CALIFORNIA’S 100% RENEWABLES REVOLUTION
THE FUTURE OF ENERGY WITH MARK JACOBSON
The fifth largest economy in the world is smashing renewables records!
For 41 of the past 49 days, California's grid has met more than 100% of electricity demand using solar, wind and hydro generation supplemented by grid-scale batteries. Supply is frequently exceeding 140% of demand, with the excess exported to neighbouring states. On some days renewables have supplied more than 100% of demand for more than 9 hours. These outstanding milestones for the atmosphere, the US economy and for consumers, are taking place earlier and faster than expected, with energy prices projected to fall steeply as California races towards the ultimate milestone: 100% solar, wind and hydro 24/7 365 days a year.
What factors are responsible? What lessons can be learned? What does this tell us about future of energy across the US and worldwide?
I asked Professor Mark Jacobson, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Director of the Atmosphere/Energy Program at Stanford University.
Mark is a GIANT in his field. As well as being the current #1 cited scientist, he is a prolific public commentator and regularly cited as one of the world’s most influential people. When it comes to the science, engineering and economics of the global transition to renewable energy, I consider him the most respected voice on the planet. His leadership, as a tireless educator to the public as well as to policy-makers, as he helps steer all 8 billion of us towards a better, healthier, safer future, is an inspiration. I’ve experienced his generosity first-hand too, when he’s taken time out of his schedule to answer my questions and to steer me towards better data and science over the years. What a wonderful human being he is!
So relax, enjoy listening to Mark's insights, relish the good news out of California, and afterwards meditate a little on just how simple the energy pathways have become for every state (including the cold ones!) then scroll down for my personal highlights, a ton of links to further resources, data and reading, and finally - for those who prefer reading over listening - a full transcript of our conversation.
And don’t forget you can listen to all my interviews on the future with the world’s best thinkers and scientists by subscribing to FutureBites on Spotifiy, Apple, or your favorite podcast platform.
PERSONAL HIGHLIGHTS
There were a ton of highlights for me, the first of which was interviewing one of my heroes! But sticking to the content side of things, here are the insights and takeaways that stuck with me:
For 41 of the 49 days leading up to this interview, California, the world’s fifth largest economy, has met >100% of electricity demand for substantial periods per day, sometmes more than nine hours per day, entirely with wind, water and solar.
For the full year 2023, wind, water and solar supplied 53.1% of California's electricity consumption.
Mark predicts California will get to 80% wind, water, solar by 2026-2028 and 100% wind, water, solar 24/7 by 2030-2033.
The battery contribution is getting BIG: discharging 6.5 gigawatts, the equivalent of seven nuclear power plants, or a quarter of California's total demand, for hours at a time!
There is still LOTS of headroom for improvement. The combination of mechanisms that will take California to 365 day 24/7 clean electricity includes:
More batteries, and shifting more battery discharge to night
More offshore wind
Shifting more hydro discharge to night
Demand response incentives – until recently 11 pm to 7 am was the cheapest electricity pricing and the most expensive was 3 pm to 9 pm. When this flips, much more demand will shift to when solar is most abundant.
The synergies between offshore wind, and demand, and non-wind energy supply curves are interesting. Not only does offshore wind flow more reliably than onshore, the wind peaks in the late afternoons and early evenings (as solar falls off) and it peaks seasonally in the summer (when overall demand is highest).
The pathways are just as positive for the cold northern states, with their own wind and hydro resources, their interconnections with Canadian hydro, the solar boost they enjoy during the long days in summer, plus the city-scale seasonal thermal storage solutions being trialled in Canada and Finland.
Those long-term seasonal energy storage initiatives are new territory and fascinating! I will explore further:
The long term seasonal energy storage at the Drake Landing Solar Community in Okotoks, Canada, that Mark mentioned is described in excellent detail here and also on the DLSC project page.
The Finnish city-scale 90GWh seasonal thermal energy storage project that Mark referred to is located at Vantaa, near Helsinki, and is expected to be the world’s largest seasonal energy storage site when completed around 2028. More information can be found here and on the Vantaa Energy page.
