Electricity from Renewables: Status, Prospects, and Impediments

1. Electricity from Renewables: Status, Prospects, and Impediments America’s Energy Future Study Panel on Electricity from Renewables K. John Holmes, National Research Council, Study Director (jholmes@nas.edu)

2. Key Objectives of America’s Energy Future (AEF) “Foundational Study” Provide transparent and authoritative estimates of the current contributions and future potential of existing and new energy supply and demand technologies, impacts and costs, focusing on the next two decades. Critically review existing work - don’t “reinvent the wheel”. Not to recommend policy choices, but assess the state of development of technologies. To facilitate a productive national policy dialogue about the nation’s energy future

3. America’s Energy Future: Technology Opportunities, Risks and Tradeoffs 63 committee & panel members 22 consultants 12 principal staff dozens of workshop participants 62 reviewers of 5 reports

4. America’s Energy Future: Technology Opportunities, Risks, and Tradeoffs http://www.nationalacademies.org/energy October 2008 May 20, 2009 June 15, 2009 December 9, 2009

5. America’s Energy Future Study Committee Harold T. Shapiro - (Chair), Princeton University Mark S. Wrighton- (Vice Chair), Washington University John F. Ahearne, Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society Allen J. Bard, University of Texas at Austin Jan Beyea, Consulting in the Public Interest W. F. Brinkman**, Princeton University Douglas M. Chapin, MPR Associates, Inc. Steven Chu*, E. O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Christine A. Ehlig-Economides, Texas A&M University Robert W. Fri, Resources for the Future, Inc. Charles Goodman, Southern Company (Ret.) John B. Heywood, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lester B. Lave, Carnegie Mellon University James J. Markowsky***, American Electric Power (Ret.) Richard A. Meserve, Carnegie Institution of Washington Warren F. Miller, Jr.****, Texas A&M University-College Station Franklin M. Orr, Jr., Stanford University Lawrence T. Papay, SAIC (Ret.) Aristides A.N. Patrinos, Synthetic Genomics Michael P. Ramage, ExxonMobil Research and Engineering (Ret.) Maxine L. Savitz*****, Honeywell Inc. (Ret.) Robert H. Socolow, Princeton University James L. Sweeney, Stanford University G. David Tilman, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis C. Michael Walton, University of Texas at Austin *Resigned, January 20, 2009 upon confirmation as U.S. Secretary of Energy **Confirmed as U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Director of Office of Science, June 20, 2009 ***Confirmed as U.S. DOE Assistant Secretary of Fossil Energy, August 7, 2009 ****Confirmed as U.S. DOE Assistant Secretary of Nuclear Energy, August 11, 2009 *****Appointed President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) • 25 members (80% academy members) • Expertise spans science, technology & economics

6. Panel on Electricity from Renewables LAWRENCE T. PAPAY, NAE, Science Applications International Corporation (retired), Chair ALLEN J. BARD, NAS, University of Texas, Austin, Vice Chair RAKESH AGRAWAL, NAE, Purdue University WILLIAM CHAMEIDES, NAS, Duke University JANE DAVIDSON, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis MIKE DAVIS, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory KELLY FLETCHER, General Electric CHARLES GAY, Applied Materials CHARLES GOODMAN, Southern Company (retired) SOSSINA HAILE, California Institute of Technology NATHAN LEWIS, California Institute of Technology KAREN PALMER, Resources for the Future JEFFREY PETERSON, New York State Energy Research and Development Authority KARL RABAGO, Austin Energy CARL WEINBERG, Pacific Gas and Electric Company (retired) KURT YEAGER, Galvin Electricity Initiative (NAE, National Academy of Engineering) (NAS, National Academy of Sciences)

7. Panel on Electricity from Renewables Study Charge The panel will examine the technical potential for electric power generation with alternative sources such as wind, solar photovoltaic, geothermal, solar thermal, hydroelectric, and other renewable sources. • Initial deployment times < 10 years: costs, performance, and impacts •10 to 25 years: barriers, implications for costs, and R&D challenges/needs •> 25 years: barriers and R&D challenges/needs, especially basic research needs • Primary focus is the quantitative characterization of technologies with deployment times < 10 years - renewable sources showing the most promise for a substantial impact in the near to mid-term • Panel will address the challenges of incorporating such technologies into the power grid (in consultation with T&D subgroup of main AEF committee)

