe and the Far East. The negative economic climate for US PV production must be addressed urgently by government.
4. Distribute electricity production so that households, businesses, and communities produce more of their own power. This reduces transmission losses, is good for the local economy, and builds community resilience against shortfalls and price spikes of any one energy resource. Achieving this distribution will require many creative and large-scale means of financing, often involving government help. It will also require fast-track permitting, changes in legislation and the power grid to allow easy grid access, as well as changes in the structuring of many existing utilities.
5. Store electricity better. We need to develop much better and more abundant electricity storage technology because most of the best renewable energy sources are intermittent (even if in quite predictable patterns). There are many different ways of storing electricity, but none of them is cheap or easy, and most of them are very expensive and in immediate need of much more research and development. In particular, battery technology, especially at large scale, is still very far from perfected, and America lags far behind the Far East in research, development, and production. This situation needs to change urgently.
6. Reinvest: the project of rebuilding America’s electricity infrastructure will require enormous public and private investment. The good news is that infrastructure investments pay tangible dividends for entire communities and for many generations—unlike speculative investments that only create temporary paper wealth for a few. Investing in a restructured power grid will require positive and active government involvement.
The federal and state governments can aggressively push feed-in tariff and "renewable portfolio standards" to stabilize and improve the fiscal environment for renewable energy. State and municipal governments can issue bonds for the building and buying of renewable energy generation, so that people can borrow against them for low interest loans. Bonds could even be extended beyond capital projects to support energy conserving and generating operations.
In 2007 the federal government created the Solar America Cities program, a partnership of cities and counties, government departments, non-profit institutions, and private companies, designed to advance the installation of solar power generation across America. Solar Sonoma County, a joint effort of local government, private business, and nonprofits (of which we are a member), is a leading example of the kind of innovative initiatives which make it much easier for all kinds of investment money to be directed into solar and energy efficiency.
Community Choice Aggregation and Power Purchase Agreements can also make local renewable power cheaper and more feasible, and thus easier to invest in.
7. Relocalize: rebuilding the local production and manufacturing economy while shortening supply chains will reduce transportation energy and carbon emissions, while creating jobs and supporting local economies. Relocalizing is a far-reaching and powerful economic idea that will come to the fore as energy constraints cause many to re-think the far-flung, shipping-intensive global economy. Relocalizing will cultivate community resilience and self-reliance at home, and a nation independent of fossil fuels and able to maximize generation of local renewable power.
8. Reengineer the infrastructure of America, starting with the power grid. Even without the need to leave fossil fuels behind, America’s electricity grid is in urgent need of overhaul. It needs to be repaired, strengthened, and in many cases dramatically re-wired to allow areas with large wind and solar resources to feed the demand centers. Though this will still entail long-distance transmission, it is far better to have large wind and solar farms than nuclear or coal plants, neither of which is clean or renewable. The new grid will also need to make it easy to add and stabilize small and medium-sized distributed generation sources.
The retrofitting of American buildings is another vitally necessary form of re-engineering. Most of the built environment in the US was designed in an era of cheap, abundant energy. US buildings account for nearly half of all energy use and greenhouse gas emissions. America urgently needs homes and businesses that remain warm in winter and cool summer with the minimum of energy consumption, with the aim of achieving zero-energy buildings wherever possible. This will reduce demand for both electricity and all fossil fuels.
9. Reskill America’s workforce for the millions of green-collar jobs that will be created by our historic transition to renewable energy—quality jobs in projects that include re-engineering the grid, installing millions of solar panels and wind turbines, retrofitting tens of millions of buildings, and rebuilding America’s fractured manufacturing sector and industrial supply chain.
These skills will be needed in every community. Reskilling will require coordination between government, education, business, and industry in an unprecedented shift toward reduced job specialization and greater ability to develop local supply chains using more local resources. This will include a return to local manufacturing of many vital lighter goods, and regional manufacturing of heavier goods and industrial feedstocks, such as steel. This historic change has already begun in some areas.
