Can the US achieve 100% clean electricity by 2020?
I will be giving a short talk tomorrow at Next Agenda, an organization started by Peter Leyden to be a kind of next generation think tank that leverages video and internet to engage people to evaluate big problems and communicate the results.The press (Reuters) labelled the effort “The US CAN Get All Its Electricity From Clean Energy by 2020.”
One important bit of perspective I’ll be bringing is that its hard enough to just avoid the massive growth in global emissions by 2020. Actually cutting them to zero for the electricity sector seems — at first blush — incredibly hard, even if limited to just the US. It will be interesting to see if the folks assembled by Next Agenda can put together a compelling case.
The biggest problem with going to 100% clean energy by 2020 is that it means shutting down existing power plants that have years of productivity left in them, including ones that haven’t yet been fully paid off. Someone has to pay for that remaining capacity. If its factored into the cost of that new electricity, it would make that electricity much more expensive. As a practical matter, it’d probably be worked into the rate base and paid across the entire user base. It raises the hurdle that clean energy sources have to clear to be competitive. For Gigaton Throwdown, we chose to focus on displacing new energy demand for electricity (fuels were a bit different) for exactly this reason.
Exactly how much more laying off that capacity is a bit of analytic work that would be good to do. A back of the envelope calculation is pretty easy, but a more complex analysis would look at the remaining productive capacity for the fossil-fuel portion of the US electric grid and estimate what that its worth on a discounted cash basis. That would at least be a basis for discussing the potential price impact of shutting down that capacity.
If someone would like to do the back of envelope calc, we’d be happy to post it here.
- Sunil Paul