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Paris: Mark Jacobson and 100% Renewables

Dec 5, 2015. Paris

Mark Jacobson, professor at Stanford in California, appeared alongside several other panelists including Bill McKibben at an event called ‘Climate Action – Engaging the Next Generation.’

Jacobson explained several aspects of his 100% renewable energy plan in record time, underlining a few key points along the way, such as the stability of the grid with load offsetting, and the dynamics of black carbon and other pollutants on global warming and health.


Partial Transcription (rushed, not perfect)

“We’ve been developing energy plans to transition states and countries to 100% clean renewable energy. By clean and renewable that’s wind and water and solar power. It does not mean biofuels, it does not mean nuclear power, it does not mean natural gas, nor coal with carbon capture. It’s simply clean and renewable energy, because we’re trying to address air pollution and climate and energy security simultaneously, and the only way you can do all of these together is by eliminating sources of combustion altogether and electrifying everything. So this is the idea is to electrify the world to all purposes. So all purposes means electricity, transportation, heating and cooling, industry, agriculture, forestry, fishing.”

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Mark Jacobson

“And so we developed plans not only for the 50 United States now, but just recently for 139 countries of the world …those were built starting last week. I’ll tell you a little bit about them. The other thing that was released, we also realized the grid has to be stable, if you have intermittent wind and solar in a large portion of it.”

“But it turns out that when you actually electrify everything it actually makes it easier to stabilize the grid because you have more what are called flexible loads. Like transportation, you don’t have to wire a wind turbine to your car to drive it around, because it has batteries inside. So you can actually provide the power to your car at different times of the day so you can control when the car gets powered, and the utility can give incentives for people to charge for example at night. This is called a flexible load as opposed to an inflexible load. Like when you turn the lights on you need the electricity right away.”

“But there are a lot of loads, across the grid, especially heating and cooling, transportation, and in industry as well, where you can control when people get there power. It turns out it makes it a lot easier to match power demand. So we just did a study after doing the fifty state plans where we looked at transitioning each of the 50 states to 100% wind water and solar. We did a grid integration study – could we keep the grid stable with those 100% plans. We found is ya, without any loss of load, over six years period every 30 seconds we found over the entire United States, we could keep the entire grid stable.”

“So, that’s the number one criticism that people who have been against wind and solar and intermittent energy sources have said that you just can’t keep the lights on, it’s going to be way expensive, you need all this peaking power, you need gas for providing peaking. But it turns out you don’t, you do not need natural gas at all for peaking power, let alone base load power. It’s because you other types of low cost storage.”

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“You don’t even need batteries it turns out for stationary storage. You need ’em in cars, electric cars, but not for stationary storage. So the types of storage we looked at that were low cost, whether it’s heat, for heating, there’s like in water and soil and rocks, and basically in ice too for cooling. For electricity, these types of storage are existing, not growing, but existing hydroelectric power, pumped hydroelectric power, existing plus proposed, pumped hydroelectric power, and concentrated solar power with phase change material.”

“It turned out we were able to stabilize the grid with just those types of storage without any stationary batteries.”

Examples:

Drake Landing – seasonal heat storage. 52 homes, with solar rooftop system, glycol solution, pass the heat into water, move through bore holes  to30 meters under ground, rocks heated to 80C, and stored for winter.

Stanford University. Gas heating plant bulldozed, replaced with 2 boilers and a chillers heat exchange system, and an elaborate pipe system.

“So we’ve developed these plans for 139 countries and the fifty states to go to 100% renewable energy. If I were to list, well why would we want to do this? Aside from eliminating global warming… and by the way this would be a transition of 80% conversion by 2030 and 100% by 2050.”

“My main work is computer modeling, I build climate models, to simulate climate, air pollution, and weather, and you know probably the biggest thing I ever found was that black carbon was the second leading cause of global warming after carbon dioxide. So I look a lot at the effects of particles on climate. And one way to actually address global warming and climate change is to control selective pollutants, like black carbon, because it has, it’s like a million times more powerful per unit mass than carbon dioxide, but there’s a lot less of it in the atmosphere, and there’s a much shorter lifetime, only a few weeks. But it is the second leading cause, like carbon dioxide causes about 42% of global warming and black carbon is about 20%, and methane is about 15-16%, and then there’s nitrous oxide and oxone and clorofluorocarbons…”

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“Because black carbon is a particle, and particles kill worldwide from air pollution, kill 4 to7 million people worldwide, each year, including about 60-65,000 in the United States at a cost to the US of about 3% of the GDP for the mortalities and morbidities. So this is, on a worldwide scale it’s estimated that, well today it’s on the order of 15-25 trillion dollars per year in health costs from the 4 to 7 million people plus the millions more that are killed to do air pollution, and that’s going to be equivalent in 2050, the climate impacts will also be around 20 trillion dollars per year. So there’s 50 trillion dollars per year in health plus climate costs. But we’d eliminate those costs.”

“My point about the black carbon was, the only way you can actually save the arctic ice is by eliminating black carbon emissions. Because if we stop the CO2 today, which we have to do, to stop catastrophic warming, it’s still not going to save the ice. But black carbon, because of it’s short lifetime and its strong impacts on climate, you can, and you also reduce health problems simultaneously, so there’s a double benefit. So you can do that kind of accounting, but the key is you have to eliminate all combustion so that means eliminating all sources of not only black carbon and carbon dioxide, but there are also cooling particles, air pollution particles that mask half of global warming that’s occuring.”

“So even though greenhouse gases plus black carbon causes this much warming, the net observed warming is this, and the difference is air pollution particles that cause cooling, such as sulfates and nitrates that mask or offset half of global warming. And so if you actually just cleaned up air pollution particles you’d actually see a rise in the observed warming which is quite scary. So you want to clean up the particles because the cause 90% of the health problems due to air pollution, but doing that will double global warming actually, immediately. And this is a scary problem. So the only solution is to eliminate all the particles and greenhouse gasses simultaneously and that’s what we’re planning on trying to do…”

to be continued…

Mark Jacobson was recently freatured on BNN Television Canada on 139 country plans and 31 minutes into this nuclear versus renewables debate on NPR

Report by James George