10. Remobilize: our transportation system needs to run on renewable electricity and human power. This means developing and deploying electric automobiles with related renewable generation and charging infrastructures, reviving and re-investing in electric trolley buses, streetcars, and electric rail - both light and heavy. We also need to revive and re-invest in pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure, and bring in light neighborhood electric vehicles (NEVs) for both personal and shared use. These measures all have the aim of replacing the petroleum-powered car as quickly as possible in order to produce a transport system designed for the 21st century.
This will require nothing short of a fossil-free transportation revolution, including an electric rail revolution. Cities redesigned for human muscles and electric motors will thrive long after we have run out of fossil fuels.
It is much easier and cheaper to store heat or cold than to store electricity. Heat pumps (for space or water heating), air conditioners, and refrigerators equipped with thermal energy storage (ice or hot water) can easily and cheaply store heat and cold. These devices can largely eliminate peak loads in the electric grid and buffer the output from intermittent renewable energy sources such as solar, wind, and waves. To be most effective the operation of this equipment needs to be coordinated by an improved "smart grid". An example of a commercial product with these capabilities is the "Ice Bear" ice storage air conditioning system manufactured by Ice Energy Corporation.
I understand the 10 steps that have been listed and their place in making the change. What I find missing is Step 1. Re-Vision. We need to collectively create the new vision of where we want to end up at the end of this 10 year process. We need the mutual enrgizing hope that this work is leading to something better than we have now. I believe that this is possible and am working toward it.
Having been working on the engineering of the technologies and systems needed for the ten steps for 25 years, I'm thinking that stating there are 10 steps in 10 years to 100% renewable is not helpful. People have to understand that these ideas have been around, and people have been working on these ideas since the 60's-70's. In the early '80's when I worked on SDHW design, and setting up the testing and certification (SRCC), it seemed like the mistakes with solar had all been made. The system engineering, materials, designs - all had developed quite well. While solar was not sensible to install in all locations, in all instances, the knowledge was good enough to get deployment on an increasing scale. But, even if all the investment that has been made in coal power plants had been turned over to solar, we wouldn't have a carbon-free society that people would recognise. I also worked on wind turbine control systems, at a time when reliability and materials and system design still had a way to go. Now, wind is deployable and economical, but not realistic as a way to replace coal. I've also put in my time on biomass combustion, fuel cells, and biofuels. If I could share my experience: I don't think there are 10 steps to a 100% renewable USA. These 10 steps are on the right track as they signal changes in expectations, patterns and consumption. It is these changes that signal the "path jump" required. What I've learned is that the work to be done is in how to manage a failing system, and how to model and communicate the real nature of the future to the public. People really shouldn't expect that we can somehow modify our current fossil fuel system within a short time to be 100% renewable. They should expect that they are going to have to change dramatically to manage fossil fuel reduction.
If the power grid fails, the Gore's call for renewable a electric economy will face difficult challenges.
According to energy investment banker Matthew Simmons, global oil production is now declining, from 85 million barrels per day to 60 million barrels per day by 2015. During the same time demand will increase 14%.
This is like a 45% drop in 7 years. No one can reverse this trend, without aggressive global conservation efforts cannot we conserve our way out of this catastrophe. Because the demand for oil is so high, once oil production beings to decline it will be higher than production; thus the depletion rate will continue until all recoverable oil is extracted.
Alternatives face challenges in filling the gap. And most alternatives yield electric power, but right now we need liquid fuels for tractors/combines, 18 wheel trucks, trains, ships, and mining equipment.
Unless the electric economy can be developed soon, we are facing the collapse of the highways that depend on diesel trucks for maintenance of bridges, cleaning culverts to avoid road washouts, snow plowing, roadbed and surface repair. If the highways fail, so will the power grid, as highways carry the parts, transformers, steel for pylons, and high tension cables, all from far away. With the highways out, there would be no food coming in from "outside," and without the power grid virtually nothing works, including home heating, pumping of gasoline and diesel, airports, communications, and automated systems.
