Antiquated electricity grid won't be able to carry renewable energy to customers

(Photo of transmission lines from Flickr and photographers Vicki and Chuck Rogers)

Weekly Angst: A wind farm can be built in about a year. But it takes 5-10 years to construct the high-voltage power lines that will transmit the electricity to where it is needed.

And the lack of current capacity (excuse the pun) in transmission lines is blocking growth of renewable energy here, especially wind.

Many renewable projects simply won’t happen if policymakers don’t expand the power grid to accommodate them, alternative energy executives warned last week at the Renewable Energy Finance Forum in New York.

What happens with transmission “will define whether 2% or 20% of U.S. electricity is renewable,” said Dan Reicher, the executive in charge of Google’s green push.

Transmission lines aren’t a sexy subject, but I’m sure you’ll agree there’s not much point in building a wind farm or solar plant if it can’t get connected to a grid. And that is the risk here. Substantially more construction of towers and power lines is needed to for the U.S, to reach a goal of 15% renewable energy, a target passed by the House but not the Senate.

In Minnesota, for example, if just one-third of the applications for wind farms are granted, the 7,500 megawatts of power they would create for the Twin Cities would exceed the 2,000MW capacity of the grid.

Why it takes so long
One problem is that the ideal places for large wind farms (Midwest plains) and solar installations (Mojave Desert) are far from the cities where the electricity is needed.

And it costs $1.5 million per mile to put up high-voltage transmission lines. While that expense ultimately is passed on to the consumer, utilities are reluctant to build the lines before a wind farm or solar plant is built – and vice versa. So a chicken-and-egg struggle is going on here.

Also the permitting process can take forever. One issue is where to put the lines. Nobody wants them.

In California, there’s a battle over San Diego Gas & Electric’s plan to build a 150-mile transmission line from a desert solar plant to San Diego through a state park. Environmentalists argue it would ruin the park, while the utility says it can’t meet California’s renewable requirement without it.

A lag in investment
Investment in the electricity grid was neglected from 1975-2000, as funding dropped from $5 billion a year to just $2 billion by the turn of the century. Since then increased demand has sparked investment of about $60 billion, but the system is antiquated, causing such problems as the 2003 blackout in the Northeast and rolling brownouts in California. Lack of capacity remains a serious drawback that may well prevent states with mandated renewable electricity standards (RES)from reaching their goals.

Some in Congress are calling for “national renewable energy zones” to reduce bottlenecks in delivering power. Bills offered by Rep. Jay Inslee (D-Wash.) and Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) would have the government identify zones with the capability to produce significant amounts of renewable energy but insufficient transmission capacity. Inslee’s bill would spread the cost of construction and requires the president to identify specific high-voltage lines for renewal within a year of establishing a national zone.

The 2005 Energy Policy Act allows the federal government to designate “national interest electric transmission corridors” where it could extend needed lines despite state and local objections. But there is resistance from states and environmentalists.

Some states and regions are searching for their own solutions. Texas, the state with the most wind power, has such zones, originally through the Western Governors Association, now in a project with the Department of Energy, which will help it bring wind to Dallas, Houston and San Antonio. Colorado, Minnesota and New Mexico are taking similar steps.

Grid should be high priority
NASA climate scientist James Hansen said last week that the next president needs to make it a priority to create a nationwide low-loss electrical grid so the country can replace fossil fuels with renewable energy. The technology exists to bury direct-current high-voltage lines, he said.

Environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says it’s important for the next president to work with governors to get rid of arcane and conflicting state rules and open up the grid so clean energy can compete fairly with fossil fuels.

The energy sector “needs an initiative like the 1996 Telecommunications Act,” which required open access to phone lines, Kennedy said. As with telephones, he said, eliminating constraints will encourage investment, and utilities and entrepreneurs will revitalize the grid. Like Hansen, he argues for direct current, saying too much energy is lost in alternating current.

The transmission grid also needs to use “smart” technology to send electricity where and when it is needed, experts say.

Demand for electricity is expected to grow 40% by 2030, according to North American Electric Reliability Council. To meet that demand with renewable sources we must take action immediately to provide an adequate grid.

(Sources: PlanetArk, Greenwire, ClimateWire, E&E Daily, USA Today, The Guardian, Vanity Fair)

We’ve used up all the slack time to avoid global warming tipping point -- Hansen

(Night photo of coal-fired power plant in Ohio from Flickr and and photographer Daniel Shea

Washington Report: NASA scientist James Hansen, who first warned Congress about global warming exactly 20 years ago, testified Monday a new administration and Congress must make a “transformational” energy change next year or be plunged into catastrophic, unstoppable climate change.

