From Manhattan Contrarians
Francis Menton
“Net Zero” – this is a two-word slogan that has become the official goal of every ethical country or nation to decarbonize its energy system. The “net” part is an indirect recognition that some parts of the energy system (such as air travel or steelmaking) may never be fully decarbonized. Therefore, it may be necessary to accept some kind of compensation or indulgence before you can claim to have achieved your goals.
But the “net” stuff doesn’t lend itself to the simple parts of decarbonization. By the simple part I mean generating electricity and powering anything that can run on electricity or batteries. In the electrical part of the energy system, “net” cannot be tolerated; only “zero emissions” will do. Officially, zero-emission electricity is easy and cheap because it can be supplied by wind and sun.
The official line is wrong. As construction of these wind and solar power systems continues to progress, it is becoming increasingly clear that there will never be a zero-emission electricity system powered primarily by wind and solar.
The reason should be obvious to everyone, although for some reason I can't understand, it isn't. The reason is that the intermittency of wind and solar generators means they require full support from other sources. But it is assumed that as long as the majority of electricity comes from wind and solar, backup power sources will be severely underutilized and idle most of the time. No alternative source is likely to be economical under these conditions, so no one will develop and deploy such a source.
The problem has arisen in many places as increased wind and solar power puts natural gas plants into backup mode, cutting operating hours in half or less.
Now consider how things should work as we move to zero-emission electricity. First, we are building more and more wind and solar facilities. Second, we do not allow natural gas or any other hydrocarbons as backup. Now, the backup system itself must be zero-emission and dispatchable. In New York, our regulators devised the acronym DEFR (“Dispatchable Emissions-Free Resources”). Several possibilities have been proposed as DEFR, mainly nuclear energy, hydrogen energy and batteries. All the possibilities for proposed DEFR have a common feature, which is that they currently do not exist at the scale required to fully support an electricity system powered mainly by wind and solar energy. In other words, if we are going to have an electricity system powered primarily by wind and solar, someone is going to have to make a massive investment in one or more of them.
Given the political environment in New York, regulators raising the need for DEFR often bury discussion of the topic deep in lengthy documents. New York-based pragmatic environmentalist Roger Caiazza did the work of unearthing and highlighting these items. Roger created a “Scheduled Emissions Free Resource Page” where he accumulated key information.
For example, we have the Climate Action Council's scoping plan, which Roger describes as “Hochul government’s ‘official’ strategy description for climate bill transition.” The document contains approximately 800+ pages of text and appendices. Somehow, Roger made it to page 49 of Appendix G, where he discovered this sentence:
During a week when solar and wind generation are consistently low, additional stable zero-carbon resources will be needed, in addition to the contribution of existing nuclear, imported and hydropower, to avoid severe shortages; Figure 34 shows the system during such a week need. Most short-term battery storage was quickly depleted on the first day of the week, and there were still several days when wind and solar were not enough to meet demand. In this case, Zero Carbon Company resources are critical to maintaining system reliability. In the modeling pathway, the need for stable zero-carbon resources is met by hydrogen-based resources; ultimately, this system need can be met by many different emerging technologies.
This is the Figure 34 they mentioned:
This might be a little hard to read, but the dark gray is what they label “Zero Carbon Company Capacity Requirements.” During the low wind/sunshine week shown, the dark gray section is well over 20 GW wide. For reference, New York State's current average electricity consumption is well below 20 gigawatts. At the same time, even during weeks with less wind/sunlight, sometimes DEFR is not called at all and sometimes only a few gigawatts are called.
So without further ado, they tell us that as part of a primary wind/solar system we need to build a DEFR with capacity equal to or greater than our current overall average electricity usage. But if the power system is powered primarily by wind and solar, then DEFR will, by definition, only operate a small number of the time. We will now build a fleet of new nuclear power plants capable of meeting our entire peak electricity demand. Or maybe a whole bunch of new hydrogen power plants with the same capacity, or a whole bunch of grid-scale batteries with the same capacity, just to have them idle most of the time.
These are extremely capital-intensive facilities, and economics can only be achieved by maximizing capacity. Instead, the recommendation is to intentionally stay idle most of the time.
Who will invest in these mostly idle DEFRs. Of course, no private investor would do this without huge government subsidies.
If we were to build a complete system of these DEFRs capable of meeting all of our power needs to support worst-case wind/solar lulls, wouldn't it make more sense to ignore wind and solar generation and continue to use them? Use DEFR? Of course it will.
At some point, this will become too obvious to ignore.
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