The intermittent nature of renewables like wind and solar require grid operators to balance these resources without increasing costs and pollution from fossil fuel-based power. There are three main ways to do this: the first is energy storage, to store surplus solar and wind energy for nighttime or windless days. The second is demand response, or flexiwatts, to moderate demand based on renewable availability.
But the less-discussed third option for states like California is to harness renewables from across the west.
James Bushnell (Energy Institute at Haas) and Benjamin Hobbs (Johns Hopkins University) describe the benefits of California expanding its “energy imbalance market” to cover renewables in other states. While some fret that the expansion could create governance headaches and possibly open the door to California importing dirty out-of-state coal power, they knock down these arguments and also discuss the huge benefits of an export market for California’s renewables:
There are triple benefits to being able to more easily export this excess power. First, it will actually lower costs for Californians by improving the efficiency of those other plants. Second, it will lower costs for other states because they can reduce output from their conventional plants. Third, air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions will go down because California plants will operate more efficiently while plants elsewhere will operate less.
The state is overdue for integrating its grid into the west in this way, and it’s encouraging to see California’s grid operator take steps to launch the expanding market.
Well, it doesn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out which industries stand to lose if California transitions to a low-carbon economy. Judging by the latest attacks on SB 350 and SB 32, sprawl developers and the oil industry are feeling a little panicked.
First oil. They sent out a deliberately misleading mailer claiming that SB 350, which seeks to reduce California’s oil consumption in half by 2030, will lead to gas shortages and higher prices. Under the fake pro-consumer-sounding group the California Drivers Alliance, they claim the following:
The Gas Restriction Act of 2015 (SB350) will restrict the use of gas and diesel by 50 percent. This law will limit how often we can drive our own cars. The state will also be collecting and monitoring our personal driving habits and tracking how much gas we use. They’re now reviewing regulations to force automakers to include data monitoring systems in all cars so that regulators will be able to penalize and fine us if we drive too much or use too much gas.
The Sacramento Bee then shot this lying fish in its barrel with a fact check:
The ad exploits a lack of specificity in Senate Bill 350 about what measures the California Air Resources Board could take to reduce petroleum use. But it misleads by suggesting gas rationing, surcharges and citations based on driving habits are in store.
Bottom line: California will be pursuing fuel economy measures, electric vehicles, hydrogen fuel cells and biofuels to meet these objectives — not gas rationing. With battery costs declining, battery electrics should be the dominant vehicles in production by then anyway.
Next comes big sprawl in the guise of the Building Industry Association. The BIA claims SB 32, to extend our greenhouse gas reduction goals to 2030 and 2050, will be an automatic “zero net energy” mandate, leading to an additional $58,000 in costs for each new housing unit, or a price increase of over 12 percent.
However, these numbers once again mislead. First off, the bill is no such mandate for new construction. The California Energy Commission will continue to develop new ways to reduce pollution from new buildings, but it will be on the same trajectory it’s been on for decades, which has saved Californians billions since the 1970s.
Second, most of the costs the BIA tallies are attributed to oversized, expensive solar PV arrays for each new home. Even if all new buildings had to have those arrays (which they don’t), prices will come down by 2030 significantly (80% in the last five years or so), while most neighborhoods would likely pool together on community solar rather than purchasing it individually. Finally, any increase in efficiency measures and solar will only save California residents in reduced energy bills.
For more on the BIA arguments, NRDC has a nice take-down here.
I guess it’s good news these industries are fighting back. If we have any hope of a cleaner, more prosperous and sustainable economy, it will only happen if these industries go the way of the fossils they help burn.
Well, it was bound to happen. With California’s renewable industry taking hold and prices declining, the broader pushback had to begin sometime. Sure, utilities and some ratepayer groups have been decrying renewables for a while.
But now we’re seeing a new attack from conservatives: renewables will cause “energy poverty” by driving up electricity prices.
Here’s Terry Jones in Investors Business Daily:
California’s policies are, by current engineering and scientific standards, insane. Under its current rules, 25% of the state’s electricity consumption will have to come from renewable sources by 2016. It won’t happen, but it’s the law. By 2020, 33% will have to come from renewable resources. And if Gov. Jerry Brown has his way, it’ll jump to 50% by 2030.
Of course utilities will not meet the standard. But they will try. And doing so, says Lesser, will make electricity more expensive. “When retail consumers subsidize electricity supplies at above-market costs, retail prices inevitably rise, even if the fuel is ‘free,’ ” Lesser wrote. They already have: Since 2004, residential electricity prices are up by more than 30%.
