I wonder how they’ll manage to put 25,000 offshore wind turbines in place after seeing the long battle (back to 2001 for the first permit) to get Cape Wind in Massachusetts approved with enviros switching sides to protect viewsheds, and it still isn’t built. I can’t see California’s sensitive coastline to go any easier, and never mind the other projects they propose, which will have their own challenges. The biggest failure of the plan seems to be lack of backup power for when the wind doesn’t blow, the sun doesn’t shine, and the tides are lower than usual. – Anthony
Stanford study shows how to power California with wind, water and sun (press release via Eurekalert)
New Stanford research outlines the path to a possible future for California in which renewable energy creates a healthier environment, generates jobs and stabilizes energy prices.
By Rob Jordan
A Stanford study outlines how power from facilities such as the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System in California’s Mojave Desert can be part of the state’s renewable energy future. (Courtesy of BrightSource Energy)
Imagine a smog-free Los Angeles, where electric cars ply silent freeways, solar panels blanket rooftops and power plants run on heat from beneath the earth, from howling winds and from the blazing desert sun.
A new Stanford study finds that it is technically and economically feasible to convert California’s all-purpose energy infrastructure to one powered by clean, renewable energy. Published in Energy, the plan shows the way to a sustainable, inexpensive and reliable energy supply in California that could create tens of thousands of jobs and save billions of dollars in pollution-related health costs.
“If implemented, this plan will eliminate air pollution mortality and global warming emissions from California, stabilize prices and create jobs – there is little downside,” said Mark Z. Jacobson, the study’s lead author and a Stanford professor of civil and environmental engineering. He is also the director of Stanford’s Atmosphere/Energy Program and a senior fellow with the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and the Precourt Institute for Energy.
Jacobson’s study outlines a plan to fulfill all of the Golden State’s transportation, electric power, industry, and heating and cooling energy needs with renewable energy by 2050. It calculates the number of new devices and jobs created, land and ocean areas required, and policies needed for infrastructure changes. It also provides new estimates of air pollution mortality and morbidity impacts and costs based on multiple years of air quality data. The plan is analogous to one that Jacobson and other researchers developed for New York state.
The study concludes that, while a wind, water and sunlight conversion may result in initial capital cost increases, such as the cost of building renewable energy power plants, these costs would be more than made up for over time by the elimination of fuel costs. The overall switch would reduce California’s end-use power demand by about 44 percent and stabilize energy prices, since fuel costs would be zero, according to the study.
It would also create a net gain, after fossil-fuel and nuclear energy job losses are accounted for, of about 220,000 manufacturing, installation and technology construction and operation jobs. On top of that, the state would reap net earnings from these jobs of about $12 billion annually.
According to the researchers’ calculations, one scenario suggests that all of California’s 2050 power demands could be met with a mix of sources, including:
- 25,000 onshore 5-megawatt wind turbines
- 1,200 100-megawatt concentrated solar plants
- 15 million 5-kilowatt residential rooftop photovoltaic systems
- 72 100-megawatt geothermal plants
- 5,000 0.75-megawatt wave devices
- 3,400 1-megawatt tidal turbines
The study states that if California switched to wind, water and sunlight for renewable energy, air pollution-related deaths would decline by about 12,500 annually and the state would save about $103 billion, or about 4.9 percent of the state’s 2012 gross domestic product, in related health costs every year. The study also estimates that resultant emissions decreases would reduce global climate change costs in 2050 – such as coastal erosion and extreme weather damage – by about $48 billion per year.
“I think the most interesting finding is that the plan will reduce social costs related to air pollution and climate change by about $150 billion per year in 2050, and that these savings will pay for all new energy generation in only seven years,” said study co-author Mark Delucchi of the University of California, Davis.
“The technologies needed for a quick transition to an across-the-board, renewables-based statewide energy system are available today,” said Anthony Ingraffea, a Cornell University engineering professor and study co-author. “Like New York, California has a clear choice to make: Double down on 20th-century fossil fuels or accelerate toward a clean, green energy future.”
Currently, most of California’s energy comes from oil, natural gas, nuclear power and small amounts of coal. Under the plan that Jacobson and his fellow researchers advance, 55.5 percent of the state’s energy for all purposes would come from solar, 35 percent from wind and the remainder from a combination of hydroelectric, geothermal, tidal and wave energy.
All vehicles would run on battery-electric power and/or hydrogen fuel cells. Electricity-powered air- and ground-source heat pumps, geothermal heat, heat exchangers and backup electric resistance heaters would replace natural gas and oil for home heating and air-conditioning. Air- and ground-source heat pump water heaters powered by electricity and solar hot water preheaters would provide hot water for homes. High temperatures for industrial processes would be obtained with electricity and hydrogen combustion.
