Solar Energy

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Under the auspices of the India Smart Grid Forum, the think tank founded as an umbrella organization over India’s 28 state utilities to provide thought leadership, share leading practices, and bring international insights to India, I’m delivering bi-weekly webinars framed by the Short List of Climate Actions That Will Work. With the glories of online recordings and AI transcription tools, it’s relatively easy to share both the transcript, and also the slides that I used, so I’m making a habit of it.

Most recently, I delivered a talk and held a Q&A session covering my take on the end game for electrical generation technologies, which will dominate, which will be a rounding error, and which won’t exist at all. For those who prefer talk-talk to read-read, here’s the recorded video of the presentation and discussion.

Thank you, Reji and the assembled ISGF team. Hello to everybody, wherever you are in the world, whatever time zone you’re in. So, originally, I had assembled this particular set of material for a global investment bank, one of the larger ones. They asked me to speak to a global set of institutional investors who were trying to figure out the signal from the noise about what types of generation would show up on grids and what percentages, so that they could start thinking strategically about their portfolios, what parts of their portfolio are at risk, what parts of their portfolio strategy and investment theses should they start leaning into, and it remains useful for this context.

So, without further ado, I’m going to start through this. I’ll go through a whole bunch of different technologies and talk about what they’re useful for, how big they’ll be in the end game, regardless of how big they are now and what that likely means.

Slide from presentation from seminar series with Indian utilities by author

Let’s start with the basics. Hydroelectric. We’ve been doing it for a long time. In the future, it’s going to be about 10% of all energy, and let’s start there.

Electricity is going to be the basis of all energy in the future. We won’t be burning stuff, we won’t be digging up fossil fuels. We’re probably not going to making a lot of biofuels, except for long haul aviation and long haul shipping. Everything else will just electrify.

Hydroelectric is going to remain a useful set of that grab bag, even though it’s challenged by changes in precipitation. Part of the reason why coal went up last year was because there was a drought in western China, where the Three Gorges Dam is, and so they had to burn more coal to accommodate for the reduction in hydro generation.

But, you know, if we think the Three Gorges dam is big, well, China’s building a dam three times the size in the mountains to the west of there. We’re still building a lot of hydroelectric now, capacity changes a lot.

These tables stay the same through the presentation.

It has capacity. It has a distance from demand centers, which becomes important as we think about where to put stuff. Generation type synchronous versus asynchronous. Synchronous enables us to keep the grid on a steady heartbeat at steady hertz. Asynchronous provides us more flexibility and a smoother ramp up and ramp down curve. Synchronous, we tend to want on high voltage alternating current. Asynchronous can be on HVAC or HVDC.

Then we have flexibility. Flexibility is a huge component these days of what we need on grids. We need firm and flexible. We don’t really need baseload. We need firm and flexible generation because wind and solar are intermittent. Hydro can do base load and peaking.

Then there’s co-benefits, such as the voltage and frequency regulation, which I mentioned, which tends to be on the high voltage, alternating current grid. But that’s replicable with electronics these days. We also get recreation, irrigation, we even get a fishing industry on some of the big hydro dams. But there are the constraints. Seasonality of it is one. It tends to be more robust as a form of generation in the springtime. In a lot of geographies, that balances well with wind being more robust in the fall time. That becomes important as we start thinking about balancing the curves across time.

Personally, I think a lot of hydroelectric generation is just going to end up as passive batteries. We’ll let nature fill it up for us, and we’ll draw it down as required, depending upon lulls and other stuff. So it’ll be less of something we use all the time, and more of something we use, like modern gas and coal plants for peaking generation.

Slide from presentation from seminar series with Indian utilities by author

Next we get to coal generation. No surprise, I project zero room for coal in the future of the generation grid.

It’s fairly inflexible. It needs to be gigawatt scale for thermal generation.

The interesting thing right now is that as I look across the world’s coal plants, I see significantly declining capacity factors. While they’re designed to run at 90% plus capacity factors as baseload generation for the most part, if we take China’s coal, while they have all these permitted plants, and they have 1.1 terawatt of power capacity of plants in operation, there are two things that are important to note. One is that the capacity factor of their coal plants is less than 50%. It is almost exactly the same capacity as the United State’s natural gas plants. In other words, they’re operating it as peak demand power, not baseload power, for their country.

The nuance there is that as more and more renewables get built, and obviously China is building enormous amounts of renewables, that is going to decline even further. There comes a point where the plants are not profitable. Data out of the finance industry of China indicates that while there are a lot of plants that have been permitted, financial institutions are very leery about actually financing them.

While coal plants in China are getting all the news for permits, they’re not getting money and they’re not getting built. While I said there was 1.1 terawatts of power capacity there, they’ve also shut down 775 gigawatts of power capacity. That is two thirds of what they have operating. They’ve either shut down operational plants, the older, worst ones, or they’ve removed the permits because they stopped making sense. They shelved them, they mothballed them, they fully decommissioned plants.

There are some advantages there and some disadvantages from a constraint. All thermal generation plants, the legacy ones, many of them are being challenged by the requirement for cooling water. The thermal design was required for the water to be a certain temperature, so that it would actually cool everything down appropriately. But now the water is a lot hotter, and they’re getting into challenges, and frequently the water is just not there, so they can’t cool at all. Climate change is impacting a lot of the legacy coal generation plants and making permitting of new ones obviously more problematic.

Slide from presentation from seminar series with Indian utilities by author

Next we get to natural gas in the future, 1%, which might surprise some people, but let’s put that in context. Natural gas, or methane at least, is a useful endgame strategic reserve of electricity for really weird lulls, like the ones that occur every ten to 50 years where there’s a long period without the sun shining or the wind blowing, and a need for something else as a strategic reserve.

But natural gas generation can also be biomethane generation. I project a future where strategic reserves of electricity will be provided by capturing the methane that’s baking off our dairy barns, our landfills, our other sources of anthropogenic methane and put into strategic reserves instead of natural gas. We’ll be capturing a climate problem and storing it to solve an energy challenge, instead of just letting it leak to the atmosphere and be a climate problem.

Natural gas generation, especially combined cycle, is pretty flexible and it can be pretty close to human beings. It has high nitrous oxide emissions, precursor to smog that causes asthma in children, so not great to have right beside growing families, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s not nearly as bad as coal from a health impact perspective. And it has significant flexibility. It is a synchronous generation, so you have to spool it up.