What’s insane is that Jones doesn’t know that California is on pace to well exceed the 33% target by 2020, given all the projects in the pipeline. It’s also insane that Jones doesn’t acknowledge the remarkable price declines in solar (10-20% just last year).
Jones may have a point, however, that rates may increase to reflect the cost of incorporating these new energy sources. It’s unclear by how much, but we should keep in mind two things: 1) low-income ratepayers already are eligible for heavily discounted electricity and other utilities, so they will not be affected, and 2) eligible residents, including the working poor, can get solar on their roofs with no-money down, thanks to the proliferation of solar leases. Those panels can offset rate increases.
And in the long run, what’s the alternative? Keep relying on large-scale, low-employment dirty power, which often pollutes most in the poorest neighborhoods? Or keep pushing on distributed, job-rich solar and wind resources that produce power cleanly and ever more cheaply?
What’s more, the end game here could have a major upside for California’s poor. In addition to the solar jobs that can’t be outsourced and the energy savings from going solar, even with a solar lease, decreasing solar and battery costs means more and more Californians will be able to un-tether from the grid completely. We’re not there yet, but at this rate we’ll be there in the next few decades.
And when that day arrives for everyone, energy will be cheap, clean, and providing major job opportunities for the state that helped make it happen with its forward-thinking policies.
What in the world is going on in America? According to a global poll on climate attitudes, we are an outlier:
In the U.S. — unlike everywhere else — being better educated doesn’t guarantee that you are more likely to believe that climate change is a real thing that is actually happening. Instead, education seems to polarize in the United States: More education is correlated with greater concern about climate change among liberals and Democrats, and less concern from conservatives and Republicans. It seems that being better educated just means you have more ammo for defending the belief that your existing partisan identification bequeaths to you.
Although maybe I should be surprised that people in other countries actually allow new facts to change their minds. Either way, this should bolster the idea that we need to rely more on personal stories of climate impacts rather than citing evidence.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will finally release its “Clean Power Plan” today to regulate carbon emissions from the power sector. The agency was required to do so by a 2007 Supreme Court decision. Yet due to what must be the brutal politics of trying to regulate coal-fired power plants, the Obama Administration dragged its feet until now — six years into the Obama presidency.
The final rules require a 32 percent drop in emissions by 2030 from 2005 levels. But this target is extremely watered down, to the point where it actually projects a slower rate of progress going forward on carbon emissions than we’ve been experiencing since 2005 to date, given that we’re already halfway to those targets with business-as-usual progress. Yet this is still better than the draft rules, which had targets so low that five states (!) were actually already in compliance with the 2030 goals.
Michael Grunwald pretty much sums it up in Politico:
If you’re really ranking them, the Clean Power Plan is at best the fourth-strongest action that Obama has taken to combat climate change, behind his much-maligned 2009 stimulus package, which poured $90 billion into clean energy and jump-started a green revolution; his dramatic increases in fuel-efficiency standards for cars and trucks, which should reduce our oil consumption by 2 million barrels per day; and his crackdown on mercury and other air pollutants, which has helped inspire utilities to retire 200 coal-fired power plants in just five years. The new carbon regulations should help prevent backsliding, and they should provide a talking point for U.S. negotiators at the global climate talks in Paris, but the 2030 goals would not seem overly ambitious even without new limits on carbon.
I couldn’t agree more with Grunwald on his rankings. The stimulus in particular is underestimated in its impact on boosting the clean technology sector. The sad part is that even this weak action today on climate will provoke endless litigation. And if a Republican wins the presidency in 2016, expect the EPA to gut and delay these rules and approve weak state implementation plans.
All relatively depressing, but these rules are still better than nothing. And maybe we can hold out hope that they will be strengthened over time.
National Public Radio’s environmental reporter Abrahm Lustgarten investigates the history of the Colorado River water allocations and finds that bad policy is as much to blame as drought and climate change for the current shortages:
Lustgarten says conservation and increased efficiency in farming could reintroduce enormous quantities of water back into the Colorado River system. By Lustgarten’s estimate, if Arizona farmers switched from growing cotton to growing wheat, it would save enough water to supply about 1.4 million people with water each year.
But, Lustgarten adds, “There’s nothing really more politically touchy in the West than water and the prospect of taking away people’s water rights. So what you have when you talk about increasing efficiency or reapportioning water is essentially an argument between those who have it, which are the farmers and the people who have been on that land for generations, and those who don’t, which are the cities who are relative newcomers to the area.”