8. Structure of Electricity from Renewable Resources (National Academy Press, 2009) • SUMMARY • Chapter 1 – INTRODUCTION • Chapter 2 – RESOURCE BASE • Chapter 3 – RENEWABLE ELECTRICITY GENERATION TECHNOLOGIES • Chapter 4 –ECONOMICS OF RENEWABLE ELECTRICITY • Chapter 5 – ENVIROMENTAL IMPACTS OF RENEWABLE ELECTRICITY GENERAITON • Chapter 6 –DEPLOYMENT OF RENEWABLE ELECTRICITY ENERGY • Chapter 7 – SCENARIOS

9. Status of Renewable Power in the US* • Renewables are a modest ~10% of all generated power • 6-7 % is hydroelectricity (depends on water conditions) • Biomass (~2%) and wind (~1%) most of the rest • But growth rates for renewables are impressive • Wind: 23% compounded annual growth rate in generation (1997-2006) • Installed capacity – 5.2 GW (2007), 8.4 GW (2008), and 2.8 GW for the first quarter in 2009 • Solar PV: over 30% compounded annual growth rate in capacity (2000-2008), mainly on demand side, but from a low base *Status as of late 2008/early 2009 when report was completed and reviewed

10. Renewable Resources

11. Estimate of wind power resource base • Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (1991) estimated on-shore wind resources at 11 million GWh per year from Class 3 and higher regions • Actual wind resource could be higher or lower • Wind electricity potential estimated from point-source measurements at 50 m -modern wind turbines can have hub heights of 80 m or higher, where more wind energy resource is likely to be available. • Model simulations of very-large-scale wind farms show the potential for agglomeration of point-source wind speed data over large areas to overestimate the actual wind energy resource and show that extraction of a large fraction of the energy might impact meteorology and climate • Assuming extraction of a limit of 20 percent of the energy in the wind field, an upper value for the extractable wind electric potential would be about 2.2 million GWh/yr (compared to 2008 electricity generation of ~ 4 million GWh) • Significant offshore resources also exist, on the order of the on-shore resources for distances 5-50 nautical miles offshore (Large-Scale Offshore Wind Power in the United States, NREL 2010)

12. Estimate of solar resource base • The solar energy resource base is the largest • Assuming 230 Watts per square meter as representative mid-latitude, day/night average solar insolation, solar resource provides equivalent of ~16 billion GWh of electric energy annually to continental US • At 10 percent average conversion efficiency would provide annual 1.6 billion GWh/yr (compared to 2008 electricity generation of ~ 4 million GWh) • Coverage of 0.25 percent of the land area of the continental United States would be required to generate 4 million GWh • Estimates of the rooftop area suitable for installation of PV have been performed state-by-state – potential generation ranges greatly (from one to 15 million GWh)

13. Resource Finding • There is a great deal of wind and solar resources and lesser amounts of geothermal, biomass, and hydropower to develop • However, these resources are distributed unevenly around the country • Solar and wind are intermittent and pose challenges for integration into the electricity system • Further, although the size of the resource base is impressive, there are economic and deployment-related considerations to using these sources on a large scale

14. Technology Finding • Some technologies (Bucket 1 technologies) are sufficiently developed and are being deployed (wind turbines, solar PV and concentrating solar power, traditional geothermal, and biomass) These are improving in cost and performance (examples shown in the next slide) - over the time frame through 2020, these technologies are technically ready for accelerated deployment at commercial scales • There are other technologies (Bucket 2 technologies) that are further away (enhanced geothermal, wave/ tidal energy, and ocean thermal gradient technologies) “Bucket 1” “Bucket 2” “Bucket 3”

15. Wind Capacity Factors in 2006 by Region and Vintage of Wind Facility Learning Curve for PV Production

16. Economics Finding • Renewable electricity is generally more costly (except for hydro and wind, and traditional geothermal in some cases) to produce than electricity from fossil fuels • Policy incentives (renewable portfolio standards, production tax credits) have been required to drive increases • Improvements in technology and stable and clear public policies will be required for renewable technologies to improve their cost competitive position

17. Cost Competitiveness of Wind versus Natural Gas & Impacts of the PTC

18. w/CCS Environmental Impacts Renewable electricity technologies generally have inherently low life-cycle CO2 emissions -1368 -248 Renewables also generally have low levels of other atmospheric emissions and water use

19. Environmental Impacts The diffuse nature of renewable resources means that the technologies must be spread over large collection areas This is mitigated in some cases because the land may be used for multiple uses and impacts tend to remain localized