There aren’t any co benefits. You don’t get voltage and frequency control. Especially in the past three or four years globally, what we’ve seen is massive gas price fluctuations structurally. This started in 2019, when the debt laden US shale industry and fracking industry started hitting roadblocks. Their projections of length of service, of fracked and unconventional oil wells were off. They were running about, they were operating about a third the length that they’d projected in their prospectuses, and as a result, they were going bankrupt. What we have is a situation where gas price fluctuations started being baked in. Then there was the Saudi Arabian, Russian oil war that was attacking unconventional oil extraction in 2021. That was impacting American shale oil as well, which is where they got 70% of their natural gas. That was all structurally causing challenges historically with natural gas prices that had been stable for about 18 years. Then Russia invaded Ukraine and the world’s gas prices just spiked.

As we move forward, the actual cost of gas generation is going to continue to be structurally volatile. As we model out the cost of that energy, it’s actually more expensive than we thought.

Then, of course, there’s the problem that methane along its distribution channel leaks. While the United States claims to have done a great job at reducing their carbon dioxide, their fracking and shale oil industry has increased methane emissions so much, they’ve wiped out their greenhouse gas gains from carbon dioxide. Natural gas was considered a bridge fuel. Well, it turns out the bridge is to nowhere.

Slide from presentation from seminar series with Indian utilities by author

We also use natural gas in a lot of places where we need heat and power. Airports are a classic example. There are a lot of airports that have natural gas plants that provide electricity for the facilities, which are fairly electricity demanding, but also heat for the terminal.

How much of that is going to continue? My projection a natural gas cogeneration is going to disappear. There are multiple places where natural gas cogeneration is used. There are district heating systems, steam assisted gravity drainage in the oil sands, there are airports and several other use cases. That’s going to all go away, in part because heat pumps work much more efficiently for heating and cooling and we’re going to have renewables.

It doesn’t make sense to do cogeneration and create greenhouse gas emissions. Once again, the gas price fluctuations are changing the economics.

Slide from presentation from seminar series with Indian utilities by author

Another big chunk that’s used that a lot of people are considering is biomass. This is big in northern Europe for legacy historical reasons, cutting down old growth forests and burning them for heat or power is considered to be climate neutral, except they’re destroying a biomass sink. This is a really weird thing out of northern Europe, where they actually, in northern Germany and Denmark, what they’re doing is they’re having old forests in Finland and northern Sweden or in Canada or the United States cut down, pelletized into efficiently burning wood chunks, which means it’s not scrap wood, and then trucked or shipped across oceans, in many cases to be burned in Europe. And they are pretending that it’s climate neutral. I don’t buy it personally, and I think they’ll come to get a sense of reality on that.

But still, there’s a lot of scrap biomass out of the timber industry. We’re not going to turn all the scrap into biofuels, although that’s an entirely viable pathway. Some biomass for electricity will be on the grid somewhere. I think it’ll be smaller, it’ll be fairly small plants where there happens to be a big supply of timber or something like that, which is reasonably dry.

And the constraints there are obvious. It only makes sense when you’ve got a co benefit of heat and the constraints. We really shouldn’t be cutting down forests unless they’re going to be durable wood products. The fact that we’re cutting down the lungs of our planet to make chopsticks that we throw away once, or paper towels, it’s not a great idea. We’re going to start seeing more preservation of forests and less of a focus on biomass. It’s just not as sensible a pathway as many people believe it.

Now, there is an interesting edge case in agriculture, where biomass waste biomass is used for process heat, for food, for certain classes of food preparation, like for example, chili peppers. Most of those cases can be dealt with by heat pumps, but if they have a local supply of waste heat or waste biomass that would otherwise rots in middens and turns into methane because of anaerobic digestion, it’s reasonable to use it for process heat in that space, but you have be careful with that because the air pollution out of biomass is quite high.

I always like to say that the worst form of heating for human health is breathing the smoke from a dead tree. The amount of toxins that come out in wood smoke is remarkable.

Slide from presentation from seminar series with Indian utilities by author

India has a lot of nuclear, a lot of CANDU reactors. I looked at the fleet. Most of them are in the 300 megawatt range. So arguably, India was building small modular nuclear reactors before small modular nuclear reactors were a thing. Now, in recent years, India has realized the same thing that everybody else realized, which is that small reactors aren’t economic. It makes sense to get them up to the gigawatt scale. And so India has been building gigawatt scale reactors, and in the future, we’re going to have nuclear generation.

I just don’t think we’re going to have nearly as much of it as many people think. I think it’s going to be under 5% of the global energy supply, which is more than it is in terms of absolute numbers, but a lower percentage of electrical generation in relative numbers. And the reason for that is pretty simple. The graph on the left of the chart is a dataset I’ve been tracking of a natural experiment in China of nuclear generation deployments versus renewables deployments.

In 2014. Somebody said to me, well, obviously nuclear can scale and renewables can’t. I said, that doesn’t make any sense. We’ve got highly manufacturable items in wind and solar, wind turbines and solar panels that can have a massive global supply chain with low security risks and massively parallelized deployment. On the nuclear side, we have gigawatt scale megaprojects that can’t be manufactured and put in shipping containers and shipped to the other side of the world and turned on with semi skilled labor. It didn’t make sense to me that would be the case.

I looked around for a geography where the question could be answered by looking at what they’re doing. All the reasons that people in the West say that nuclear can’t grow mostly don’t apply to China. It should have been able possible to create all the conditions for success such as a long term stability of governance, which enables the nuclear programs to continue regardless of electoral changes in the west, for example, where nuclear is sometimes a part of the wedge politics. It has a national scale program for deployment as a national strategic requirement, has alignment with the development and maintenance of nuclear weapon capability, has the ability to do a national program for human resources, and it should have had the ability to pick a single design or two of technology to enable it to replicate its learning across all of its sites.

They could have had all the conditions of success. However, China is, much more than India, an export driven country. Its strategy is based on that. Instead they built one of every nuclear technology and design so they can export anything any customer anywhere in the world wants. As a result, their nuclear program is languishing badly.