To ensure grid reliability, the plan outlines several methods to match renewable energy supply with demand and to smooth out the variability of wind, water and sunlight resources. These include a grid management system to shift times of demand to better match with timing of power supply; and “over-sizing” peak generation capacity to minimize times when available power is less than demand. The study refers to a previously published analysis that demonstrated that California could provide a reliable grid with nearly 100 percent clean, renewable energy.
The footprint on the ground for the new energy infrastructure would be about 0.9 percent of California’s land area, mostly for solar power plants. The spacing area between wind turbines, which could be used for multiple purposes, including agriculture and rangeland, is another 2.77 percent.
“I believe that with these plans, the people and political leaders of California and New York can chart a new way forward for our country and for the world,” said study co-author Robert Howarth, a Cornell University professor of ecology and environmental biology.
The study’s authors are developing similar plans for all U.S. states. They took no funding from any interest group, company or government agency for this study.
Rob Jordan is the communications writer for the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.
-30-
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“cedarhill says:
July 25, 2014 at 3:57 am
The latest example of how propaganda works.
Even supposing a smog free LA is attainable using all-electricity…”
To make a smog free LA, you’d need to use a few nukes to remove some mountains, so the wind patterns in the area were changed…there’s not enough electricity generated in the US to do that.
mjc says:
July 24, 2014 at 7:08 pm
—–
Lighting only accounts for about 5% of energy usage. Office and industrial switched to fluorescent decades ago, and homes started converting to CFL years ago.
I’d love to see the source of your claim that converting to 24VDC would save energy.
Regardless, even if everyone of your claims was accurate, your still talking about less than 1% total savings.
How many elderly people are going to die sitting in an unairconditioned house waiting for the wind to start blowing again?
Applying major pressure by EPA on the energy producers that supply California from adjacent states at the same time California imposes its own Stanford-based policy misstep would define the next economic and budget disaster for the state and the region.
I remember a few years back, the CA air quality district was going after bakeries, trying to get them to put catalytic converters on their ovens, because of hydrocarbons that resulted from baking.
The only way you will ever get a smog free LA, is to first get rid of all the people.
Utopian nonsense. Aside from all the other environmental impacts the water usage of solar thermal and geothermal is hard to justify in the EIS process. Already these projects are bogging down on the water component. Close cycle cooling effectively cures the water usage problem but now the generated power is TOO expensive for investors to get behind, even with Moonbeam banging the drum.
I live 30 miles south of the Coso geothermal facility. This is a 20 year old Navy/private pilot plant. It had water usage issues from the start, On some cool winter mornings there are large steam plumes rising thousands of feet above the mountains. Those water vapor plumes from the cooling towers are there 24/7 but in the dry Mojave environment are only visible on occasion as steam.
To all those advocating nuclear power, the truth about nuclear power is that it is far too expensive (in any form), unsafe in any form, and leaves long-lasting toxic residue for future generations to deal with.
For just a few truths about nuclear power: it has achieved only 11 – 12 percent of all electrical generation worldwide after 50 years of heroic efforts, no nuclear plants are installed on medium-sized islands where power is generated by oil or diesel at 25 to 30 cents per kWh, and no country has followed France’s example of 85 percent nuclear power on the grid. Also, on safety, a near-miss meltdown occurs approximately every three weeks in the US fleet of 100 reactors.
