A new analysis from Stanford University has laid out a roadmap for 139 countries to power their economies with solar, wind, and hydro energy by 2050. It says the world can reach 80 per cent WWS (wind, water and sunlight) by 2030 and 100 per cent by 2050 with no impact on economic growth.
The idea of net zero emissions, or a decarbonised economy, is being openly discussed at the Paris conference, even by Australia, with prime minister Malcolm Turnbull talking (but not yet acting) of a push to zero carbon energy.
For most however, zero carbon means including carbon capture and storage and nuclear, or offsets from forestry, land use and other sequestration. Some, though, are talking of meeting that talking with 100 per cent renewable energy only.
The Stanford study, published on 27 November, under lead author Mark Z. Jacobson, focuses on what is has dubbed âWWSâ â wind, water and sunlight. And it includes not just electricity but transportation, heating and cooling, industry, and agriculture, forestry and fishing.
It says the world can reach 80 per cent âWWSâ by 2030.
The roadmap outlines numerous benefits â millions of jobs, no impact on economic growth â and total savings from fuel costs, environment and climate damage of nearly $US5 trillion.
The Stanford study estimates that total WWS conversion will save each person in the 139 countries an average of $170 a year on fuel costs, and $2,880 a year in air-pollution-damage cost and $US1,930/person/year in climate costs (2013 dollars).
The authors have broken out the equipment and installations needed into each country. It appears eye watering, but Stanford says the land use requirements are minimal â just 0.29 per cent of the land area, mostly for solar PV, not including reclaimed fossil fuel plants.
Their plan, under one generalised scenario, would require:
- 496,900 50-MW utility-scale solar-PV power plants (providing the most power, 42..2% of the 139-country power for all purposes).
- 17 million new onshore 5-MW wind turbines (19.4%).
- 762,000 off-shore 5-MW wind turbines (12.9%)
- 15,400 100-MW utility-scale CSP power plants with storage (7.7%).
- 653 million 5-kW residential rooftop PV systems (5.6%).
- 3 million 100-kW commercial/government rooftop systems (6.0%).
- 840 100- MW geothermal plants (0.74%).
- 496,000 0.75-MW wave devices (0.72%).
- 32,100 1-MW tidal turbines (0.07%)
- Zero new hydropower plants. (Stanford says the capacity factor of existing hydropower plants will increase slightly so that hydropower supplies 4.8% of all-purpose power).
- Another estimated 9,300 100-MW CSP plants with storage and 99,400 50-MW solar thermal collectors for heat generation and storage will be needed to help stabilize the grid.
Energy efficiency and changing industrial practises will be important. The average end use load will fall 39.2 per cent, with 82 per cent of this fall due to electrification and eliminating the need for mining, transport, and refining of conventional fuels.
The cost reductions come from the fact that that levellised costs of electricity for hydropower, onshore wind, utility-scale solar, and solar thermal for heat are already similar to or less than natural gas combined-cycle power plants.
The LCOE for rooftop PV, offshore wind, tidal, and wave energy will fall below conventional fuels in coming years and decades, the study says.
Stanford says the major benefits of a conversion to WWS are the near-elimination of air pollution morbidity and mortality and global warming, net job creation, energy-price stability, reduced international conflict over energy because each country will be energy independent.
It will bring power 4 billion people worldwide who currently collect their own energy and burn it, and reduced risks of large-scale system disruptions because much of the world power supply will be decentralized.
âFinally, the aggressive worldwide conversion to WWS proposed here will avoid exploding levels of CO2 and catastrophic climate change.â
Editorâs Note
The Stanford study is available here. A study into the possibility of 100% renewable energy in the United States can be read here. Interactive maps are available at www.thesolutionsproject.org.
This article was first published by Reneweconomy.com and is republished here with permission.
Hans Erren says
Amazing the silence about Thorium, India has huge reserves and also a programme to implement it.
Paul Roden says
Whether it is Thorium, plutonium, uranium, mixed oxide, fusion, fission or breeder reactors, all forms of nuclear power are too expensive, too dangerous and totally unnecessary for our energy needs. We have the technology and resources to transition to a renewable energy economy now. What we lack is the “political will” because our elected government leaders have been bought out by the greedy, dirty energy industry, because they will loose power and money by decentralized, renewable energy.