Notably, the area features one of the country’s largest coal-fired power plant at the Navajo Generating Station, dedicated almost exclusively to moving water around the Colorado River states. So the drought and water situation affects our energy supply and related pollution as much as anything. Re-examination of water rights, coupled with better financing mechanisms and rate structures, could therefore go a long way to solving both the water shortages and pollution from energy generation.
With more solar panels, internet connected home appliances, electric vehicles, and small-scale batteries, California will soon have millions of “distributed” energy resources it can tap into to make the grid more efficient and clean. The entity in charge of managing the grid just made it much easier to connect and aggregate these items as a bulk resource:
California is already busy creating new regulations and market structures to integrate rooftop solar, behind-the-meter batteries, plug-in electric vehicles and fast-acting demand response systems into its grid. This week, California’s grid operator took another step down this path — one that could allow these resources to tap the state’s grid markets as a revenue-generating resource, possibly as early as next year.
On Wednesday, the California Independent System Operator (CAISO) published a proposal (PDF) for creating a new class of grid market players, known as distributed energy resource providers — DERPs for short. In simple terms, the proposal sets rules for how DERs can be aggregated and dispatched to serve the same grid markets open to utility-scale energy installations today.
As the rules roll out and get refined, the state will become an international leader on integrating these resources into the grid, while providing owners of these assets with an additional revenue stream — further encouraging their deployment.
Former Representative Henry Waxman breaks down the options for the president’s final 18 months in office:
Executive authority, especially under the Clean Air Act, provides numerous paths for meaningful climate action. It can deliver popular, pro-growth, business-friendly pollution reductions that today are not possible through legislation. That is the legacy of one of our most important laws, and it can shape the legacy of this administration and the next.
Waxman goes on to list potential options to reduce emissions in aviation, cars and trucks, and other industrial sectors outside of electricity. It’s worth reading the whole thing.
I’ll be on Warren Olney’s show tonight at 7pm on KCRW Radio (89.9 FM in Los Angeles), discussing the Pope’s apparent bashing of cap-and-trade as a means to address climate change. Joining the roundtable discussion will be David Baker from the San Francisco Chronicle, who wrote an article describing the Pope’s comments, and Scott Edwards of Food & Water Watch, who doesn’t like cap-and-trade and was pleased with the Pope’s position.
Meanwhile, here’s what the Pope wrote to stir this particular issue up:
171. The strategy of buying and selling “carbon credits” can lead to a new form of speculation which would not help reduce the emission of polluting gases worldwide. This system seems to provide a quick and easy solution under the guise of a certain commitment to the environment, but in no way does it allow for the radical change which present circumstances require. Rather, it may simply become a ploy which permits maintaining the excessive consumption of some countries and sectors.
Hope you can listen in or stream. I’ll post a link later.
UPDATE: you can listen to the show here.
Haters gonna hate
The Pope weighed in on Thursday with strong moral arguments in favor of addressing climate change. But in his landmark encyclical, he apparently bashed cap-and-trade as a means of addressing carbon pollution:
“The strategy of buying and selling ‘carbon credits’ can lead to a new form of speculation which would not help reduce the emission of polluting gases worldwide,” Francis wrote in his wide-ranging encyclical on the environment and global warming.
“This system seems to provide a quick and easy solution under the guise of a certain commitment to the environment, but in no way does it allow for the radical change which present circumstances require,” he wrote. “Rather, it may simply become a ploy which permits maintaining the excessive consumption of some countries and sectors.”
I have been a critic of cap-and-trade in the past, particularly the federal version proposed in 2009. The evidence to date for cap-and-trade at that point wasn’t great, with failed programs in Southern California and the European Union and a seeming success in the Northeast that had more to do with a technological fix than program design.
But I’ve been impressed with California’s efforts to implement it. First, it’s been executed well so far, with no apparent market manipulation and some real results in terms of emissions reductions. Second, it’s been an important backstop to other state climate policies, such as for renewable energy, low-carbon fuel, and energy efficiency. And third, it’s generated a lot of revenue (up to $4 billion this year) that will be used in significant amounts for pollution reduction in low-income communities, including for weatherization and affordable housing.
So why is the Pope a hater? My guess is that his criticism is more about the European cap-and-trade system, which did not work as planned and resulted in windfall profits for some sectors, particularly electric utilities.
I think if the Pope were to look closely at California’s program, he would come away with a better feeling about it. And in any event, California’s climate efforts involve much more than cap-and-trade. But to be sure, the program provides a critical safety net to ensure the state meets its 2020 greenhouse gas targets. It may not be as elegant as a carbon tax or as forceful as command-and-control regulations, but it will get the job done. And that should be worth some papal love.