This is documented in a free 48 page report that is in the public domain and can be downloaded, website posted, distributed, and emailed: http://www.peakoilassociates.com/POAnalysis.html
One of the key elements of your plan is to diversify, using the best resource that is locally available. For whatever reason, you have left off of this list one of the most widely available and harvestable forms of renewable energy, which would be Convective Available Potential Energy or CAPE (see CAPE Buoyancy and Classroom Study at http://tornadochaser.net)
More than 6000 TW of CAPE are dissipated in the atmosphere each day (as updrafts) as compared to a mere 2 TW of energy generated by man. It is possible to reorganize a local region of the troposphere (http://vortexengine.ca) which normally produces a lot of updrafts (where the energy they contain is lost)and divert them and the energy they contain into an Atmospheric Vortex Engine (inventor, L.M. Michaud, P.Eng.) This device conducts the converging air through channels where a portion of the energy contain can be harvested by turbines, and then is able to induce vorticity in the air stream before it is released, causing it to rise high into the troposphere via a buoyant vortex.
CAPE availability is more in phase with the needs of man in most of the country than are horizontal winds, which are often strongest during the night rather than when most needed. CAPE is also available more than direct solar, which is only available during the day, and often in very reduced amounts on cloudy days.
The potentially lower cost of energy from CAPE makes it the preferred renewable resource to exploit in many areas, which can provide the lowest investment per KW of capacity or per KWH of production. This would include PV which you have arbitrarily asserted as being one of the "best" solutions without any form of proof that this is indeed the case.
The Atmospheric Vortex Engine doesn't necessarily even need CAPE to generate low-cost electricity, as it can also operate on low value heat which is available from geothermal sources and (relatively) warm bodies of water.
IMO, if either Gore's or Picken's Plan is to have a chance to reach its objective within ten years, it will have to use both CAPE and waste heat fed to an Atmospheric Vortex Engine as major part of the solution.
Jerry Toman
This is a very useful article. I am copying it for distribution to organizers of our community-wide venture into Transition Town communities here in Portland, Oregon. We plan to bring together thousands of households, neighborhood associations, churches, companies,and existing environmental organizations to begin redesigning our region for resiliency in the face of future challenges. We assume that any combination of the variety of environmental limits we face will require us to learn within a few years to live with less energy and create new ways of finding satisfaction in life - not to mention avoiding widespread disaster.
One element I find omitted in our American discussions is what a modern passenger train system could do for us. Examples include high speed trains in Europe, Japan and now China, which has manufactured thousands of locomotives and cars over the last 5 years in preparation for the Olympics as well as for their domestic population after the games are over. The trains move at well over 150 miles per hour and so in the US could travel (theoretically) from coast to coast in a day. With no surcharge for baggage. YOu could include that under "saving energy" - both on air and automobile travel.
Jim
Everything posted here is excellent. I am quite pleased to see such a thoughtful discussion filled with insight and knowledge. One additional thing I'd add is that we need to consider the most important piece of the puzzle - human beings.
Right now I'm reading Daniel Gardner's new book, "The Science of Fear", which summarizes the last fifty years of research in risk perception and decision-making (an area I'm quite familiar with). We need to account for the ways people think, the cognitive and psychological mechanisms shaping our perceptions and behaviors, and build a coherent vision of how to get from here to there that benefits from this knowledge.
If we don't account for the human mind in our planning, we'll find that progress is much more difficult to make - and may fail before getting the process rolling.
Regarding Energy Storage--the 5th step
In the ten-step plan, the storage of electricity, on an 'Urban Scale' poses a problem. That is, there is no Battery, so far, that can power a city or town, (but for maybe a few minuets.) If we could turn the Earth, itself into a battery, As Tesla was attempting to do, we might have something. In the meantime, this is a undeveloped technology; and I would question its validity on this 10 step list. Including it as a viable solution is sort of like saying: "If we could develop anti-gravity, we would have this problem licked." How valid can that be?
However, the making of an 'urban-battery' is conceivable if we approach it in the way that Dr Richard E. Smalley proposes, in one of his later works.* [The late Dr. Smalley is part of the team that discovered carbon-based molecule called Fullerenes...receiving a Nobel for it.]
Dr. Smalley proposes that if each home or unit had its own battery--capable of meeting its own immediate energy needs--then the combination of those house-hold batteries, in effect, might go a long way to addressing the urban power storage problem. In other words, 'each home (or unit) becomes a power cell in the urban battery.'
http://www.matternetwork.com/2008/2/bucky.cfm
Dr. Smalley points out that this technology--local power storage--is already fairly-well developed. Also, such House-hold batteries (for example) can be re-charged by renewable solar energy sources or other alternatives.
