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26 Mar, 10 tweets, 8 min read
🚨New Study🚨

The key to a 100% clean electricity future in California is Clean Firm Power!

Study led by @EnvDefenseFund & @CleanAirCATF w/3 modeling teams (incl. me).

Read about it in @ISSUESinST: issues.org/california-dec…

Read the full report at: edf.org/cleanfirmpower
Jane Long was fearless leader w/Steven Hamburg + @ArmondCohen1.

Modeling teams: Ejeong Baik @Stanford w/urbs model; myself @Princeton w/GenX; & @ethree_inc's @cleakolster @kiranpchawla & @ArneOlsonE3 w/RESOLVE.

Sally Benson, Rob Jackson, David Victor & @colvin round out team.
This major effort was assembled after California passed the landmark SB100 legislation in late 2018, setting a requirement to reach 100% carbon-free electricity by 2045.

Our question: how can California decarbonize by 2045 without sacrificing reliability or affordability?
The answer: build wind, solar & batteries rapidly while also developing & deploying new CLEAN FIRM POWER, carbon-free power sources that can be relied on whenever needed, for as long as they are needed: advanced geothermal & nuclear, gas or biomass w/CCS, clean hydrogen.
With 1+ clean firm power options, all three models find California can build a reliable 100% carbon-free grid at ~7-9 cents/kWh, which is ~same cost as paid by ratepayers today (9.1 cents/kWh).

Without these techs, costs & challenges of reaching carbon-free grid are significant
Wind, solar & batteries will be cornerstones in California's clean future. But pushing them to do the entire job themselves isn't smart. We need to complete the team with CLEAN FIRM POWER sources that don't depend on weather and aren't energy constrained as batteries are.
The report identifies lots of key benefits of adding CLEAN FIRM POWER to the portfolio:

1. Lower costs
2. Less rapid deployment rates for solar & batteries
3. Less over-building of under-utilized RE & storage capacity
4. Far less land area & transmission expansion required
What about long-duration energy storage? I took look at this too (both underground hydrogen storage & ultra-cheap metal-air batteries). These provide another useful arrow in quiver, but are partial substitutes for clean firm power. RE+storage only still meainingfully more costly.
Interested in learning more about the future role of long-duration energy storage in decarbonized electricity systems?

Good news: @nsepulvedam @dhariksm & I have a new paper coming out in @NatureEnergyJnl next Monday on exactly this!

Stay tuned...
Resources:

1. @ISSUESinST article on study issues.org/california-dec…

2. Full report via @EnvDefenseFund edf.org/cleanfirmpower

3. Related 2018 paper on role of clean firm resources w/@nsepulvedam doi.org/10.1016/j.joul…

4. My seminar on clean firm power

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More from @JesseJenkins

JesseJenkins Profile picture
6 Mar
Since rebound effects came up in my Voltscast chat w/ @drvolts' intro, a new paper by @steve_r_sorrell is timely! carbonbrief.org/guest-post-why…
"economy-wide impact of these effects and find they may erode more than half of the potential energy savings from improved energy efficiency."
Here's the lit review on rebound effects I wrote @TheBTI in 2011, which @drvolts mentions in the podcast. I inspired by the earlier work of @steve_r_sorrell at UKERC as well as @hsaunders6 thebreakthrough.org/articles/new-r…
Rebound effects describes phenomena where energy efficiency makes energy services (lighting, heating, industrial process) cheaper, inducing greater demand for those services (direct rebound), spending of savings on other energy using activities (indirect) + macroeconomic effects
Read 12 tweets
JesseJenkins Profile picture
5 Mar
IMPORTANT NOTE for journalists and others reporting on this ERCOT generator outage data & #TexasBlackout #TexasFreeze:

ERCOT's reporting method for wind capacity outages overstates the impact of wind outages on reliability by about 4x.

Here's why...
The outages reported for wind in this report are based on reductions from the "Seasonal Max MW," which is the maxim rated capacity of the wind farm in the winter. But ERCOT wisely does NOT count on wind farms to produce 100% of their output (the wind is inconstant. Duh).
As the Winter "Seasonal Assessment of Resource Adequacy for the ERCOT Region" report details, ERCOT 'de-rates' wind during winter peak load events to account for its variability. The derate differs for wind in different regions, but the average derate is ~25% of the max capacity.
Read 5 tweets
JesseJenkins Profile picture
5 Mar
Ok time for a #EnergyTwitter crowdsource investigation: @ERCOT_ISO just released plant-level generator outage data from the #TexasBlackout. Here's a PDF ercot.com/content/wcm/li…

An Excel file is also out: dropbox.com/s/xz91kfbk0vvx…

Holler if you see anything notable! Ill do same.
No cause of outage information included though, so still requires some real guess-work as to what went wrong.

Focus on ~12:00am-2:00am February 15th period. That's when mass generator outages sent the Texas grid dangerously close to full system blackout. ercot.com/content/wcm/ke…
Like, what the heck was going on here with all of these natural gas plants failing over the course of two hours? Many correlated failures at multiple plants at about the same times (12:23-12:27am; 1:00am; 1:23-1:35am).
Read 8 tweets
JesseJenkins Profile picture
25 Feb
Wow, this graphic from a new @ERCOT_ISO report on the #TexasBlackouts shows how close the ERCOT grid was to a cascading failure that could have easily blacked out the whole system. ercot.com/content/wcm/ke… 1/
Going into the night of Valentine's Day, February 14th, a new winter peak demand of 69,222 MW was set at 7:06pm. By 1:23am in the middle of the night on February 15th, frigid temps had left more than 35,000 MW of generating capacity offline. 2/
Faced with greater demand & diminished generation capacity, ERCOT, the grid operator, ordered transmission utilities to start disconnecting millions of customers. The initial order was to shed 10,500 MW of demand. This grew to a height of 20,000 MW by the end of Feb 15th. 3/
Read 11 tweets
JesseJenkins Profile picture
24 Feb
A good look at the variability of wind and solar resources in Texas, from @VibrantCE. They show that wind power can exhibit significant inter-annual variability, and some extreme years exhibit winter months with near-zero output from wind. This is rare, but happens.
Solar exhibits less interannual & monthly/weekly variation than wind, but there is, of course, this thing called night. That said, batteries + solar can mitigate diurnal cycles well. So solar+storage can be counted on a bit more than wind it seems, with higher capacity value.
This variability needs to be accounted for in resource adequacy planning, including the potential for correlated extreme low wind events during periods of system stress.
Read 5 tweets
JesseJenkins Profile picture
20 Feb
The Lessons of the Texas Power Disaster nyti.ms/2NfdrPv

Today's @nytimes editorial cites and echoes my recent op ed on what went wrong in Texas and what it means for building a cleaner & more resilient energy system.
For more on what went wrong in Texas, see my op ed in the @nytimes here
For a forward looking view on how to ensure adequate firm resources in a clean electricity system, my seminar on The Critical Role of Clean Firm Resources here:
Finally, check out this week's issue of @TheEconomist, which has a cover story building on the @Princeton Net-Zero America study about how the United States can regain it's leadership on #ClimateAction and build a clean energy economy
Read 4 tweets

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