I still think it wouldn’t have scaled nearly as quickly as renewables did. That white line is additional terawatt hours of actual generation with capacity factor added each year. As you can see, that’s still an accelerating curve. It’s going to accelerate for the next ten or 15 years as well. Meanwhile, nuclear peaked in 2016 and 2018 with about seven gigawatts of capacity, and it’s been adding much less capacity since then. Last year, it only added 1.2 gigawatts of new capacity.

The question for India, because I’m sure this debate is strong in the country is, if China can’t achieve the conditions for success for nuclear and renewables are so easy to build, which one should India be focusing on in the next few years? I certainly know which way I’m betting, and I’m not betting for nuclear.

Slide from presentation from seminar series with Indian utilities by author

Here’s where we get into the big wedges. Onshore wind farms, they need strong winds and they need a grid. About 30% of all energy for the world in my projection will come from onshore windfarms, and some of them are pretty honking big. We’re getting to the point now where I’m seeing quite large wind turbines on land. I think we’re peaking at about 5 MW capacity for an individual turbine. When we power old wind farms we’re getting a lot more power with a lot fewer wind turbines, getting higher capacity factors.

The generation is asynchronous. There was an experiment with synchronous wind turbines back in the seventies in the United States, which failed miserably. They ramp up and ramp down. As I said in the Electrify everything everywhere, all at once discussion and other previous discussions, one of the things that people don’t realize about wind energy is that it’s actually available about 85% of the time.

It only has a capacity factor of perhaps 40%, which means if we consider the wind blowing at perfect speed all year long, that’s 100%. The wind doesn’t blow at the perfect speed all year long, so the actual generation is 40% of the optimum generation. But the wind actually blows between the startup speed and the cutoff speed 85% of the year. Even on the edge days, we’re still getting a lot of electricity from wind.

One of the things that’s in the short list is overbuild wind and solar. And the reason for that is that 85% and the roughly half of a day, on average, that solar is doing something. As we add up those 50% of some generation from solar, and 85% from wind from when those curves start overlapping.

We have built more of every form of generation, except for nuclear, than we could possibly. Then we’ve underused them, like coal plants running at under 50%, and a lot of natural gas peaker plants running at under 10%.

We don’t have a problem with overbuilding generation and underutilizing it, and we’re not going to have that problem with wind or solar as well, especially because it’s cheaper than them. One of the nice things about wind and solar, they’re dirt cheap.

The co benefits are interesting. From a flexibility perspective, wind turbines are really easy to turn off, and they’re really easy to run below optimum and turn up. Simple SCADA commands from centralized grid management systems can easily manage wind assets to reduce their generation when we need a little less on the grid, but also to run them at 90% of their optimal, and then have 10% in reserve to pop them up as needed.

That co benefit comes with a reserve for voltage and frequency power management solutions that are on wind farms as well. Right now, we’re getting voltage and frequency support from big hunking, spinning chunks of metal in steam coal plant turbines and hydroelectric dams, and in nuclear plants, but we started requiring wind and solar farms to put on power management because they were so big that in order for them to be well managed participants in the grid, we needed them to replicate those ancillary services.

Increasingly, we’re going to be able to get the co benefits of voltage and frequency for the grid from wind farms, which are asynchronous but we’re using electronics to do that so they become much more flexible participants in the grid.

Remember, they’re running 85% of the time, just below maximum. We can run them at 90% of what the weather conditions might enable them which gives us immediate free backup that can be turned on electronically. This is just a market requirement.

The constraints are wind, and wind conditions do change over the year and over the day, and that varies a lot by geography. It’s not a slam dunk. It’s a great participant in the grid, but it is not the only participant in the grid.

Slide from presentation from seminar series with Indian utilities by author

Offshore wind has some advantages that onshore wind doesn’t. The winds are a lot steadier, and they’re a lot firmer closer to the water, so the masts don’t have to be as tall. The logistics offshore means wind turbines can be massive. China’s putting in place, I think it’s a 20 or 21 GW single turbine this year. Turbines started out well under a megawatt. An over 20 megawatt single turbine is an astounding thing.

Logistics are easy because we can put them on ships. We don’t have to drive them along highways and get them under bridges and stuff like that. You can put them on ships where there’s many fewer logistical constraints.

Offshore wind has the same advantages as onshore wind, in that they are asynchronous and easily feathered.

One of the constraints is subsea transmission, but we’ve solved that problem. High voltage direct current interlinks are now regularly done everywhere in the world for offshore wind. The break even point is 50 km for high voltage direct current versus high voltage alternating current due to the characteristics of the power management solution.

One of the nice things about offshore winds is that frequently they can be put a lot closer to major demand centers. The United States has very specific constraints on its offshore wind because of the Jones Act that prevents maritime shipping from being sensibly managed for historical reasons. They’re really constrained in terms of putting offshore wind in there, and they’ve got billionaires with compounds who just don’t want to have a hint of a wind turbine on the horizon. We have a couple of headwinds there.

If they could put offshore wind off of New York state, they could be providing enormous amounts of electricity at times when it’s demanded for their biggest demand center of population. That’s why they keep trying despite the headwinds.

Offshore wind is going to be big. Its potential is understated. If we look at Japan, it actually has very significant offshore wind capabilities, it’s just not building them sensibly. It’s doing silly stuff. It’s talking about importing ammonia and co burning it with coal, which is going to be nine times the cost of energy. It will bankrupt their economy if they actually persist in going down that pathway.

Slide from presentation from seminar series with Indian utilities by author

Then, of course, solar farms, utility scale solar farms. My projection, 35%, the biggest single form of electrical generation. Ten years ago, I thought that wind might have the edge on solar. Now, I know that from the evidence of the past decade we put solar panels in containers, we ship them around the world, and they’re easy to install.

There’s this great video out of China of heavy lift drones plucking massive solar panels off a stack and flying them autonomously down to their location on a hillside solar farm. It’s astounding to watch. The scale of solar panels is right for human interaction. Containerization is a strong benefit.

Solar has all the advantages of wind. In New Delhi, where many of the participants are today, it’s about 12 hours of sunshine a day, which means 12 hours of solar generation, just not at peak. If there’s more solar farms, you get more electricity in the edge conditions, and it’s easily turned off. We can turn off strings of solar panels in a solar farm once again with the same SCADA commands that we use for wind turbines.

We can run solar farms suboptimally and turn on capacity if we’ve overbuilt solar or we can do things where we can actually load balance for putting heat into heat storage, and doing some industrial processes that require lots of electricity in the right time, when peak solar is done.