The dividends we get back from the transition are a favorite topic in my energy keynotes, and it was Mark who first got me thinking about them. He reiterated two of them on the pod: that the fossil fuel industry occupies about 1.3% of all land area in the United States, MORE than will be taken up by all the renewables required to electrify the entire nation, and that 12% of ALL energy worldwide is used to mine, transport and refine fossil fuels and uranium. Remember, we get to have these back! Good news!!
47 countries now generate between 50 and 100% of their electricity from just wind, water, solar
Rooftop solar funded by individual householders now accounts for 12% of all electricity generation in California (and growing) reducing grid demand accordingly.
While the size of the economy makes California’s records the most important, it actually only ranks number 12 in the United States in terms of proportion of annual electricity consumption met with just wind, water, solar. So much to celebrate here!
California’s high electricity prices caused by (a) gas pricing and (b) gas disasters such as the Aliso Canyon gas blowout and the San Bruno gas disaster, and (c) the infamous wildfires caused by sparking transmission lines -- all of which have forced huge capital outlays which have been passed on to consumers.
Renewables are stopping Californian prices from being higher, and are driving down costs in other states. The 11 states with higher fractions of their grid supplied by renewables, like South Dakota with 96% of consumption met by wind water and hydro, and Iowa with 81%, have the lowest electricity prices in the US.
Republican states emerge as the unsung heroes in the US renewables journey! 9 out of the 10 states in the US with the most wind energy are red states, and have no wind policies! When energy is cheap, dollars beat politics, which is a great outcome for everyone. Those states are worth celebrating.
Because wind and solar are so much cheaper than gas and coal per unit energy (and getting cheaper) and because end-to-end electrification is MUCH more efficient than combustion (loses a LOT less energy on the way to doing work) Mark predicts electrificaton will save consumers a staggering 60-65% of their annual electricity bills.
It’s going to be a fascinating year. I can’t wait to see what demand will be met in the tougher California summer months, when electricity demand doubles because of air conditioning use.
WE ALREADY HAVE THE INGREDIENTS
I’ll close with what I believe is Mark’s most important overall message: the California journey shows how we don't need anything special. We don't need new technologies. We certainly don't need magic. We have all the renewables ingredients to transition electricity, transportation, buildings, and industry, for every city and country across the planet. We’d all like it to happen faster, sure, but we can be certain it WILL happen. Why? Because as well as being cleaner and healthier and safer, its cheaper. Because it pays back, bigtime. The journey to that future is full of imperfections and challenges (of course it is!) but it IS achievable, and its simpler than you might think.
RESOURCES AND FURTHER READING
Mark generously took the time to send the following links to 100% Wind, Water, and Solar (WWS) online resources, transition plans and data. As I mentioned, his data have already been superbly useful to me. I cannot recommend them highly enough. At the very least, I urge you to take a minute to click and see the wealth of information that’s available to you, whenever you may need answers or to check assumptions.
100% WWS roadmaps and grid studies for 145 Countries (149 country plans are waiting to be published)
Infographics summarizing 100% WWS transitions across cities, states, and countries
Additionally, for a highly accessible read on our energy pathways to a better future, check out Mark’s latest book: “No Miracles Needed: How Today's Technology Can Save Our Climate and Clean Our Air” – named by Cambridge University Press as one of its books of the year for 2023.
The book link will also take you to associated op-eds, and Stanford online courses that anyone, anywhere can enrol in to get a grounding in renewable energy and storage for a sustainable future.
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
Please note, my transcripts are AI-generated and lightly edited for clarity and will contain minor errors. The true record of the interview is always the audio version.
BRUCE MCCABE: Welcome to FutureBites, where we explore pathways to a better future. I'm your host, Bruce McCabe, and I've got a very, very special guest today who absolutely speaks to pathways to a better future, and that's Professor Mark Jacobson. Welcome, Mark.
MARK JACOBSON: Thanks for having me on, Bruce.
