A piece I posted a few days ago – How realistic are electric cars? – included a calculation of how much U.S. production of wind and solar energy would have to be increased over the next 20 years if electric cars were to become a significant component of the U.S. vehicle fleet. That calculation was off by an order of magnitude. A more careful recalculation finds that wind and solar generation capacity would have to be increased by a factor of 2,500 – 5,000. The post has now been corrected.

So how are we doing on our project to massively increase U.S. wind and solar generation capacity? This chart posted by Stuart Staniford at Early Warning is not reassuring, at least regarding wind.

The American Wind Energy Association’s Q4 2010 market report reveals that new installations collapsed in 2010.

The worsening nuclear crisis in Japan raises questions. What would be the consequences of shutting down nuclear reactors in the U.S.? In light of fresh doubts about the wisdom of nuclear power, is swapping out the U.S. vehicle fleet with all-electric vehicles realistic?

The chart below shows what the U.S. energy mix is today, and what the U.S. Energy Information Agency projects it to be over the next 25 years. The nuclear and coal part of the mix are expected to drop only a bit, coal from 45% to 43% and nuclear from 20% to 17%.

[Note that 43% of 5+ trillion kilowatt hours per year is a lot more than 45% of the 4+ trillion kilowatt hours coal accounts for today - meaning coal consumption in electricity generation is thus expected to increase substantially.  So much for doing anything about global warming.]

The University of California, Berkeley Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology has published a technical brief which considers three scenarios for “maximum penetration” of electric cars into the market, projecting market share of new cars at 2015, 2020, 2025, and 2030 under differing cost assumptions.

The “market” in the above chart is defined as those likely to buy electric vehicles – 20% of the total market is excluded as not likely to buy electric vehicles.

Under the baseline scenario, 81 million electric vehicles would be on the road by 2030; under the operator-subsidized scenario, 151 million.

The U.C. study calculates that by 2030 the fleet of electric cars is estimated to require between 190 and 350 million megawatt hours of electricity per year. Currently, electricity generation in the U.S. totals around 4 billion megawatt hours per year. Powering an electric car fleet would require that the U.S. increase electricity generating capacity by 4.75%-8.75% by 2030. And that’s assuming no growth in electricity usage elsewhere in the economy, despite population and presumably economic growth.

In 2009, U.S. nuclear plants generated 798.7 billion kilowatt hours (or 7,987 million kilowatt hours) from 104 commercial nuclear generating units; “nuclear generating units” in the U.S. thus average 7.68 megawatt hours per year in output. The 602 coal power plants in the U.S. produce on average ~3.88 megawatt hours per year. Powering the projected U.S. electric car fleet would therefore require building 25-46 additional “nuclear generating units” by 2030. Or 50-90 coal-fired power plants.

Renewable sources, including wind and solar, currently account for about 10% of U.S. electricity generation – but two thirds of existing renewable capacity is hydroelectric, which is about tapped out and even under threat of decline. Solar and wind together account for only a little over 2% of renewable electric energy – about 72,000 megawatt hours per year. Powering the projected electric fleet from solar and wind alone would require increasing our solar and wind capacity by a factor of 2,500 – 5,000. Just to power electric cars,  nothing else: no growth, no phasing out of nuclear or decommissioning aging plants, no shutting down of CO2-emitting coal plants.

Phasing out nuclear power while we are still able so to as avoid catastrophic accidents, and phasing out coal to save the planet as we know it, would seem to be of a bit higher priority than powering our go-carts.

Challenging times indeed. Replacing our gasoline-powered cars with electric cars is about the last thing we should be focusing on.

A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science finds that wind power could provide for the entire world’s current and future energy needs. The study, Global potential for wind generated electricity, was authored by Xi Lu, Michael McElroy, and Juha Kiviluoma.