There is great flexibility with solar and wind that doesn’t exist with nuclear or coal which is underestimated as an advantage. Of course, if it’s cloudy, we get less electricity. If it’s nighttime, we get no electricity. So what? Everything has some constraints.

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Commercial solar is going to be a big thing. Every country has big box warehouses. It has distribution centers for a modern distribution based economy. Those things have big flat roofs. Convention centers frequently have big, flat roofs. There are lots of commercial buildings where there’s lots of rooftops available for slapping on solar.

North America especially has big expanses around malls in where there should be solar canopies protecting the cars from sunlight and, oh, by the way, generating the electricity that goes into the cars. It’s going to be two to 3% of the global generation mix, in my estimation, because it puts electrical generation where there is significant demand. Distribution centers are increasingly going to have electric trucks rolling in and out.

They’re going to need big batteries. What’s going to feed the big batteries that buffer that stuff? Well, a lot of that is going to be rooftop solar. We don’t need nearly as much grid if we have ot more demand centers coated in solar panels.

That’s a big wedge and it’s an obvious one. I’ve dealt with a number of commercial solar developers who do very well for themselves because of this, and because of the the fall in solar panel prices these days, globally, it’s a no brainer.

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Residential solar is a different story, 2% to 3%. I’ve had this debate with Mark Zed Johnson Jacobson out of Stanford. He and his team since the early 2000s, have been developing a model for 100% renewables by 2050. He’s one of the most influential people speaking about what the grid will look like in the future. And I disagree on some stuff, but mostly it’s matters of degree, not of kind. Mark thinks that rooftop solar between commercial and residential will be 15% of energy in the future. I think it’s going to be 5% to 8% between them for a simple reason. We’re not going to mandate that everybody has solar on their roofs. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to do that. There’s a lot of rooftops that are shaded. There’s a lot of rooftops that aren’t aligned well with the sun. There’s a lot of rooftops that people just don’t want solar on.

To be clear, Mark is a brilliant, great guy. I have a lot of time for him. We have spent a lot of time together. But he lives in the suburbs of affluent California, in a ranch home with a huge roof in a sunshine state. His perspective is bound by his conditions. I have spent a lot more time in Asia and in Latin America with my leadership roles in São Paulo and Singapore, and I traveled extensively around Asia and Latin America.

Most people don’t live in suburban ranch homes with massive roofs for a family of three or four. In Asia, 90% of people live in multi unit residential buildings, and those have much less ability to put solar on the rooftop to provide the power for the residents of the multi unit residential building.

I live more like an Asian person. I’m in a 19 story condo building with 233 units, probably 400 residents. That’s much more Asian than North American, so I tend to have a different perspective

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I like to describe geothermal as a solution that’s really useful if you are in constant threat of having your country destroyed by earthquakes or volcanoes such as New Zealand or Iceland. I spent six weeks in New Zealand last year. I describe them as collections of volcanoes that are temporarily dormant. At some point, they’re just going to be wiped out by the equivalent of Krakatoa, but in the meantime, they’ve got great access to geothermal electricity.

The constraints of geothermal, I think, are going to leave it at about 1% of global energy generation. There are places like Japan, which should be leveraging their geothermal, and British Columbia, where I live, that should be leveraging geothermal where different preconditions means we aren’t. In Japan, the onsen culture means hot springs are sacrosanct in their culture, and you can’t touch them for a geothermal generation. In British Columbia, we have very few people. We have lots and lots of hydroelectricity, so we don’t really need to do geothermal.

We should be doing more of it. And so I don’t think it’s going to be a huge thing. I’m not that big on deep geothermal. There are construction risks there that I think are underappreciated.

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Tidal electricity, there’s going to be some generation, but it’s going to be less than a thousandth of global energy needs. People don’t appreciate how hard it is to keep something operating underwater with moving parts offshore. Wind works great because there’s no moving parts underwater. Everything that’s underwater is just a wire, concrete or steel, and it’s coated steel, so it doesn’t corrode, it just accrues minerals and wildlife.

I’m including tidal here for completeness.

Slide from presentation from seminar series with Indian utilities by author

Virtually everything is going to be grid tied, so the grid can act as a battery, a demand center, and a supply center at least part of the time. A lot of generation that’s on the grid is there to supply the electricity that the grid needs. The rooftop solar and commercial solar that’s not on rooftops is still going to be almost entirely grid tied. It doesn’t make sense to not have it grid tied. You get a lot of benefits from the grid, like voltage and frequency control and backup that you don’t get if you’re not attached to the grid.

The grid remains an integral component of this. One of the challenges around generation is everybody seems to think that the wires don’t matter and that they don’t need to be paid for. That’s just not the case. Utilities have a purpose, and that purpose is to maintain the wires and the wires need to be paid for.

There’s a completely unreasonable conversation where people say, well, you have to get rid of the utilities. I just kind of scratch my head and think, have you ever actually looked at the way that electricity gets around?

Mining is an exception. A lot of mining is in remote areas where it doesn’t make sense to string a wire 1000 km. It makes sense to put up a six gigawatt solar farm for the duration of the mine and then rip the solar farm down and put it up next to the next mine, which is what’s happening in Australia. And in a lot of those places, they have lots of room for wind. I worked on an engagement briefly where they were putting three big wind turbines up in northern Quebec on a mining site in Raglan. It made a lot of sense. It avoids having to ship in a lot of diesel or other energy.

The mining giants have all agreed on this. Rio TinTo, Fortescue BHP and Vale have all said they’re going to electrify their mines, that it’s the pathway to the future. They’re going to build a lot of renewables close to the mines where it’s viable. They’re going to run transmission to the mines. It just makes sense. It’s the most efficient way to do it and it’s increasingly the most economically viable one.

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The next one is grid storage. We just have lots of places we’re going to put grid storage and grid storage can be anywhere that it makes sense. One of the coming lectures in this seminar series is just all about storage and a discussion of India where there’s a lot more capacity for closed loop off river storage than the Indian outlook appears to believe, and I’m curious to explore that.

Battery storage has plummeted in price so much, they’re showing up on micro grids. They’re showing up in commercial facilities and distribution centers. They’re showing up in places where instead of strengthening the wires, the transmission or distribution, it makes sense to put a buffering battery at either end to optimize that physical asset of the wire. And so we’re seeing a lot of that stuff, and it increasingly can be thought of as a form of generation because it provides so many different pieces of capacity.