The concept, in general, exemplifies the premise that sustainable development--in terms of 'energy management'--is characterized by empowering each unit (or cell)--whether it be 'moving' or 'stationary', to be as self-sustaining as possible. The concept is really falling into place naturally--as if the obvious approach--and can be extended to such units as these solar-powered street lamps we see in Ren County, China. http://www.eyeon2050.com/2008/07/solar-powered-street-lamps.html
Note also, that the this 'local power storage' approach meshes nicely with some of the other strategies of the 10 step Plan; most notably>>#2-'Sharing'.
Thanks for this website.
van
-----------
* [The late Dr. Smalley is part of the team that discovered carbon-based molecule called Fullerenes...receiving a Nobel prize for it.]
For interest, hear are a couple of my web-world nodes:
www.eyeon2050.com and www.gravityandspace.com
The State of California has had a way to the new day enacted into the law and called the "Community Energy Act of 1984". The Local Government Commission and then Assemblyman Sam Farr (now a Congressman) passed this law due to an oil shortage in the 70's and 80's but it has laid fallow, never used for its purpose until now.
The Brooktrails Township Community Services District (located above Willits) has resolved and requested that the enabling powers, the four incorporated cities and the Board of Supervisors of Mendocino County so act to form a broad based joint powers authority to be called the Mendocino Community Energy Authority.
On Monday the 11th of Aug. the City of Fort Bragg has the opportunity to be the first of the enabling authorites to act in creating the Committee to Draft, the "Declaration of Formation of the Mendocino C.E.A. and the City of Willits will follow on Aug. 13th. Renewable Energy and the Mendocino Activists for a Dependable Economy(REMADE), has a goal of an independant Green Renewable Energy Economy Now (iGREEN)in a generation.
I only like proposal 3 and 5. And as someone already pointed out, nobody knows how to run a city on a battery for several hours.
1-Why should I be forced to reduce consumption if I don't want to? Don't get me wrong, I use only CFC lights, drive a car that gets 33mpg, etc, but if I want something that consumes energy I don't see why I should have my freedom taken away. Besides, the laws of economics seem to imply that efforts to reduce consumption either won't work, increase consumption of some other resource, or create poverty.
2-People take bad care of other people's property. I'd never let someone else drive my car. They'd get in the habit of thinking it's 'their car' and leave trash on it, take it when I want it, etc.
4-Make households produce more of their own energy? This one is probably the worst of your proposals, and I'll tell you why: It's easier and cheaper to build and maintain 1 gaint solar plant than a hundred smaller ones. Each household would need a DC/AC converter that can align the AC with the sign wave on the grid, for example. It would be so inefficient that energy consumption would increase rather than decrease. Businesses and industry would build larger structures and be less effected.
6-The soviets tried forcing Industry to meet targets, too. Requiring industry to do something can only go so far before they try to manipulate the requirement rather than put up with it.
7-It's less energy intense to build one massive factory somewhere and ship the parts than to build several smaller factories. The bigger factory doesn't need to invest as much (percent wise) on security and training. They use bigger reactors, which means less steel and piping per product. Making steel consumes energy too.
8-I debated putting this one on the "I like" list but decided against it. I dispute, for example, that nuclear is less clean than renewables. However some form of this is probably necessary
9-10 will probably consume more energy than they save as well.
All energy comes from the sun. Systems that use the suns energy directly are the least polluting and efficient. Electric energy is both efficent and clean, however it all depends on how the magnets are rubed together. Gas, coal, nuclear, oil, all must boil water first to make steam to power generators, wasting fuel and polluting. Wind on the other hand uses the suns energy directly to rub the magnets. Personal and air transportation will phase out as oil becomes too expensive. Trains and trolleys will be the prime movers of people and goods. We lived 100 years ago without oil and need to look back. 100 years from now we must do it again. There will be no choice. At least we can still have laptops, TV's, refrigerators.
Post new comment