Here’s the abstract:

The potential of wind power as a global source of electricity is assessed by using winds derived through assimilation of data from a variety of meteorological sources. The analysis indicates that a network of land-based 2.5-megawatt (MW) turbines restricted to nonforested, ice-free, nonurban areas operating at as little as 20% of their rated capacity could supply >40 times current worldwide consumption of electricity, >5 times total global use of energy in all forms. Resources in the contiguous United States, specifically in the central plain states, could accommodate as much as 16 times total current demand for electricity in the United States. Estimates are given also for quantities of electricity that could be obtained by using a network of 3.6-MW turbines deployed in ocean waters with depths <200 m within 50 nautical miles (92.6 km) of closest coastlines.

The world’s two largest carbon emitters, China and the United States, could easily use wind to replace coal.

Large-scale development of wind power in China could allow for close to an 18-fold increase in electricity supply relative to consumption reported for 2005. The bulk of this wind power, 89%, could be derived from onshore installations. The potential for wind power in the U.S. is even greater, 23 times larger than current electricity consumption, the bulk of which, 84%, could be supplied onshore.

The study is open access and the full PDF is available here.

Jerome a Paris has a great article in the European Tribune about the economics of wind.

The most important piece of information that was new to me was a paradox in an unregulated free electricity market that makes wind uneconomic – even though wind is by far a better deal than coal, nuclear, or other options.

His explanation follows below. The logic would be similar for other capital-intensive generation such as solar thermal.

In market environments, marginal cost rules, i.e. the price for electricity is determined, most of the time, by the most expensive producers needed at that time to fulfill demand. Demand is, apart from some industrial use, not price sensitive in the very short term, and is almost fixed (people switching lights and A/C on, etc…), so supply has to adapt, and the price of the last producers that needs to be switched on will determine the price for everybody else.

Source: Economics of wind (pdf) by the European Wind Energy Association

If you look at the above graph, you see a typical ‘dispatch curve’, i.e. the line representing generation capacity, ranked by price. Hydro is usually the cheapest (on the left), followed by nuclear and/or coal, and then you have gas-fired plants and CHP (combined heat and power) plants, followed to the far right by peaker plants, usually gas- or oil-fired.

You take you demand curve (the quasi vertical lines you can see on the right graph), and the intersection of the two gives you the price. As is logical, night time demand is lower and requires a lower price than normal daytime prices, and even less than peak demand which requires expensive power generators to be switched on.

The righthand graph shows what happens when wind comes into the picture: as a very low marginal price generator, it is added to the dispatch curve on the left, and pushes out all other generators, to the extent is available at that time. By injecting “cheap” power into the system, it lowers prices. The impact on prices is pretty low at night, but can become significant during the day, and very high at peak times (subject, once again, to actual availability of wind at that time).

As the graph above suggests, the impact on price of significant wind injections is high throughout the day, and highest at times of high demand. When there’s a lot of wind, you end up with prices that get flattened at the price of base load, i.e. the marginal cost of nukes or coal, and wind no longer has any influence on price.

But the consequence of this is that the more wind you have into the system, the lower the price for electricity. With gas, it’s the opposite: the more gas you need, the higher the price will be (in the short term, because you need more expensive plants to be turned on; in the long run because you push the demand for gas up, and thus the price of gas, and thus of gas-burning plants, up).

In fact, if you get to a significant share of wind in a system that uses market prices, you get to a point where wind drives prices down to levels where wind power loses money all the time! (That may sound impossible, but it does happen because the difference between the low marginal cost and the higher long term cost is so big).

There are two lessons here:

• wind power has a strongly positive effect for consumers, by driving prices down for them during the day.
• it is difficult for wind power generators to make money under market mechanisms unless wind penetration remains very low; this means that if wind is seen as a desirable, ways need to be found to ensure that the revenues that wind generators actually get for electricity are not driven by the market prices that they make possible.