BRUCE MCCABE: Absolute pleasure, and a privilege. I want to just briefly introduce you so everyone knows why this is such a privilege. You're not only a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford, and the director of the atmosphere and energy program there, but you are such a powerful voice on this planet - for the practicalities of making this transition to decarbonization. I think you get regularly ranked in the top 100 most influential people, and I think you're currently number one in terms of citations in your space, so I'm speaking to the top man in terms of the science of atmosphere and energy. Right, that's amazing in itself. And I'd like to also just add, on a personal note, you've been incredibly helpful to me with resources you've provided online, and to so many other people, in modelling the transition, what we actually need to do at a city, state and country level. You've actually modeled what resources we need, what energy installations we need, what the cost of that would be, what the jobs implications of that would be, which, to me, is just phenomenal. And it's all out there and available, right?
MARK JACOBSON: Yeah, now we've developed energy plans for all 50 United States, 149 countries, now over 120 cities internationally, and these are all plans to transition these cities, states and countries to 100% clean, renewable energy and storage, for all purposes, electricity, transportation, buildings and industry, in order to address air pollution, global warming and energy security.
BRUCE MCCABE: Yeah, what an amazing resource. And you update that quite regularly, don't you? You go and revisit that model.
MARK JACOBSON: We've updated the the country plans, like you know, four times. Every time, well, when new data become available, we try to update it.
BRUCE MCCABE: Where do people find that? I'll put a link on this, but what's the best thing to google?
MARK JACOBSON: Unfortunately I don't have a nice acronym, but definitely from my web page at Stanford it's all linkable.
BRUCE MCCABE: It's a really amazing resource and the best part is, you document all your assumptions. So, you know, anyone can go there and say, well, hang on, what if it goes this way or that way? And they can think about different scenarios. And the best part is the economics of it, because we all start with the science. I certainly did, and what I've realized is that when I'm presenting to people, they really respond much more to what it all means in dollar terms, what it means to them and their wallet and their job and the cost of energy in their city.
MARK JACOBSON: We find that a transition will save consumers a huge amount of money because, especially when you're electrifying transportation, buildings and industry, then you reduce your demand for energy because electricity is more efficient than combustion. So we find there's a reduction of energy requirements worldwide about 56%, for several reasons. So even if the cost per unit energy of a fossil fuel is the same as renewables, you'd expect your annual payments for energy to go down 56%. But in fact wind and solar now are cheaper than gas and coal per unit energy, and that's expected to increase in the future. So we estimate that annually people will save on the order of 60, 65% of their annual payments, compared with today, upon electrification of all energy.
I mean you can imagine if you have an electric home, electric vehicles you will eliminate, and you have solar on your roof then, and even some batteries, maybe you will eliminate your electricity costs from the grid, you can eliminate your vehicle fuel costs, you can eliminate your natural gas heating costs from your home and because it does cost, you have to put up the solar in the battery system. But that can pay itself off within five to ten years and solar is usually warranted for like 25 years, so it's free energy after five or ten years yeah, and in different geographies.
BRUCE MCCABE: It's even better where I'm sitting right now. We're all solar here and our payback period is probably four and a half years, on a very big solar install residentially. So yeah, I mean it's a wonderful story, it's amazing, and we're here to talk about a larger scale story. I think the excuse for this really is just the remarkable things happening in California. I wonder if you could run us through that, because we've broken some records, haven't we?
MARK JACOBSON: So something amazing has happened this spring Well, it actually started during the winter. So in 2022 and 2023, California's grid - and California, just its economy, is the fifth largest economy in the world, so it's larger than any other US state, but also a larger economy than many other countries - and its main grid for the last two years, for a couple days a year, but on both on a weekend and never together, went over 100 percent renewables in terms of meeting demand on the grid. So wind, solar, geothermal and hydroelectric, in particular. Sum those up, and the sum of the output from those four technologies exceeded the demand on the grid in 2022 and 2023, but just for one or two days each year. This year, all of a sudden, for the past 49 days, for 41 of those days, California has this demand has been more than met by wind, water and solar. So those four technologies, for 41 out of the last 49 days, for anywhere from a quarter hour to nine and a quarter hours per day.
BRUCE MCCABE: Wow.
MARK JACOBSON: In fact, for the last 12 days we've been 100% wind, water and solar for a portion of the day. In fact, as I speak right now, California's grid is about 130% renewable electricity, and you might ask well, what happens to the excess?
BRUCE MCCABE: Absolutely.
