February 8th, 2018 by Steve Hanley | CleanTechnica
Last August, Mark Jacobson, a renewable energy expert and senior fellow at the Precourt Institute for Energy at Stanford University, was the leader of a study that identified how 139 countries around the world could obtain 100% of their energy from renewable sources by 2050. But that study got some pushback from people who questioned its assumptions. The naysayers said the study relied too heavily on energy storage solutions such as adding turbines to existing hydroelectric dams or storing excess energy in water, ice, and underground rocks.
A Response To Critics
Those criticisms stimulated another piece of work from Jacobson and his colleagues at the University of California at Berkeley and Aalborg University in Denmark. They are now back with a new report they believe thoroughly addresses the concerns brought up by skeptics of the first report. It begins by breaking those 139 counties into 20 regions and proposing energy storage solutions uniquely suited to each region.Here’s how Jacobson summarized the work and the findings in an email to CleanTechnica:
The previous paper (in Joule) estimated the number of devices in each of 139 countries needed to provide power for each country in the annual average with 100% wind, water, and solar (WWS).That sounds good. Will policy makers and utilities listen now? That’s the trillion-dollar question. Either way, it will certainly help fill out the CleanTechnica Answer Box.
This new paper takes the next step, which is to divide the 139 countries into 20 world regions, then to see if the grid can stay stable in each region every 30 seconds for 5 years, and what is the resulting cost.
Utilities and policy makers alike are concerned that all the wind and solar we propose for the annual average numbers in the first paper won’t allow the grid to stay stable — that the lights will go out. This is the biggest barrier for the large-scale implementation of renewables.
This paper new shows that there is not only one solution but multiple solutions to the grid reliability problem — thus large penetrations of renewables can indeed keep the grid stable at low cost.
In addition, we find that the wind turbines needed would reduce global warming by ~3% and quickly. That is a new conclusion as well.
“Based on these results, I can more confidently state that there is no technical or economic barrier to transitioning the entire world to 100 percent clean renewable energy with a stable electric grid at low cost,” Jacobson said for his university press team at Stanford.
“This solution would go a long way toward eliminating global warming and the 4–7 million air pollution-related deaths that occur worldwide each year, while also providing energy security. Our main result is that there are multiple solutions to the problem,” he says. “This is important because the greatest barrier to the large-scale implementation of clean renewable energy is people’s perception that it’s too hard to keep the lights on with random wind and solar output.”