The thirty articles in the Truth About Nuclear Power series on SLB emphasizes the economic and safety aspects by showing that (one) modern nuclear power plants are uneconomic to operate compared to natural gas and wind energy, (two) they produce preposterous pricing if they are the sole power source for a grid, (three) they cost far too much to construct, (four) use far more water for cooling, 4 times as much, than better alternatives, (five) nuclear fuel makes them difficult to shut down and requires very costly safeguards,
(Six) they are built to huge scale of 1,000 to 1,600 MWe or greater to attempt to reduce costs via economy of scale, (seven) an all-nuclear grid will lose customers to self-generation, (eight) smaller and modular nuclear plants have no benefits due to reverse economy of scale, (nine) large-scale plants have very long construction schedules even without lawsuits that delay construction, (ten) nuclear plants do not reach 50 or 60 years life because they require costly upgrades after 20 to 30 years that do not always perform as designed,
(Eleven) France has 85 percent of its electricity produced via nuclear power but it is subsidized, is still almost twice as expensive as prices in the US, and is only viable due to exporting power at night rather than throttling back the plants during low demand, (twelve) nuclear plants cannot provide cheap power on small islands, (thirteen) US nuclear plants are heavily subsidized but still cannot compete, (fourteen), projects are cancelled due to unfavorable economics, reactor vendors are desperate for sales, nuclear advocates tout low operating costs and ignore capital costs, nuclear utilities never ask for a rate decrease when building a new nuclear plant, and high nuclear costs are buried in a large customer base, (fifteen) safety regulations are routinely relaxed to allow the plants to continue operating without spending the funds to bring them into compliance,
(Sixteen) many, many near-misses occur each year in nuclear power, approximately one every 3 weeks, (seventeen) safety issues with short term, and long-term, storage of spent fuel, (eighteen) safety hazards of spent fuel reprocessing, (nineteen) health effects on people and other living things, (twenty) nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, (twenty-one) nuclear meltdown at Three Mile Island, (twenty-two) nuclear meltdowns at Fukushima, (twenty-three) near-disaster at San Onofre, (twenty-four) the looming disaster at St. Lucie,
(Twenty-five) the inherently unsafe characteristics of nuclear power plants required government shielding from liability, or subsidy, for the costs of a nuclear accident via the Price-Anderson Act, and (twenty-six) the serious public impacts of large-scale population evacuation and relocation after a major incident, or “extraordinary nuclear occurrence” in the language used by the Price-Anderson Act. Additional articles include (twenty-seven) the future of nuclear fusion, (twenty-eight) future of thorium reactors, (twenty-nine) future of high-temperature gas nuclear reactors, and (thirty), a concluding chapter with a world-wide economic analysis of nuclear reactors and why countries build them.
The TANP series starts at:
http://sowellslawblog.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-truth-about-nuclear-power-part-one.html
” MarkW says:
July 25, 2014 at 6:01 am
mjc says:
July 24, 2014 at 7:08 pm
—–
Lighting only accounts for about 5% of energy usage. Office and industrial switched to fluorescent decades ago, and homes started converting to CFL years ago.
I’d love to see the source of your claim that converting to 24VDC would save energy.
Regardless, even if everyone of your claims was accurate, your still talking about less than 1% total savings.”
That’s on a home use/personal level. Overall, no it won’t save that much. And the home use for lighting, alone is, about 14% (according to most electric companies, as that was the easiest ‘source’). And adding in other things like TVs and computers will bump that up considerably…and they are also things that can be run directly on 12-24V DC (they actually are, it’s just converted from 120 AC…which induces a loss).
And yes on saving energy…eliminating, at least on a personal level, if enough do it. But that is conditional, right? (Although if it were part of the zoning code, since CA loves zoning, then it becomes less conditional)
And a 12 or 24V DC system just for lighting is pretty easy to set up (for new construction), maintain and a lot more efficient (no conversion to AC needed). The big problem, and why I haven’t actually implemented such a system is ‘old construction’…retrofitting such a system in an already built house is a major expense/headache. I was really wishing I had done it, though, back in 2012…between the big derechio in June and Sandy, I was without power for close to 3.5 weeks.
Industrial does skew things away from home use, so it won’t see the big gains, unless there is some done industrially. But, for industrial, localized generation is probably the biggest help…a small, on site generation plant (be it natural gas, minireactor, whatever) at large industrial complexes relieves some of the burden on the ‘grid’, can be ‘cleaner’ and so on.
The idea is not to try to do it all with one thing, but blend a bunch and make it actually practical to implement…a 12-24V system for lighting still gives a ‘regular’ service for other things, but cuts back the amount needed. Also with a bit more planning and ‘design’ A/C, even CA, requirements can be reduced…plus there’s other benefits for CA by going with more ‘sane’ landscaping for houses…and that’s less water needed for all those lawns.
As to source material, I’d have to dig it all back out…most of it is on a hard drive awaiting recovery (no, it’s not suffering a Lerner-ism, I just haven’t bothered to move the stuff over, yet…it mostly works, just won’t boot any longer…the damaged sectors are in the boot area). I’ve spent 3 yrs researching to try and get my home ‘independent’ of the local grid…because even without major incidents, it really sucks (we get a 5min to 1 hr ‘blip’ at least once per month and a 4 to 24 hr outage at least 3 times per year).
MarkW,
The reason to switch to 24V LED lighting is mostly on capital costs. Copper, fixtures and labour to install 10 120V pot lights can be $1000, while running some 24V lamp cord and some plastic LED ‘fixtures’ can be done for $100. The electric code will have to change for this, but that’s coming.