The main points of his statement, published in advance in The Guardian in England:
• CO2 in the atmosphere must be reduced and kept below 350 parts per million to avoid climate change disaster (it is now at 385 ppm and the Lieberman-Warner bill targeted 450).
• The first requirement is to halt use of coal unless the CO2 is captured and stored. He called for a moratorium on new plants that don’t do that.
• A price on emissions is essential. A carbon tax, with all the money going back to the public in the form of a “dividend,” would be best, he said, with a full share to every adult and half-share to children.
• Fossil fuel CEOs have known about the damage CO2 was doing, but like the tobacco companies, encouraged doubt about a link to global warming. “In my opinion, these CEOs should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature.”
• The next President must make a low-loss electricity grid a priority, so renewable energy can replace fossil fuels for power generation.
• Fossil fuel interests must be blocked from squeezing every last drop of oil from public lands, offshore and wilderness areas. It will only delay the real change that is needed to avoid a tipping point.

The tipping point has already been reached in the Arctic, Hansen said, and regardless of new emissions, summer sea ice will disappear. The risk now is passing a tipping point in West Antarctica and Greenland, which will rise the seas if they melt. Without a big change, he predicted a sea level increase of 2 meters (6 feet) by century’s end, which would bring constantly unstable shorelines and hundreds of millions of refugees.

Hansen, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told Congress June 23, 1988, that the world was warming, that the cause was man-made, and that it would lead to erratic weather with floods, droughts and wildfires. Some call him a prophet and some have said he is “nuts.”

This week Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), R-Okla., said, "Hansen, Gore and the media have been trumpeting man-made climate doom since the 1980s. But Americans are not buying it."

Hansen has suggested he might campaign against some of the obstructionists in Congress. Inhofe is facing a challenge this year from Democrat Andrew Rice in Oklahoma.

(Sources: The Guardian, ClimateWire,
EnvironmentalLeader.com, Associated Press)

Climate change leaders now say global warming is happening faster than expected

(Photo of German coal-fired plant from Flickr and photographer Bruno D. Rodriguez.)

Weekly Angst: At the end of 2006 and early part of 2007, a series of reports finished the job started by Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” and woke the slumbering world to the urgent need to stop global warming or suffer severe consequences. After the Stern and IPCC reports, the debate ended for most, but progress has been slow as governments and fossil-fuel businesses balked at change. Now the same people who told us we needed to take action in the first place are raising the decibels as they warn it’s even worse than they thought. Here is what they and others are saying, little more than a year later.

Nicholas Stern, former World Bank chief economist, whose ground-breaking 2006 report was the basis for policy in the UK and EU, now admits he was overly optimistic about the ability to cut GHG emissions and absorb some of the CO2. Stern now says he "badly underestimated the degree of damages and risks of climate change … Emissions are growing much faster than we'd thought, the absorptive capacity of the planet is less than we'd thought, the risks of greenhouse gases are potentially bigger than more cautious estimates, and the speed of climate change seems to be faster." He now says the developed world must cut emissions by 90% to meet a world-wide 50% reduction by 2050.(Source: Business Green)

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s assumptions were too optimistic about cutting CO2, a new study in the journal Nature says. The IPCC report, which won the panel the Nobel Peace Prize and is the basis for international negotiations, assumed that even without changes in government policy, new technology would dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions this century. But with huge growth in Asia, based mainly on fossil fuels, the world is going in the wrong direction, say scientists from the University of Colorado, the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and McGill University in Canada. We need enormous advances in technology to meet our goals, but also policies that motivate innovation, the researchers say. (E&E News PM, EurekAlert)

James Hansen of NASA, one of the lead scientists to sound the alarm about about global warming, has dramatically reduced the amount of CO2 he thinks the atmosphere can tolerate and still keep the planet similar to the one on which civilization developed. Recent research has led Hansen, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, to the conclusion that CO2 in the atmosphere must be brought down to 350 parts per million (from the current 385) to avoid a tipping point that would cause melting ice sheets and rapidly rising seas. The only way to do that, he says, is to phase out the use of coal by 2030 (unless it can be captured and sequestered). He calls for a moratorium on new coal-fired plants, as well as improved agriculture and forestry to reduce carbon 50 ppm by the end of the century. This assumes that we’re nearing the end of oil reserves and no more drilling will occur on public lands or in pristine areas. It also assumes little extraction of unconventional fossil fuels like tar sands. Hansen says bringing down CO2 levels to 350 would also solve the problem of acidity in oceans and destruction of coral reefs. He warned there must be global cooperation and it needs to start in the next few years. (Source: Environmental News Network.)

The UN Environment Programme warns in a new report, by 338 experts, that the future of humanity is at risk and may be pushed beyond the point of no return. The balance between consumers and resources is seriously out of whack, says Achim Steiner, executive director of the programme. The planet is increasingly stressed by climate change, which is “accelerating at a pace that goes beyond the scenarios and models we’ve been using.” Some regions may soon reach a point of environmental devastation from which they won’t be able to recover, he said, noting the increasing droughts in Africa and melting ice in the Himalayas that will leave China and India short of water. (Source: NaturalNews.)

Next week: Some suggested solutions