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Heat pumps, whether ground source, air source or water source, are moving units of energy out of the environment into the places we need them. They’re using electricity to do that, but the efficiency is astounding. We end up with the ability to use a lot less energy for the same value proposition, so we don’t need to generate nearly as much electricity. There’s a lot of thermal storage that can balance energy within a 24 hours period. There are some significant advantages to thinking of environmental heat as an energy source in this context.

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All of this generation is running on the grid, increasingly on high voltage direct current transmission. Now we have reconductoring as well. I’ll be talking about reconductoring and Heimdahl smart balls and high voltage direct current in another seminar in the series.

All grids are going to have a lot of different types of generation, and this isn’t a reliability issue. The grids in the world with the highest penetration of renewables, like Germany and Denmark, for example, are more reliable, with around 13 minutes of average outages per customer per year. Germany is an industrialized nation, it’s a high demand nation, and it gets 60% of its electricity from renewables.

German greenhouse gas emissions have cut by 10% over the past couple of years, and it’s accelerating decarbonization with cheaper electricity. Their wholesale electricity prices are among the lowest in Europe. They maintain artificially high electricity prices just as they maintain artificially high fossil fuel prices to incentivize efficiency. It works, but now they have to tweak that, make electricity cheaper and fossil fuel more expensive so they can get more people to electrify.

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That’s the slides. Reji, I hand it over to you to moderate the Q&A.

Question

One is about he’s saying there is so much of investment done already on the coal plants, so why don’t we concentrate more on making the coal energy cleaner?

Answer

There have been a lot of attempts to try to pretend that coal can be clean. All coal can be is less filthy.

If we take the consideration of supercritical coal plants burning high grade washed coal and low sulfur coal, they can get down to the point where they’re only killing 40 or so people a year per plant. They can get down to the point where they’re only causing significant health degradation in a smaller portion of the population, as opposed to we’re seeing 7.5 to 12 million people a year having significantly degraded quality of life, productivity and lifespan.

Part of the reason that China is so focused on renewables and clean energy, and has shut down so many coal plants, is because they were seeing in northern China, twelve year reductions in lifespan. Their life expectancy was being degraded by coal generation.

And that’s why when I talk about China and coal, I say, well, they have replaced a lot of their brown coal plants that were running in just crappy ways. They’ve replaced them with supercritical plants, with low sulfur, washed coal that are running very efficiently. But still, that’s taking, from a climate perspective, 1,400 kilograms, 1.4 tons per megawatt hour of carbon dioxide from the worst coal plants, only down to about 800 tons from one of the new supercritical coal plants.

It’s not clean, not low carbon. It is not a pathway to the future.

The new supercritical plants are slightly more flexible, so they can be treated more as peak regeneration. And that’s probably necessary. But there’s no way to make coal clean or low carbon. It’s basically carbon rich dirt with mercury and other trace elements that end up in the environment and end up in our children, and end up in the biosphere, and end up in bioaccumulating plants and animals.

It’s really hard to actually bolt carbon capture onto an existing coal plant to deal with this. Boundary Dam in Saskatchewan attempted to bolt a carbon capture and sequestration solution onto their existing coal plant. After a few years of operation, they found a few things. One is, for many of the years, they’d only achieved 40% capture, well below the expectation. Second, they were using the carbon captured for enhanced oil recovery, pumping it down into tapped out oil wells to liquefy the sludge that’s left over, pressurize it, and enable it to be sucked out and then burned. Every time you pump a ton of carbon dioxide into an oil well for that purpose, you get about 0.2 to one tons of new petroleum, which when you burn it, negates the benefits of sequestering CO2.

Thing three is what they found is it made the electricity from Boundary Dam incredibly expensive. It was $140 per megawatt hour for coal generation, which is supposed to be cheap. What Saskatchewan did after that wxperiment was say, okay, we’ve tried it, it doesn’t work economically, and we’re not going to ever do it again.

The Petra Nova coal plant in the southern United States attempted something similar. They had twelve generation units in a massive coal facility. They bolted on carbon capture to one of them. They had to build a natural gas plant to power the carbon capture, because the auxiliary power drain of carbon capture compression and dealing with the carbon dioxide, which in the case of coal is over three times the mass of the coal.

It was a very big drain. The carbon capture and sequestration community claimed that was a success. They managed to get up to 93% capture for one month, but mostly, like Boundary Dam, it failed miserably to achieve its carbon capture objectives. It made the electricity incredibly expensive and they had to build a natural gas plant to provide the power with the right characteristics to run carbon capture. It doesn’t make any sense. It’s just a declining pathway to thermodynamic, economic and climate idiocy.

I don’t have any temperament that allows me to think that making coal cleaner is a solution. Using coal plants less is a solution if coal is required. Replacing your worst coal plants with a supercritical coal plant with low sulfur, washed, high grade coal is a solution, as you’d reduce the capacity factor of your coal plants.

The real answer is not to build more coal, if at all possible. And so for India, the question is, what’s that narrow pathway? If we think of the guide rails, how do you get as close to no coal? What’s the minimum coal that you can manage to build and manage to operate?

There are so many health impacts for your citizens, there are so many productivity impacts from the health impacts. You need a productive labor force, you need a healthy environment for your people to live in.

Coal does none of that. It kills people.

It generates electricity in the absence of anything else. Coal is better than nothing else. But we have alternatives now and they’re cheaper.

Addition by Reji

If you are done. Back to the questions. So India’s coal has high sulfur content, it’s not suitable for even carbon capture and storage even if the technology has matured. A desulfurization unit was approved by our central regulator and several people calculated different numbers. Just before COVID someone calculated that a plant which generates electricity at two or two and a half rupees, the desulfurization unit will add another 40 to 45. Nobody was willing to buy into that. It was a 20% to 25% increase in the price of power. Nothing has been done so far.

Now that battery storage has become much cheaper compared to many other technologies, the last two years the ISGF has been arguing that we should not spend that much billions of dollars installing desulfurization units on thermal power stations which we are going to retire after some years. Instead we should invest that money into building distributed storage on the grid by which we can integrate more solar and wind.