MARK JACOBSON: Half of it goes to batteries and half goes to exports to out-of-state, and the batteries are then used when the sun goes down, because it's dominated by solar, but there is quite a bit of wind, there's geothermal, there's hydroelectric, but it's during the day that we get these 100% days, and then at night it goes down to anywhere from 25% to 45% wind, water and solar. But batteries now, there was a record on the grid last week of 6.5 gigawatts of batteries discharge, and just to put that in perspective, that's on the order of seven nuclear power plants operating, and that's about a quarter of California's total demand.
But that's not all. I mean, that's just the utility scale solar. The governor of California announced today that there's a total of 10 gigawatts of batteries in California entirely. Maybe. I think there's around seven gigawatts on the grid now and the peak actual discharge was 6.5 the other day. But there's another 3 gigawatts in people's homes and buildings. And then there's a lot of solar, and the numbers I just gave do not even account for the solar on people's roofs. Rooftop solar in California accounts for 12% of all electricity generation in the state, and so what's happening in rooftop solar is not included in the grid because what it does is it first is used to reduce people's own electricity use, or it's used to provide people's own electricity, so they do not need grid electricity. So during the day what we see is a drop in demand due to rooftop drop in grid demand due to the fact that people are using their own rooftop solar to provide their own electricity, so there's less need for grid electricity and they're charging their own batteries, so a little bit at night as well, the grid demand goes down. So there's a combination of solar reducing the demand for electricity during the day, and then rooftop solar, then utility solar increasing the supply. So you get this region or period of time for anywhere from a quarter hour, to now nine and a quarter hours per day, where you have more than 100% renewables supplied on a grid by grid electricity not only solar, but geothermal, wind and hydro as well.
BRUCE MCCABE: That's amazing. It's such a brilliant story. I love the rooftop solar bit because they're actually—it's an interesting phenomenon. You've got consumers funding their own technology for themselves, but also in terms of lifting the entire fleet, if you like, the entire state gets lifted up by people actually opening their own wallets and investing. It's just incredibly significant.
MARK JACOBSON: This is going to help a lot because in the summer in California the electricity demand doubles a lot on hot days because normally, let's say, the average is 25 gigawatts of peak electricity demand during autumn, winter and spring. In summer it goes up to 50 or 55 gigawatts because of air conditioning use. But you can imagine, with more and more people providing their own electricity with their rooftop solar, that grid demand during the day is going to decline and that's going to help avoid blackouts, because that's when we have blackouts. We actually haven't had a blackout in California since, I think, 2020. So it's been almost four years with no blackouts. You know there've been some close calls and people are concerned with all these renewables. You know suddenly we're going to have a blackout, but it just hasn't happened.
And right now. Just to put it in perspective in 2023, in the annual average, wind, water and solar supplied 53.1% of California's electricity that it consumed. So fo the consumption of electricity …
BRUCE MCCABE: So the entirety of it.
MARK JACOBSON: 53.1% was supplied in the 24 hours a day, seven days a week, on the average, with just wind, water, solar, and that's going to go up this year probably to 57% or so, but during a lot of days it's going to go over 100%. But to put that in perspective, California is ranked only number 12 in the United States in terms of meeting its annual electricity consumption with just wind, water, solar. So it's not even the top state or close to it, it's number 12. But it's the largest state by far and it's the only one dominated by solar. Most of the others are dominated by wind, you wouldn't believe it, not hydropower. I mean there are a couple dominated by hydro, but mostly by wind.
BRUCE MCCABE: That's fascinating and I want to get onto the other states a lot because we can start to draw pictures in our mind up to what that transition might look like up in Michigan or Maine. I really do want to get to that. But can we just drill into the mechanics of this? Because it's so remarkable. I can't get seven nuclear power plants out of my head, in terms of the equivalence of the battery stuff going into the grid. That is just phenomenal. If we drill into that, that's lithium-ion battery technology or flow batteries there? What's the architecture out there, of where that's coming from, that stored electricity?
MARK JACOBSON: Well, I believe it's happening so fast I can't possibly say, but I'm pretty sure they're mostly lithium-ion four-hour batteries and they're just in these big battery packs in different locations. There's utility-scale battery packs and they're all over California and the governor announced today that well, the 10 gigawatts is the total amount and that's larger than any state in the US, but also larger than any country in the world except for china. So there's more batteries now in California than any country except China or any US state. So that's phenomenal. But you know, that's what we need in every country and every state. We need a lot of batteries with wind, water and solar to eliminate the use of fossil fuels and bioenergy and even, ultimately, nuclear energy.