What they’ve actually outlined is a path to bankruptcy of the state, lowered living standards and higher rates of poverty, and higher mortality rates among the ever-swelling ranks of the poor.
But yeah, no down-side to speak of, if that is the ultimate goal.
What I envision is a Los Angeles with no industry and no jobs, but a huge number of angry unemployed people subsisting from public benefits, something of a cross between 3rd century Rome and modern day Mexico City.
and I also envision a Texas with 5 times the economic output of California, with all of the industry, all of companies, all of the headquarters, and a big chunk of the productive people who used to live in the once “golden state”. (Some will have moved up to Oregon, Washington, and Idaho)
“If implemented, this plan will eliminate air pollution mortality and global warming emissions from California, stabilize prices and create jobs – there is little downside,”
Isn’t California basically broke with ruinous pension commitments in virtually every municipality mercilessly pushing them to the brink of bankruptcy? You’d think they’d have learned the lesson of affordability and budgets at this point.
Whatever, I’m holidaying in the Centauri system this year, once I pull my new warp-drive out of my butt.
One of the major problems with green energy sources is they require 100% redundancy because you can’t ramp them up when demand increases. No wind to spin your windmills? You need a backup power plant (or implementation of rolling blackouts) and the only power plants that can be quickly turned on or off are fossil-fuel powered or hydro. Nuclear plants can’t be turned on or off quickly. Nuclear, which greens by-and-large want to outlaw, can provide baseline power, but not stand-by power for times of high demand.
No sun? No solar. Cloudy day? Reduce solar power generation. Winter time, same thing, except not only are the days shorter but are often quite cloudy. In some parts of the country, the potential for solar power is near zero during many days in the winter.
“The overall switch would reduce California’s end-use power demand by about 44”
Deliciously Orwellian. They will cut supply 44 percent, and say demand was cut 44 percent.
Many California Greens will go along with the plan, and accept power outages. Sitting in their dark, hot house, they will feel good about helping Gaia. Saving Gaia is more important than their little, miserable lives.
pat says:
July 24, 2014 at 10:26 pm
Those kinds of power cuts will be called “bat outs”.
The only fossil fuel power source that can be ramped up and down quickly is gas turbine. All the others take hours to days.
For just a few truths…
I interpret anything that starts off like that as a pack of lies.
“These include a grid management system to shift times of demand to better match with timing of power supply; and “over-sizing” peak generation capacity to minimize times when available power is less than demand.”
In the UK they have started the compulsory rollout of ‘smart’ meters, which will allow for ‘smart’ charging.
So if you want to eat and wash at your normal times, just pay double or triple the price per unit.
Simples!
California does not currently generate enough electricity in the summer to handle demand. They rely on electricity generated out-of-state to meet peak demand. If California was serious, they would not allow importation of electricity generated out-of-state by non-compliant sources.
Another promise of job creation from clean energy. Where have we seen that before?
Are there any ocean based wind turbines that have been running for awhile? I would be concerned about them rusting, corroding in the humid, salt air and worried that they would leak lubricating oil into the ocean. The bearings would have to be sealed pretty damn well to keep out the moisture and salt. Moving parts don’t do well with corrosion.
A perfect IEEE solution! Imagine, Estimate, Exaggerate, Extrapolate !
Steve Reddish says:
July 24, 2014 at 6:12 pm
“Imagine a smog-free Los Angeles, where electric cars ply silent freeways…”
Since car noise on the freeways is overwhelmingly tire noise, electric cars would make the same noise on freeways
Wrong my friend they will be hover cars. Don’t scoff they were invented in Hollywood during 1976. These are not the tires you are looking for.
Unmentionable says:
July 25, 2014 at 9:57 am
Steve Reddish says:
July 24, 2014 at 6:12 pm
“Imagine a smog-free Los Angeles, where electric cars ply silent freeways…”
Since car noise on the freeways is overwhelmingly tire noise, electric cars would make the same noise on freeways
Wrong my friend they will be hover cars. Don’t scoff they were invented in Hollywood during 1976. These are not the tires you are looking for.
*******
No, wrong on all accounts. the silence will require legislation to add noisemakers to warn Bambi and friends of oncoming traffic. The din from high-frequency warning devices (harmonics of which will be very audible to humans) will be positively deafening. and therefore require yet another round of solutions. And grants to research them.
Barry, Barry, Barry.
Are you saying we can simply build enough solar to power the state when tides are low and the wind isn’t blowing? Build enough wind turbines to power the state when it’s dark and the tides are low? Build enough tide power to supply the state when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining? And finally, build backup gas and coal plants for when all three of the above aren’t working?
Wishful thinking isn’t an energy strategy.