That’s actually the point of feed-in tariffs, which provide stable, predictable revenue to wind producers, and ensure that their maximum production is injected into the system at all times, which influences market prices by making supply of more expensive producers unnecessary. And these tariffs make sense for consumers. The higher fixed price is added to the bill for the buyers of electricity, but as that bill is lower than it would have otherwise been, the actual cost is much lower than it appears. As I’ve noted in earlier diaries, studies in Germany, Denmark and Spain prove that the net cost of feed-in tariffs in these countries is actually negative, i.e. a apparent fixed cost imposed on consumers ends up reducing their bills!

The analysis above doesn’t include externalities – the impact of economic behavior or decisions which are not reflected in the costs or prices of the economic entity taking the decision – including the most important externality of all, greenhouse gas emissions.

The Midwest grid operator and other U.S. regional grid managers have released a major study – the Joint Coordinated System Plan (JCSP) – that concludes increasing wind’s share to 20 percent of U.S. power production would yield annual net savings of $12 billion annually by 2024 based on wind’s low production cost compared to the fossil plants the turbines would replace.

The 20% scenario would also save 3 billion tons of carbon over the next 16 years.

Increasing wind power to 20% of electricity production by 2024 (requiring some 230 GW of wind) would require some investment – 15,000 miles of new transmission costing $80 billion, and the total cost of the wind would be some $1 trillion. But that investment would pay off.

ITC Holdings is getting a jump start on the grid upgrades, planning to build a $10 to $12 billion power transmission network to move 12,000 megawatts of electricity from the Dakotas, Minnesota and Iowa to the Chicago area. Joseph Romm at Climate Progress has posted a graphic outlining the “Green Power Express”.

Jerome a Paris at The Oil Drum reminds us that wind is a power source that deserves to be taken more seriously.

Wind is following the exact same growth trajectory as nuclear power did – just thirty years later:

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Over the past 8 years, wind has represented around 40% of new installed capacity (which, it is true, represents a smaller fraction a new production, in MWh, which is probably closer to 25%).

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Under market price setting mechanisms, wind power (which has a zero marginal cost) brings wholesale prices down when it is available, by avoiding the need for more expensive coal-fired or, more usually, gas-fired power plants that would otherwise be required. Subsidizing wind pays off.  For example, in Denmark and Germany the overall effect (price reduction multiplied by the relevant volume) now brings savings to consumers  that are equivalent to the gross cost of feed-in tariffs and significantly higher than the net subsidy.

In addition to reducing carbon emissions and improving energy independence, wind saves money.

The Wall Street Journal reports that shares in solar- and wind-power companies have suffered even more than the market at large and that the outlook for new projects is growing increasingly cloudy. The new administration needs to ensure that investments in wind energy – and in saving civilization from an energy crisis and climate change – not only continue, but are massively increased.

Dutch-based Home Energy International has come up with a new design for home wind power.

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The eggbeater-like design spins quieter and at lower wind speeds than traditional propeller-type turbines. The firm asserts that noise from an Energy Ball is always less than the sound of the wind. And the device works even when the wind speed dips down to as slow as 4.5 mph, whereas the average turbine needs roughly twice that wind speed to turn.

The Energy Ball is that it has a horizontal axis and uses a different kind of physics, called the Venturi effect. The Venturi effect is characterized by a low pressure that occurs when a flow of air or liquid speeds up as it is constricted.
The constriction causes the pressure to drop inside the ball, sucking in air flowing and turning the rotor blades.

Venturi-based turbines are said to be 40% more efficient than a propeller-style turbine of the same diameter.

In a good location, a 1-meter ball can generate up to 500 kilowatt-hours and a 2-meter ball up to 1,750 kilowatt-hours per year. The typical U.S. household uses 11,000 kilowatt-hours per year.

Energy Balls currently are sold in sizes of either 1 meter or 2 meters in diameter. They can be installed on a pole or a flat roof in as few as four hours.
The cost of the Energy Ball is between $3,500 and $7,000, not including installation.