BRUCE MCCABE: And if we look forward, the way this is going to pan out in California, I guess, is we're going to be running more of the hydro or trying to slide the hydro into the evening hours. More of the battery in the evening hours, obviously, but perhaps also longer duration, higher storage, battery architectures as well. I guess there's quite a few ways of filling out the night hours?
MARK JACOBSON: So right now, in the daytime we're doing really well and in fact, you know, because we have so much supply, the prices during the day are dropping, although utility rates are still highest during parts of the day. But the question is, how do you get that night-time powered by renewable energy? Well, in California there are really four major ways. Well, the most obvious, the simplest, okay. Just increase solar during the day. Increase batteries, put more of the solar electricity during the day. Increase batteries, put more of the solar electricity during the day into batteries. Use the batteries at night. Okay.
But another straightforward way is offshore wind. We have a lot of offshore wind resource, and there is a plan, there are plans to put offshore wind off California. Not only does offshore wind flow 24 hours a day and it is pretty even (onshore wind is more variable, but offshore wind is smoother and offshore wind peaks in the late afternoon, early evening and especially in the evening you can get, after the sun goes down, you can fill in that gap. But the brilliant thing about offshore wind in California, it peaks in the summer and that's when we have the highest electricity demand. I mentioned that electricity demand doubles in parts of the summer and the wind speed, the offshore wind speed of California, is up to two meters per second, faster in the summer on average than any other season, and so it's coincident in the seasonal peak and in the time of day peak. So combining offshore wind with utility solar and battery storage.
And then also the hydropower right now is running 24 hours a day. It's mostly running at night, but there's some during the day. Shifting more of that hydro to night would just allow more solar to be used during the day, and then you provide more electricity at night with hydro.
And then the fourth component is using what's called demand response, where utilities give people incentives to use electricity at different times of the day. So you know, for example, if we want more people to use more electricity during the day because there's so much solar, make it cheaper. Utility rates are cheaper during the day and more expensive at night. Now in California we've had demand response for decades. I mean we have different rates at different times of the day and that does work. But in fact until recently I mean the peak, like 11 pm to 7 am that was the cheapest electricity price, and the most expensive was 3 pm to 9 pm. But you know, when we have so much solar during the day, you know that should really be the cheapest. At 3 PM to, let's say, 7 PM, that should be really cheap electricity. And then at night that should be more expensive if we want to shift people to use electricity during the day. Anyway, utilities can play around with giving people incentives to change the time of demand. That makes it easier to match supply with demand on the grid.
BRUCE MCCABE: So there's a lot more headroom there. We haven't really begun to fully exploit any of those capabilities or how much we could do.
MARK JACOBSON: No, no, I mean. Well, one thing we've done in California is just build up a lot of solar and batteries.
BRUCE MCCABE: And that is doing a lot, though I mean it's amazing how much that is doing. So that's a good start. Yep, yep, absolutely. And on this energy pricing thing that you mentioned, I mean California famously has quite high prices, or people keep complaining about them. Can we drill into the actual mechanics of that? Because, you know, one of the first things the naysayers say is. ‘oh, that's because we're investing in all these renewables and now it's more expensive,’ which is ridiculous, I know, but I'd love you to explain what's going on.
MARK JACOBSON: Yeah, well, California has the third highest electricity prices in the United States. I mean, they're nothing like Hawaii's, which are another 20 cents a kilowatt hour higher than California …
BRUCE MCCABE: Those poor Hawaiians!