Question

35% of that global power mix will be solar. With so much uncertainty about the sunshine, how can we be so sure that 35% contribution of total power in future will be from solar power?

Answer

Two or three things related to this question. Yes, solar doesn’t work at night, and in heavy evening loads, there isn’t solar power. Well, time shifting solar a few hours is easy, using two different simple common technologies. India is, while not one of the biggest countries, it’s not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not the United States, it’s still the 7th biggest country in the world, and that includes east to west. So sunshine that’s hitting the west coast of India in a low demand period can be transmitted across India to high demand centers in the east. And similarly, you are in a geography where you actually have neighbors, and transmission can flow to your neighbors, so you can actually be transmitting peak solar across greater geographical distances. You’re already doing some of that. That’s going to expand.

The second thing is it’s easy to put a lot of solar energy into increasingly cheap batteries and shift the electricity a few hours into the evening. We’re seeing that increasingly occur in affluent countries and battery prices are plummeting. It’s even surprised me. Everybody’s being surprised by how much battery prices are going down. I’ve been saying that in 2020s, not betting on batteries is like around 2000, not betting on fiber optics and data availability, or wireless and data availability, it’s a similar kind of constraint. The constraint is a temporary one based upon an apparent lag. Right now, we’re seeing CATL projecting delivery of batteries at $56 per kilowatt hour of capacity. That’s a price point that wasn’t expected to be achieved until 2030 by people who are actually optimistic about batteries.

Then there’s the other forms of grid storage. I’ll be talking more about both grid storage and transmission in subsequent lectures. The sunshine hours availability, as I said in New Delhi, it’s 12 hours of generation. If we overbuild 25%, that actually accommodates most of our shoulder needs, and we can move the peak of sunshine a bit and actually then collaborate with wind and the other forms of generation that are on the grid to provide that power that we need. It’s not that hard.

Question

What is the optimal mix of sustainable energy capacity and technology deployment in a country like India.

Answer

There are people who’ve done this kind of work and there are lots of different scenarios. I encourage people to go to explore the Mark Z. Jacobson, which has a perspective on India. As said, he leans too heavily into rooftop solar from my perspective, but he’s in the ballpark. So you can look at his projections of transmission, wind, solar and water and get a pretty good answer there. It’s Mark Z. Jacobson, Stanford University 100% renewables by 2050. His models now extend to, I think it’s 145 countries globally because he reruns them with CIA factbook data for every country. It’s not perfect, but it’s a plausible scenario that’s worth looking at.

India has also has a future oriented grid strategy that it’s articulated. I disagree with aspects of it. It’s a bit too heavy on hydrogen, which is a dead end, and we’ll be discussing why. There’s a bit too much focus on nuclear and there’s too much of a reliance on fossil fuels. There’s an underappreciation of the value propositions of renewable energy, which is fairly typical for some of these legacy things.

Technology failed at this point, so the last couple of questions don’t appear in the transcript.

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Ninety miles west of Chicago, the corn and soybean fields stretch to the sky, and dreams of the clean energy future dangle — just out of reach.

To the east of Route 52, there’s the first phase of the 9,500-acre Steward Creek solar farm, in the works since 2019.

To the west, there’s South Dixon Solar, which once hoped to begin construction on 3,800 acres in 2022.

Both projects have been approved by the Lee County Board. But neither can be built, according to a county official, due to PJM Interconnection, a powerful but little-known entity that controls access to the high-voltage electric grid in northern Illinois.

“There isn’t anything we can do to help the state move forward (with its clean energy goals),” said Lee County Zoning Administrator Alice Henkel. “This is all PJM. They have the control.”

As the clean energy transition surges ahead, with prices for electricity from wind and solar dropping and market share growing, long waitlists for new power sources seeking approval to connect to the electric grid have quietly emerged as a major barrier.

Across the nation, the waitlists for large projects to connect to the grid — and deliver power to homes and businesses — have ballooned, leaving over 1,400 gigawatts of wind and solar power in limbo, enough to allow the United States to achieve 90% clean electricity.

“We really shouldn’t have this kind of breakdown in something that’s so vital,” said Mike Jacobs, a senior energy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

And nowhere is the problem worse, according to a recent first-of-its-kind report, than in the PJM region, which spans Washington, D.C., and 13 states, in whole or in part, including northern Illinois.

PJM came in last out of seven regions, with a grade of D-, in the Generation Interconnection Scorecard report prepared for the business association Advanced Energy United.

PJM’s performance had “few bright spots,” according to the report, which was based on publicly available data, as well as recent interviews with energy developers and engineers working in the field.

The report found that in a nation with “agonizingly slow” grid connection processes, the PJM process of studying and green-lighting new requests to connect to the grid was the slowest, with the most unpredictable timelines.

One clean energy developer was quoted as saying he had stopped doing new projects in the PJM region.

PJM’s delays are severe enough to pose a significant risk to Illinois’ ambitious clean energy goals, according to a 2023 report from the Natural Resources Defense Council.

“(PJM) has unnecessarily set our transition to cleaner energy back by years,” said Clara Summers, the Consumers for a Better Grid campaign manager at the Citizens Utility Board.

PJM, a federally regulated private company that manages part of the high-voltage electric grid, declined a request for a phone interview, instead issuing a written statement saying the interconnection scorecard report “is an assessment of conditions and practices that no longer exist in PJM.”

“Over three years ago, PJM and its stakeholders identified improvements to the interconnection process and developed landmark reforms in record time. These new rules are enabling PJM to process New Service Requests faster and more efficiently,” the statement said.

PJM said the “more relevant challenge” is getting previously approved projects built.

“This is the challenge we need to confront as an industry rather than looking back on problems that have been largely addressed,” the statement said. “PJM is not delaying the energy transition.”

But critics of PJM’s operation say that delays continue.

While PJM points to 40 gigawatts of power that’s approved but awaiting construction, there were 290 gigawatts of power waiting to connect to the PJM grid at the end of 2023, up from 88 gigawatts in 2018, according to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a federally funded research center.

A tidal wave

In Lee County, wind turbines sprout from cornfields, some as tall as skyscrapers.

There was heated debate when the state’s first utility-scale wind farm was built here in 2003, Henkel said as she drove her SUV down quiet country roads.

But as time went on, farms continued to produce, the turbines did their jobs and concerns faded.