20. Deployment Consideration of deployment issues is key – just having adequate technologies capable of efficiency and reliably producing electricity is not sufficient to have non-hydro renewable make a significant (10-20%) contribution to US electricity systemKey factors impacting the wide-scale deployment and integration of renewable energy sources: • Relatively high costs (especially in absence of price on carbon) • Supply of materials and workforce • Inertia • Perception of risk & performance uncertainty • Complex decision making & policy setting • Infrastructure limitations

21. US and World Wide Wind Turbine Material Usage PTC extended to 2012 2008 installation – 8.4 GW 2009 installation – 10 GW Effects of PTC Expiration and Extension on Wind Power Investment

22. Scale of Deployment is Critical Department of Energy study of 20% wind penetration by 2030 demonstrates challenges and potential opportunities • 100,000 wind turbines • $100 billion dollars’ of additional capital investments and transmission upgrades & 140,000 jobs • 800 million metric tons of CO2 emissions annually eliminated (~ 20% of electricity sector emissions) • 50,000 kilometers2 of land area (2-5% of which is directly needed for turbines) • In the panel’s opinion, increasing manufacturing and installation capacity, employment, and financing to meet this goal is doable, but the magnitude of the challenge is clear from the scale of such an effort

23. Deployment Potential Finding • The readiness of conventional hydropower, wind, solar photovoltaics and concentrating solar power, hydrothermal, and biopower technologies are such that an “aggressive but achievable”* future for renewable electricity would be that they comprise up to 20 percent of all electricity generation by 2020, up from about 10 percent today (with all growth in non-hydropower) • By 2035, such an aggressive but achievable future deployment could result in non-hydro renewables providing 20 percent or more of domestic electricity generation *The main AEF study committee and its associated panels used an “aggressive but achievable” deployment rate to consider the potential future penetration of various energy technologies. In general, the AEF study committee defined an aggressive but achievable scenario as one that is more accelerated than the base case deployment rates defined by the Energy Information Agency’s reference case but less dramatic than an all-out or crash effort that could result in disruptive economic and lifestyle changes and require substantially new technologies

24. Renewables Integration Wind & solar provide intermittent power – must be integrated into electricity systems that also includes base load and peak generation • Transmission capacity and other grid improvements are critical for significant penetration of renewable electricity sources • Transmission improvements - new resources into the system, geographical diversity in generation base, access to regional wholesale electricity markets • Distribution improvements - two-way electricity flow, time-of-day pricing • Panel finds • ~20% intermittent renewables would require grid improvements, fast-responding generation, but no electricity storage • reaching >50% level of renewable electricity penetration will require storage, new scientific advances, and changes in how we generate, transmit, and use electricity

25. Achieving Greatly Increased Penetration of Renewable Electricity • The panel concluded that sustained actions involving the coordination of policy, technology, and capital investment will be essential • Although continued technological advances are critical, the degree of penetration also is determined by actions that collectively center on sustainably improving the economic competiveness and on policy initiatives that have a positive impact on competitive balance and the ease of deployment of renewable electricity. • The promise of renewable resources is that they offer significant potential for low-carbon generation of electricity from domestic sources of energy that are much less vulnerable to fuel cost increases than are other electricity sources and offer significant economic opportunities.

26. Post Report Trends – Slowing of Growth in Wind Capacity in 2010 (not linked to expiration of PTC)

27. Post Report Trends – Global PV Production Continues to Grow and Costs Declined Source: PV Production and Cost, 2009 Forecast: The Anatomy of a Shakeout, Greentech Media/Prometheus Institute

28. Post Report Trends – Wind Power Prices Increases and Wholesale Electricity Prices Decline Source: 2009 Wind Technologies Market Report, DOE

29. Post Report Trends – Wind Energy Curtailments within ERCOT Increases Greatly Source: 2009 Wind Technologies Market Report, DOE

30. Post Report Trends – Possible Revisualizing Transmission Infrastructure for Wind Alternate to • coast-to-coast Electricity Superhighway radiating from the Midwestern wind states (from Kansas north to the Dakotas and Wyoming) is a • series of initiatives from coastal states confining superhighway to smaller area and complements it with a system that enables coastal states to harvest near-onshore and offshore wind “Integrating 200,000MWs of Renewable Energy into the US Power Grid: A Practical Proposal” Edward N. Krapels, Anbaric Transmission, LLC

31. Energy Policy Context In the United States at the national level energy policy is largely a derivative policy directed at shifting priorities over time related to economics, national security, and environmental goals. economic vitality Energy Policy climate change Energy Policy national security