Vern Williams says
Nuclear Power generation is one of the safest forms of generating reliable electric power and creats 0 CO2. The problem with several of the sources of “renewable power” is they are inherently unreliable. If it is dark or cloudy, no solar power. If the wind stops, no wind energy. Without equal amounts of quick start NG power plants, the lights go out, the electric transportation stops and we do not have storage technology to support solving it that way. So, nice try, but not something you want to bet the farm on.
Dennis Heidner says
Looking at a very large geographic region… distributed generation and the unreliable nature as you described — is simply variable – often predictable in when it will vary. Large interconnected grids can in general handle variable generation… so long as they are understood and planned for. The loads that are served by the grid – for all practical purposes are simply “negative generation” and the loads themselves also vary considerably. As such the ability to adjust generation to match loads is reasonably understood. A renewable energy resource that vary from peak to zero… looks like a load that goes from low to high.
The system operators for generation have handled the Superbowl / world cup peak loads and survived… even before renewables — and those minimal to peak changes often occur with in 30 minutes… the half time flush effect.
Paul Younger says
How is all this to be achieved without very large scale storage? (The only place storage is mentioned is in relation to domestic CHP). I don’t see grid-scale storage in the list, let alone any mention of how that can be achieved at reasonable cost with zero expansion of hydropower, as they propose. And then there’s using all this electricity (high quality energy) for heating – the vast bulk of energy use in the populous countries of the Global North. That is a very wasteful approach and will require a far greater increase in total power generation than seems to be envisaged And then there’s transport … electrification is a non-starter for heavy goods shipping and trans-ocean air transport, for both weight and charge range reasons. Without addressing such questions it is difficult to believe this is much more than a crowd-pleasing, headline-grabbing exercise in fantasy football. Meanwhile, I’m getting back to work exploring the least wasteful options for renewable heat … we’ve a hell of a lot of work to do before 2020, let alone 2050 (Paul Younger, Rankine Chair of Engineering, University of Glasgow, Scotland).
Paul Roden says
There are a number of ways to achieve mass storage. Iron Chromium Flux batteries of 1 megawatt storage, outline in a Forbes Magazine article of couple of years ago. Pumped hydroelectric storage, where surplus electricity is used to pump water into a reservoir and then let out at night, cloudy and less windy weather to balance the grid load. Having energy efficiency in our appliances, homes, businesses and manufacturing is also a factor to not waste and control demand. Having more sources of energy with a mixture of not just hydroelectric, photo-voltaic, wind, biomass, tidal, geothermal, ocean current, hydrogen fuel cell and passive solar hot water heaters. Also, by have a smart electrical grid, roof top solar hot water/photovoltaic, solar and wind farms, wind turbines at homes, businesses rooftops we will have a more resilient, decentralized system that will stabilize supply and demand. Supporting mass transit, use of bicycles, better city and regional planning to reduce commuting and population density will also contribute to a safe, renewable energy future. For more details http://thesolutionsproject.org and http://rmi.org . We will not “starve and freeze in the dark” nor “wreck our economy.” The only thing lacking, as DeLucci and Jacobson so eloquently put it in their Nov, 2009 Scientific American article,is “the political will” to do so. We have the technology, the raw materials, geographic and geological resources depending on locations on the planet to do so now.
Math Geurts says
Afraid to spoil a good story: Energy Post nor Giles Parkinson toke time to study the roadmap. In fact the datafile of this (preliminary) analysis shows that quite some of these 139 countries: Gilbraltar, Singapore, Hongkong, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Austria, Czech Republic, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany, can not power their economy with just solar , wind and hydro, even in 2050.
Dennis Heidner says
I’ve read Jacobson’s work and have bought some of his text books in the past… while the white paper is interesting… it grossly oversimplifies the ability to meet 2050 renewable targets. It wildly ignores problems in a 100% only renewable system. It wildly over estimates the ability of the rural areas (farmers) to move to 100% electricity. I’ve yet to see large tractors and combines that are 100% electric even prototyped… or even proposed.