The county now has 280 wind turbines, with enough power to meet the electricity needs of roughly 200,000 homes.

“It works for this area,” said Henkel. “We are contributing to green energy and energy independence, so I’m proud of that.”

Proposals for big solar projects started arriving here about five years ago, part of a national trend.

A tidal wave of renewable energy projects — driven by falling wind and solar costs and state and federal policies — was building, and heading toward the grid.

“It’s happened really fast,” said Joe Rand, an energy policy researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and lead author of Queued Up, a series of reports on the grid-connection waitlist. “We’re in a rapid and fundamental energy transition in this country.”

In the PJM region, the median time a new energy project had to wait before being allowed to connect to the grid rose to more than five years in 2022, up from just 20 months in 2005.

PJM effectively slammed on the brakes in 2022, with a decision, approved by regulators, that it would not review newer grid-connection requests — submitted after September 2021 — until early 2026, according to government documents and PJM reports.

That allowed PJM to focus on clearing the backlog of older requests but left newer projects with potential waits of up to four years — just to begin the review process.

As part of a broader package of generally well-received reforms, PJM also went to a new review process in which grid-connection requests are studied in clusters, rather than one by one. Other changes included new financial requirements for applicants, aimed at discouraging speculative projects.

Among the local projects affected by PJM delays: Deriva Energy’s South Dixon solar farm in Lee County, which applied to connect to the grid in 2019. According to PJM’s timelines, the project should get an agreement to connect to the grid by mid-2025.

Phase 1 of Hexagon Energy’s Steward Creek solar farm submitted its requests to connect to the grid in 2019 and 2020. The project should get an agreement by mid-2025.

“Having things dragged out — it certainly makes the development timeline a lot trickier,” said Hexagon senior director of development Scott Remer. “It introduces risk to how we’re going to continue to develop and mature the project.”

Planning for the future

No one is saying that PJM’s job is easy.

The Pennsylvania-based company — a membership organization that includes utilities and power providers — is the largest grid operator in the country, coordinating and directing the flow of electricity to 65 million people in a time of unprecedented change.

And PJM is by no means the only region struggling.

A recent report based on a survey of 123 wind and solar developers nationwide found that the grid-connection process was the top cause of delays of six months or more, followed by local ordinances and zoning, community opposition and supply chain issues.

At the Solar Energy Industries Association, senior director of energy markets and counsel Melissa Alfano said that the grid-connection process nationwide is a “huge” problem for big solar farms.

Rand said the issue has moved “to the forefront of the national energy conversation.”

“(Grid-connection) has become the leading barrier to new power plants coming online and new renewables being deployed,” he said.

There are more than 1,400 gigawatts of clean energy in grid connection waitlists nationwide, and 1,000 gigawatts of battery storage, or technology that collects energy for later use, according to the most recent Queued Up report.

That would be enough to take the United States to 90% clean electricity under current conditions, according to Nikit Abhyankar, a senior scientist at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley.

However, Abhyankar cautioned that only about 19% of projects that enter the grid-connection waitlists end up being built.

Before the waitlists surged, about 24% of projects got built, according to the 2020 edition of Queued Up.

PJM, historically a leader among grid operators, entered the current era in a strong position. But critics say that while some regions have taken bold steps to meet the challenge of clean energy, PJM has moved more cautiously.

“Honestly, it’s deer in the headlights behavior,” said Summers, grid campaign manager at CUB.

California’s grid operator — or PJM equivalent — has pursued a blue-state strategy of proactively planning the expansion of the high-voltage grid. That’s helpful, experts say, because a right-sized grid allows new clean energy to connect more easily.

In the Texas grid region, a red-state, free-market approach has also drawn praise: new projects can connect to the grid fairly easily, but bear additional risk that their power production may be curtailed if the energy supply exceeds demand.

Both regions earned overall grades of B in the interconnection scorecard report, the highest grades awarded.

PJM, in contrast, stuck to a “sub-par” process for studying grid-connection requests for far too long, the report said. And when PJM did make reforms, the transition to an improved process froze opportunities for new projects to be considered.

The report also gave PJM a low grade for forward-looking grid planning, in which strategically located long-distance power lines are built and upgraded to meet the growing demand for electricity.

Experts say that planning for the grid of the future — and building it — brings a multitude of benefits: It’s easier for far-flung locations to access the cleanest, lowest-cost electricity; the risk of blackouts and other power interruptions diminishes; and adding new power sources is faster and less costly.

But today the United States is expanding the grid “in the most expensive way possible,” via painstaking piecemeal additions, according to Rob Gramlich, president of the power-sector consulting firm Grid Strategies and a co-author of the interconnection scorecard report.

“It’s very costly to just keep putting these Band-Aids on the system when there are huge economic efficiencies that come with higher-capacity lines and upgrades,” Gramlich said.

Studies have repeatedly concluded that expanding and upgrading the high-voltage grid creates economic benefits, with a 2022 study in the journal IEEE Transactions on Power Systems finding that adding high-voltage power lines between huge, largely disconnected sections of the grid would create as much as $2.90 worth of benefits for every dollar spent.

PJM got a D+ for proactive grid-planning in the interconnection scorecard report.

The report did note PJM is finalizing a new long-term planning process. However, the authors wrote, it’s not yet clear if the new process will lead to the kind of proactive expansion that would make it easier for new energy sources to come online.

Ambitious targets

Peter Nichols grew up in Lee County: swimming and canoeing in the Rock River, and accompanying his grandfather on visits to his farmland.

“We’d go around every week and collect eggs and check on the cattle,” he recalled.

It was the kind of childhood that forges deep ties to the land, and Nichols, a retired doctor and emeritus professor in Southern California who visits Lee County regularly, said that when he and his siblings received offers to lease land to two local solar projects, they took the decision seriously.

They spent a lot of time discussing the pluses and minuses, including the opportunity solar would offer to let the land recover from the demands of corn and soybean farming.

They decided solar was the right choice for them about four years ago, Nichols said, and then they waited.

“We’re attached (to our land), we want things that are good for it, and now we’re kind of just held in limbo. That’s aggravating,” Nichols said.

The grid-connection slowdown has affected a wide swath of people, including landowners who plan to lease to developers and the growing number of companies — including data centers — that want to use clean energy.

States such as Illinois, which have set ambitious targets for wind and solar energy, are feeling the impact as well.