Renewable energy is bumping up against the reality of a power grid that cannot handle the new demands. Achieving a goal of getting 20% of our electricity from wind would require moving large amounts of power over long distances, from the windy, lightly populated plains in the middle of the country to the coasts where many people live. Solar-power stations in the nation’s deserts  pose the same transmission problems.

Many transmission lines, and the connections among them, are simply too small for the amount of power companies would like to squeeze through them. The difficulty is most acute for long-distance transmission, but shows up at times even over distances of a few hundred miles. Today’s grid is a system conceived 100 years ago to let utilities prop each other up, reducing blackouts and sharing power across small regions. It resembles a network of streets, avenues and country roads. What we need, as FERC member Sudeen Kelley says, is “an interstate transmission superhighway system.”

But the grid is balkanized, with about 200,000 miles, or 322,000 kilometers, of power lines divided among 500 owners. States have traditionally exercised authority over the grid but have little incentive to push improvements that would benefit neighboring states. Big transmission upgrades often involve multiple companies, many state governments, and numerous permits. Construction costs are astronomical, and every addition to the grid provokes fights with property owners who do not want to look at a line of power pylons marching across their landscape.

Our rickety grid would have to be transformed if we are to ever achieve  an all-electric automobile fleet.  But that’s just one problem with the dream.

As Richard Heinman points out, cars are inherently inefficient. We can make them smaller and lighter. We can power them with renewable electrons instead of nasty old hydrocarbons. But in the final analysis, pushing a ton or three of steel down the highway just to move a two-hundred pound person to and from a shopping mall is both wasteful and plain stupid in a multitude of ways.

Heinberg consider just two: tires and asphalt.

“Tires are made largely of non-renewable petroleum, and after 40,000 miles or so they tend to wear out. Americans discard them at a rate of one tire per person per year.

“Then there’s the stuff that roads are made of. We build roads compulsively so as to give our precious cars more places to roam, but those roads also soon wear out, so we have to constantly repair them; this requires enormous amounts of asphalt (25 million tons annually in the US). But asphalt is, once again, a petroleum product, and as oil gets scarce the building and maintenance of roads becomes unmanageable.”

“Electric cars are a sparky idea if you consider only what they are designed to replace. But we really need to be thinking about how to reduce our need for motorized transport altogether by redesigning our cities and shortening our supply chains. And where something more than a scooter is necessary, we should move people and freight by rail or water rather than by highway.”

The Oregon Energy Facility Siting Council has approved building what would be the world’s largest single wind farm in Gilliam and Morrow counties in northeastern Oregon, about five miles southeast of the Columbia River town Arlington.

The Columbia River Gorge wind proposes 303 turbines and will be capable of generating 909 megawatts at its peak – enough to power 225,000 homes and to double the state’s current wind-generated energy capacity. Output would enter the Federal Columbia River Transmission System through Bonneville Power Administration’s Slatt Substation.

Other wind projects under review in Oregon include the 400 megawatt Golden Hills Wind Farm in Sherman County and the 143 megawatt Newberry Geothermal Project in Deschutes County.

The largest wind farm in the United States to date is Horse Hollow in Texas at 736 megawatts.

The Umatilla County Planning Commission has given the go-ahead to a wind farm project in Echo, voting unanimously to approve a land-use permit for the wind farm’s transmission line along Highway 207. The line will carry the project’s electricity to a PacifiCorp substation at Hinkle. The land-use permit was the final hurdle before could commence.

The hearing room was packed with more than 70 people, several of whom testified against the transmission line. They argued high voltage lines devalue property and endanger the health of cattle and people, and that having lines on both sides of the highway would make it impossible for farmers to move some machinery down the road and hamper farmers’ ability to use cropdusters and helicopters to spray their land.

Commission Chair Gary Rhinhart said there were 13 other wind farm projects in the planning stages in Umatilla County. and expressed worry there’s not enough room for everyone’s transmission lines. The East Oregonian quotes him as saying,

“I’d like to see electric companies hook up this wind power so we don’t have to hurt any more people than we have to.”