Vaclav Smil in his works is far more pessimistic – and is also probably too pessimistic. The real picture is going to be some place closer to 80% renewables by 2050… with nuclear (of some type) included in the mix.
A review of the story also present this week on energypost about the Fraunhoffer ISE see “Energiewende is easily affordable â if we donât go 100% renewable” by Craig Morris.
Math Geurts says
On the optimal mix of wind and solar generation in the future Chinese power system:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.energy.2015.05.146
“Even 100% generation of the annual electricity consumption by
wind turbines will only result in a capacity credit of approximately
15%. There will be a huge portion of generation that will be produced in excess of current consumption and thus has to either be stored, curtailed, or used for other purposes. This situation can be significantly improved by additionally including a limited amount
of PV for electricity generation. Thereby, the capacity credit can be
increased dramatically. For a low combined percentage of wind and
PV, the optimal mix includes up to 80% of PV. For a higher combined generation, these values are reduced down to 20% of PV in a fully renewably-powered China. In all considered scenarios, storage requirements increase exponentially to unrealistically high values as soon as 70% penetration of wind/PV are reached. To avoid this storage problem, alternatives like a sector coupling with either
heating or transportation can be considered.
To sum up, our research showed that even with a generation
that equals the demand on a âper yearâ base and an optimized mix of
VRE, conventional power plants or large amounts of storage will be
required to ensure a reliable power supply on an hour-by-hour
basis. This shows the problem of renewable integration: conventional power generation or storage or both will be prevalent even in a system where generation of VRE equals demand on an annual basis. As a consequence of our analysis, we suggest planners pursue a system with a wind/PV mix of around 70%/30% in order to have the lowest integration costs. We also suggest setting a goal of at most 70% generation being provided by wind and PV as long as the storage problem remains unsolved”
Math Geurts says
On the optimal mix of wind and solar generation in the future Chinese power system:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.energy.2015.05.146
“Conclusion: recommendations for system planning and renewable energy policy in China. Our results confirm the hypothesis that was proposed by researchers from the Harvard China project: China could be entirely powered by renewable energy sources like wind and solar. We saw that, indeed, it is possible to fully power China by generation from wind turbines calculated on an annual base. However, when considering the hourly timescale, it turns out to be more difficult. Even 100% generation of the annual electricity consumption by wind turbines will only result in a capacity credit of approximately 15%. There will be a huge portion of generation that will be produced in excess of current consumption and thus has to either be stored, curtailed, or used for other purposes. This situation can be significantly improved by additionally including a limited amount of PV for electricity generation. Thereby, the capacity credit can be increased dramatically. For a low combined percentage of wind and PV, the optimal mix includes up to 80% of PV. For a higher combined generation, these values are reduced down to 20% of PV in a fully renewably-powered China. In all considered scenarios, storage requirements increase exponentially to unrealistically high values as soon as 70% penetration of wind/PV are reached. To avoid this storage problem, alternatives like a sector coupling with either heating or transportation can be considered. To sum up, our research showed that even with a generation that equals the demand on a âper yearâ base and an optimized mix of VRE, conventional power plants or large amounts of storage will be required to ensure a reliable power supply on an hour-by-hour basis.
This shows the problem of renewable integration: conventional power generation or storage or both will be prevalent even in a system where generation of VRE equals demand on an annual basis. As a consequence of our analysis, we suggest planners pursue a system with a wind/PV mix of around 70%/30% in order to have the lowest integration costs. We also suggest setting a goal of at most 70% generation being provided by wind and PV as long as the storage problem remains unsolved”
eliot stephens says
Interesting study, but have you misreported the findings in the summary? 17,000,000 new 5MW on-shore windmills? The study lists 1,170,000. Wouldn’t 17 million units just about satisfy the entire world’s current energy needs? Also, a bit of geopolitics – just because the IEA chooses to ignore poor little Timor-Leste, doesn’t mean Stanford should. A lot of these studies do just that. The Timorese fought to reclaim their independence for 25 years (with the loss of some 30% of their population) and have now been independent for 13 years. A bit of recognition would be nice.