We are just not building enough renewables and storage. With the retirement rate of generation plants scheduled to exceed the new energy (not capacity) provided from renewables, the US will risk massive price spikes and rolling blackouts by 2030 during extreme conditions.
Every time I do the math for December (month with least renewable energy production), the numbers become grimmer. Something has got to give.
Solar alone will not solve the issue, in fact no single generation technology will – nor will flexible demand (unless you consider rolling black outs flexible demand!).
We need a portfolio of generation technologies that include:
1)Â Â Â Â Â Solar
2)     Wind – both on and offshore
3)Â Â Â Â Â Western Geothermal
4)Â Â Â Â Â Hydro-electric
5)Â Â Â Â Â Nuclear
The time to approve utility scale development of ANY of these resources takes more than 7 years in much of the US, add transmission to a new site, and the time to build is well beyond 2030.
The runway has run out!
Even for large scale solar. We should shift our attention to 2050 instead…
Fossil Fuel is still 60% of total energy generated. Nuclear and renewables account for just 40%. We need to double electricity by 2050, so we are 80% short of that goal for generation, today’s 40% becomes 20% in 2050.
There are roughly 90 nuclear reactors running in the US with a capacity of 93GW providing 21% of today’s energy (~10% in 2050). If you consider the cost of the storage required, building more reactors in series is a lower cost option than building solar and storage (sorry it is true). So, let’s start by raising the nuclear target to 50% of our 2050 needs – 500 GW of nuclear generation (including SMR).
There are few large hydro sites, but over 89,000 unpowered dams of smaller sizes, most will provide at least 1 MW of generation, and likely half are reasonable units to build – there is another 45 GW.
Geothermal exists in a few locations, and still can’t be built in GW sized plants, but let’s target Geothermal for another 40 GW of baseload energy on the West Coast.
That leaves 415 GW of firm solar+storage and wind+storage to fill. That is likely to require up to 2 TW of nameplate capacity for wind and solar. A non-trivial number to reach.
This plan does not solve the 2030 issue, it will not come close, even with permitting reform. But it does put the US on a path to having enough electrical generation to support a 2050 transition if we start working now.
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