A 2023 Natural Resources Defense Council report found that the PJM grid-connection process isn’t currently getting new wind and solar farms online fast enough to put Illinois on pace to meet its clean electricity goals. And a recent planning report from the Illinois Power Agency said grid-connection delays — along with supply chain issues and the amount of time needed for construction — create a “significant challenge” for ambitious state clean-electricity targets.

Still, advocates and experts are heartened by increasing attention to grid-connection delays nationwide, including a 2023 order from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission requiring reforms to the grid-connection process.

Another federal order, addressing long-term planning of the high-voltage grid, is expected this year, and federal regulators are looking into other improvements.

Rand said there is a lot more room to improve the grid-connection process, but he is “optimistic” that the country is at or near the peak of the problem.

Gramlich, whose résumé includes a stint as a senior PJM economist in the late 1990s, said that every problem in the grid connection scorecard report is solvable, and in each case, someone around the country is doing things right.

“Now really all we need to do — at the risk of oversimplification — is identify those activities that work and get everybody else to adopt those activities,” he said.

Rooftop view

On a brisk afternoon in March, Lee County offered evidence of the delays — and a glimpse of what could lie beyond.

When Henkel pulled her SUV to a stop next to a piece of farmland promised to the Steward Creek solar farm, bare fields stretched for miles, interrupted, here and there, by a few lonely landmarks — a house, a water tower, a smattering of leafless trees.

There was nothing to suggest rows of sleek black panels, turning in tandem to follow the sun, until Henkel offered up her cellphone, with photos she had taken during a visit to a big solar farm in Coles County in central Illinois.

She had actually climbed up on top of her car to get a better view of the panels, she said with a chuckle.

“It’s hard to really grasp it from the ground level, because of how tall they are,” she said. “Then once I got up there I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is quite the sight.’”

Enphase Energy’s Recovery Can’t Come Soon Enough The Motley Fool

Representative image. Credit: Canva

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has announced the recipients of a $7 billion grant initiative aimed at increasing solar energy in low-income and disadvantaged communities. The initiative is part of the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, part of the Investing in America program funded through President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.

A total of 60 select individuals, including states, territories, tribal governments, municipalities and nonprofit organizations, will benefit from the Solar for All program. The initiative is designed to fund the development of sustainable residential solar projects targeting more than 900,000 households across the country. The primary goal is to reduce energy costs, create quality jobs in underserved areas, and promote environmental justice while addressing the pressing issue of climate change.

EPA Administrator Michael S. Regan emphasized the administration’s commitment to ensuring that no community is left behind, with the investment expected to create hundreds of thousands of jobs and save families nearly $8 billion in energy costs. In addition, the projects are predicted to make a significant contribution to improving air quality and combating climate change.

John Podesta, Senior Advisor to the President on International Climate Policy, echoed these sentiments, citing solar power as the most cost-effective form of electricity currently available. He noted that the Solar for All grants will extend the financial benefits of solar power to economically disadvantaged groups that have historically been marginalized in terms of energy efficiency.

Additionally, US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Acting Secretary Adrianne Todman noted that the grants will improve energy efficiency and climate resilience in affordable housing across the US. , thereby promoting healthier community environments.

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According to an analysis of 26 projects, EU member states have dramatically increased their solar energy goals within their updated national energy and climate plans.

SolarPower Europe said that 26 of the 27 EU countries have submitted updated national energy and climate plans (NECPs), increasing their solar targets by an average of 87% from previous versions.

Governments are banking on renewables more than ever, but grid and flexibility planning lags far behind renewable targets, putting the energy transition at risk, the organization added.

EU member states were supposed to submit updated draft NECPs last summer. The only country missing is Austria. SolarPower Europe noted that its NECP is “on hold indefinitely”. In 2019, the European Commission approved the previous phase of the plans in 2019.

According to the analysis, Lithuania and Ireland stand out by increasing their targets by more than five and 10 respectively. Poland tripled its target, while Finland, Portugal, Slovenia and Sweden more than doubled their previous targets. Spain has increased its ambition by 95%, the report says.

NECPs lack long-term support schemes, targets for consumers

The Union stressed that most NECPs fail to provide long-term visibility to 2030 by introducing support schemes. Besides auction pipelines, investors also need a clear view of self-consumption schemes, especially as net metering is being phased out, he added.

Regarding decentralized photovoltaic generation, only Spain, France, Croatia, Ireland, Portugal and Romania have provided quantitative targets for rooftop PV. The rest do not distinguish between rooftop and utility-scale facilities, which creates a problem for the visibility of the rooftop market, the report’s authors emphasize.

The description and trajectory of support earmarked for manufacturers or energy communities is often limited or partial, he said. Only Greece, France, Ireland, Italy and Lithuania provided sufficiently detailed information on consumers, while Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy and Poland passed the energy communities segment, the document said.

Bonadio: Without proper system planning, solar projects will go to waste

SolarPower Europe Senior Policy Advisor Jonathan Bonadio said Europe risks putting the cart before the horse. “Energy system planning should be aligned with energy production targets. “Without proper energy system planning, solar projects will not be implemented, solar energy will be wasted and the business case for solar energy will be undermined.”

According to the report, NECPs fail to truly connect the dots that are critical to making the energy transition a reality: grid deployment, modernization and flexibility. Less than half of the EU countries have relevant energy storage targets, only two plan relevant investment in their distribution networks, and only four have provided a realistic target for demand-side flexibility through the roll-out of smart meters or demand-side response: Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus and Croatia.

Only two countries have set a target or investment plan for their distribution network

This demand-side gap is preventing citizens from adapting to the new energy reality, the report says.

Its authors emphasized demand-side flexibility as a key tool to reduce investments in slow-to-build network infrastructure.

Regarding energy storage, plans for Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece, Spain, Croatia, Hungary, Lithuania and Portugal include specific targets such as megawatts, megawatt-hours or euros.

The analysis shows that while the lack of storage infrastructure or demand-side response undoubtedly and unnecessarily puts pressure on the electricity grid, only France and Malta have set a target or investment plan for their distribution electricity grid.

SolarPower highlighted that the overall ambition for 2030 is seen at 626 GW, compared to the EU Solar Strategy target of 750 GW and industrial capacity of 902 GW.

Governments now have until June 30 to submit any updates before their plans are considered final.

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