MARK JACOBSON: … But it has nothing to do with the renewable energy, renewable electricity. In fact, renewable electricity has helped to reduce, keep the prices down. There's two ways you can prove this. One is you can look at other states that have even more renewable electricity than California, and I mentioned there are 11 other states with higher fractions of their grid with renewables. So, for example, California, in the annual average last year, 53% of its electricity generation was wind, water and solar. But South Dakota, 96% of its consumption of electricity was wind and hydro, which is part of it. There wasn't any solar in there. In fact, most of it was wind. There's two thirds of that was wind, one third was hydro and yet South Dakota has among the lowest prices of electricity in the US. In fact, of the next two states after that are Iowa and Montana. And Iowa is like 81% wind, water, solar, with like 79% wind, and the rest, almost the rest, is solar, a little bit of hydro. And Montana too, but they also have really low prices. So, in fact, of the 10 of the 11 states that are ahead of California in terms of the fraction of their electricity from wind, water, solar, 10 of them are in the lowest half of the states in terms of their electricity price, and five are in the lowest 10 states with the lowest electricity price. So if you actually look at all the states, it's only California and I think Maine was the other one, that had a high electricity price, that was, had a lot of wind, water, solar. The correlation is far more strongly associated with more wind, water, solar having lower electricity prices than the other way around.
But so what's causing California's electricity price to be high? Well, there's several reasons.
One, we still rely on gas for a good portion of our electricity in California, and California has the third highest natural gas prices for industrial purposes in the United States.
But on top of that there are all these disasters that have happened in California that utilities are passing on these costs to customers. So, for example, there was the Aliso Canyon gas blowout, where for several months there was a huge amount of fossil gas that went into the air just unabated and that caused a lot of damage, but also huge amounts of penalties that the utilities then transferred to customers. Then there was the San Bruno gas disaster, where a whole city block was blown up from gas and a lot of people died and that cost billions of dollars in penalties and repairs. And the utilities were then required to strengthen underground gas lines. And so they've been going around the state strengthening lines and they're passing those costs on to customers.
And then there are all these wildfires that are caused by transmission line sparks, and this is over many years and this has cost billions upon billions of dollars, and that's been passed on to customers. And, in addition, now the utilities are undergrounding transmission lines, which was helpful because it helped reduce wildfire risk, but that's being passed on to customers too.
So all these other factors are leading to high electricity prices in California, and there are others as well. So, but the renewables are keeping the prices down, as I indicated by the statistics for other States.
BRUCE MCCABE: And that pain through gas is all over the world, because what's going on in Europe [caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine] and people trying to capture all their gas and export it rather than supply domestic markets … the pricing's crazy all over the place. So we're all suffering from that. But we won't! At some stage we'll all be off the gas, thank god. So let's extend out. Let's kind of think about what this looks like, maybe 10, 20 years or further hopefully earlier the better as we look at the other states, and maybe we can talk about some of those northern states and what the mix might look like there, and how we do more load sharing. I guess that's the architecture, right? We're going to … California. What you said 148% some days is going to nearby states?
MARK JACOBSON: Yeah.
BRUCE MCCABE: Yeah, so there's some sort of overcapacity formula that's going to work here, as we extend across the continent, where it makes sense to have more than 100% local supply, I guess? And a lot more interconnectivity is going to be part of that architecture? Give us a picture of how you think it's going to roll forward.
MARK JACOBSON: 21:14
Well, so the United States already has several grid regions that are interconnected. So California is connected to most of the Western states, in fact, and so we export and import electricity and I'd say, on average, the Western states are about 50% wind, water and solar. So even when California is importing, they're importing mostly renewables. But as we get at least half renewables, as we get toward 100% renewables, I mean, whether we export or import it's not going to matter so much, because other states will be producing 100% renewables and California will be as well. And I think California will actually get to 100% wind, water, solar, 24/7 soon after 2030, maybe 2032 or three. I think we'll be at 80% by 2026 or seven or eight. That's because things are ramping up much faster than I thought.
So other states, like other regions of the country, are interconnected. Northeast states are interconnected, and actually there are a lot of states interconnected with Canada, because Canada exports hydropower to many states in the US. In fact California gets hydropower from Canada. Or even though Oregon, Washington, all have a lot of hydro, they still import hydro from Canada too, as does New York and several of the states that border the US in the north. So northern states will not only still receive Canadian hydropower, but they have wind, they have their own hydropower, a lot of them do. And solar. I mean you can have solar. You know the further north you go, the more seasonal the solar is. But summers, as you go further north, are longer, maybe you have longer days summers. And then, as you go further north, are longer, maybe have longer days, so you actually get more solar in a lot of places in the far north, like in Canada, in the summer. You have really long days. As you get to the pole north pole you get 24 hours of sunlight a day, so it's seasonal.
