Renewing A Matter of Degrees with… Renewables!
We need more clean power, and we need to share it better!
After a year and a half off, let’s get back to discussing the green transition! Yours truly has started law school, gotten hooked on a bunch of energy experts’ Twitter accounts, and learned a lot more about renewables, our energy grid, building decarbonization, electric vehicles, battery chemistries, climate consequences in the Global South — you name it.
As I’ve learned more, I’ve come to believe that, above all, we need to electrify everything (widely the consensus view outlined by climate luminaries like Paul Hawken with Project Regeneration and Saul Griffith at Rewiring America, whose work you should check out if you haven’t already; it’s really exciting). But for electrification to help, we also need one of the pieces of the green transition you probably already knew would be pivotal: renewable energy. After all, if we managed to electrify everything but generated power the way we did in 2000, we might actually generate more emissions than we do now, not less.
So the importance of electrification and renewables exemplifies a key aspect of the climate crisis: Most actions are most effective when done together. A fully renewable grid won’t help as much if most vehicles still burn gas. And a nation of electric cars all charged on coal-powered grids would be a step backward. So today let’s talk about some pros and cons of renewable power and what’s standing between the present and a 100% clean-power future.
Intermittency
The biggest knock on renewable energy is that we can’t have it whenever we want it. If we need power when the sun doesn’t shine or the wind doesn’t blow, then the two sources of renewable power we’ll want to rely on most in the future wouldn’t be available. Fortunately, we have solutions for that: batteries. Though they might be designed slightly differently, the batteries used in electric vehicles can pretty much meet our energy storage needs. In fact, the batteries that will be most suitable for grid-scale storage will probably be even better than the lithium-ion batteries used in EVs since they’ll rely more on iron and less on metals like cobalt and manganese that are mined in hideous ways in the Global South.
But for right now and for the next handful of years, batteries make clean power projects a fair bit more expensive. If you want a wind farm that can store energy when there’s no net demand from the grid, you need to buy a big, expensive battery to hold that extra juice until demand returns.
So what should we do about the costs of building batteries alongside renewables? Subsidies! We should give tax breaks and incentives to projects that include some storage capacity to help renewables provide power 24 hours a day and not just intermittently. (A truly fantastic number of climate challenges can be solved by simply making this or that cheaper. Renewable energy is the rule and not the exception here.)
“Firm” Generation
Power that isn’t intermittently generated is often called “firm” power — energy we can call upon whenever. Fossil fuels fall into this category, as do nuclear and hydropower, broadly speaking. But arguably, renewables also do when paired with batteries! And that’s important for those who argue that “firm” power is a misnomer. Arguably, we’re really just talking about stored power; fossil fuels are hydrocarbon stores of energy that are finite and millions of years old, while renewables can be stored in batteries.
Renewables with batteries may be man-made storage, but fundamentally, they follow the same concept as fossil fuels, letting us use energy at a time other than when it’s produced. And while some forms of energy storage (e.g. hydrogen) are far less feasible than others, we should probably start thinking of all forms of energy as being stored when we access them, since that can clarify what infrastructure lets us access which fuels, whether grid electricity or otherwise.
Moving the Juice
For now, most of us are most familiar with gas stations as the most common way of distributing stored energy, but as discussed in my previous piece on municipal decarbonization, that infrastructure can and will change. In fact, thanks to $7.5 billion in Congress’s 2022 bipartisan infrastructure law, every state has access to funds to install electric vehicle chargers roughly every 50 miles on all America’s major highways. And lest you think Republican-led states are lollygagging, every state has already submitted a plan for allocating the funds and been approved.
In Oregon, for instance, where about half of I-5 is already compliant with the National EV Infrastructure (NEVI) program between Eugene and Portland, even the state’s most remote highways will be NEVI-compliant by 2025. You read that right: In two years, even some sparsely populated, rural states will have EV chargers every 50 miles or so even in their most sparsely populated, rural areas. Au revoir, Range Anxiety.
And not a moment too soon. The US Postal Service will purchase exclusively electric vehicles by 2026. In several states, including California, New York, Oregon, and Washington, executive orders or new regulations require that all new vehicles purchased must be fully electric by 2035. As noted above, all of these commitments will need to be married to increasingly clean grids to have their intended impact, but we finally have the momentum on infrastructure that will be the linchpin in electrifying vehicles — and probably a critical catalyst for all the electrification and grid modernization that comes next. So stay tuned for more good news in this space soon!