So the key is to increase seasonal heat storage. And this is really interesting because, you know, for heating and cooling there is really large scale seasonal heat storage. For example, in Finland now they're building an underground water tank, essentially, that will store enough heat – the water will store enough heat to heat a midsize city for a year. So that's like when I say midsize city, like city of 250,000 people for a year. It's like 90 gigawatt hours.
BRUCE MCCABE: Oh my goodness!
MARK JACOBSON: … And to just put that in perspective, there's a town in Canada, Okotoks, that has an underground heat storage in soil and that's about 1.5 megawatts of heat storage that supplies 52 homes. Now multiply that by 60,000 to get 90 gigawatt hours. 1.5 megawatt hours times 60,000 equals 90 gigawatt hours. That's how much is stored, going to be stored, in this Finnish town. So in the summer, when you have long summer days, you can use solar to heat the water. That water can then be stored underground in the tanks that are insulated yeah, until winter time, and provide 100% of the heating of the city seasonally, so you don't necessarily need to produce your electricity or heat in the season that you're going to use it in some cases. Just the heat in this case.
BRUCE MCCABE: That's brilliant. I'm going to look up that Finnish example. I did not know about that. That's remarkable, and such scale! That's brilliant.
The other thing that comes up with storage - I was chatting to Michael Barnard recently on this podcast and he got me thinking again about how hydro storage doesn't have to be the dam, the river. You don't have to have massive water assets to do hydro energy storage. It's just potential energy and it can be a closed system. Have you seen anyone doing that? Or seeing that rolling out in particular areas? This idea that, hey, we just build a system with a container at the top and the bottom, obviously a large container, perhaps a square kilometer container, but a system you've built specifically for storage of energy, not by taking over an existing water system?
MARK JACOBSON: Yeah, so I think you're referring to pumped hydro power storage, which is pretty common. It's actually, after hydroelectric dams, it's the most common type of electricity storage in the world, even more than batteries. But so you need two reservoirs, an upper one and a lower one, and the lower one could just be the ocean, so you could have the ocean and you could have a cliff. You could have an upper reservoir where you store, you know, not a huge amount of water but some amount of water. And so when you have extra electricity - let's say you're running your grid on just wind and solar and hydro - when you have extra electricity you can use that to pump the water up the hill into the upper reservoir. And then, when you need electricity, you let water drain down. It's drained down a pipe and it'll run through a generator. So a motor pushes the water up a hill and a motor running in reverse is a generator, and so the generator will generate electricity. So you lose about 20%, maybe 18% of your energy. But it's nice because it shifts the time of your electricity use. So if you have a lot of extra solar, for example during the day, but you need electricity at night, you can use the extra solar to pump water up a hill, and then you can generate the electricity at night by letting the water drain down the hill.
BRUCE MCCABE: Yeah, and well, Michael's point was you really can think about anywhere. It could be a desert. I mean, you've got to get the water there in the first place, but if it's a closed system with no losses, hey, you can use hydro anywhere. It's the dominant form now, it could still be the dominant form wherever your geography is.
MARK JACOBSON: There was a study out of australia actually, that looked around the world that how many pumped hydro storage facilities there are worldwide, or potentially, and it was found that there were so many that you could find enough storage for all storage purposes in the world. Now the practical issue is, often you need permits to put up these storage facilities and sometimes they can take years. It's not that expensive, I mean, compared to batteries, I think the pumped hydro is less expensive, but it takes longer to get permitting. Okay, and you get more objections, and it's really the siting issue is the main key.
BRUCE MCCABE: Absolutely. And one of the things I learned from you which I found exceptionally powerful, while we're on real estate, is while everyone's focused on the amount of real estate that wind farms and solar farms take up - even though there's very clever ways of installing them where you have agriculture beneath, and on rooftops, and all that - there's so much more real estate bound up in the fossil fuel industry that we get to have back, and everyone forgets to include that in their calculations! It's just a huge dividend, isn't it? All those pipelines, refineries, gas fields … we get to have them back!
MARK JACOBSON: Well yeah, in the United States, the fossil fuel industry occupies about 1.3% of all land area. And this is growing every year because they drill 50,000 new oil and gas wells every year in North America. And there are 1.3 million active oil and gas wells in the United States alone right now, 3.2 million abandoned ones, but the active ones, they keep growing and growing every year. This is creep. It just keeps growing and people don't realize it. That's going on in all these states like North Dakota – you can fly over and you see all these pockmarks of oil and gas wells everywhere. So these, like in Pennsylvania alone, there are close to like 700,000 of these or more. So it's really ridiculous. And then on top you have millions of miles of pipelines, you have hundreds of thousands of gas stations, you have refineries, you have storage facilities, you have all sorts of coal mines and all sorts of fossil fuel infrastructure that people kind of just got so used to. And they, you know, every time they see a wind turbine they say, oh, it takes up so much land, without realizing that you know, once you build the wind turbine or the solar you don't need 50,000 new ones every year. They last 30 years. And we calculate that the land area required for transitioning the United States entirely to clean, renewable energy is less than 1% of the land area, so we would reduce land requirements versus the fossil fuel system.
BRUCE MCCABE: It's a reduction, it's a dividend. It's something people got to get their heads around because it's such a positive story. And everywhere you look, there are those dividends which I've also learned from you, like, for example, shipping. 40% of global shipping just ships fossil fuels. Who knew, right?
MARK JACOBSON: 29:51
It's on the order of like 12% of all energy worldwide is used to mine, transport and refine fossil fuels and uranium. If we go to clean renewable electricity for everything, we don't need to mine, transport or refine fossil fuels, maybe with the exception of maybe a small percent for plastics, and some of those chemicals will eventually be transitioned as well. There's a big waste involved in this current system that can be got rid of by going to clean renewable energy.
BRUCE MCCABE: Yeah, I've got to keep telling those stories on your behalf as well. It's amazing. So, getting back to this transition, I think, when we look to the US getting to 100% across the board, there's still a long way to go. But I think your key message is always that we don't need anything special to do it. We don't need anything magic. We don't need any new technologies. We're not depending on SMRs to become real or economically interesting, or fusion, or any of those things. We really can do it with what we're doing now, can't we?
MARK JACOBSON: Yeah, we have 95% of the technologies we need to transition electricity, transportation, buildings, and industry. The main technologies are basically - besides wind turbines, solar panels and batteries - there are electric vehicles, electric induction cooktops for cooking, electric heat pumps for air conditioning, air heating, water heating, clothes drying even. There's LED lights to replace incandescent lights. You wouldn't believe people still use incandescent lights when LED lights use like 1/20th the energy and they never burn out. Energy efficiency improvements, insulation. In industry there are electric high temperature technologies such as arc furnaces, induction furnaces, resistance furnaces. There are also storage like fire bricks, which are ceramic bricks to store high-temperature heat, that allows industry to run 24-7 on high-temperature heat. And so you can go through each energy sector and there are solutions.
BRUCE MCCABE: Yep.
MARK JACOBSON: The things we don't have right now, but we know how to do, they're just not commercial, are long distance aircraft, long distance ships, basically. But everything else is is either commercial or close to commercial.
BRUCE MCCABE: And I have to say I've been one of the guilty ones looking at, you know, for the big step change technologies. I've been over to France to visit ITER and to have a look at how they're going on construction of this massive tokamak for fusion, and I’ve been following the Commonwealth Fusion Systems guys. And over the last, I guess, 10 years, I have evolved my thinking from “Can we do it?” because I actually think, sure, we can get fusion power, to “When, if ever, could we get fusion power that's economically competitive?” which is a whole different scenario. Electricity that comes from a plant might take another three or four decades to become economically competitive. And all the while, the photovoltaic scientists I talk to are just saying “Well, we're reducing, we're reducing! It's going to be cheaper again! We're going to halve it again, Bruce!”
MARK JACOBSON: Yeah, I mean fusion has no chance of being competitive. I mean, right now you get the trivialest amount of energy out of the hugest amount of input energy. So it's not negative anymore, necessarily, but it's still trivially positive and it's not even close to economic. I mean, we're talking orders and orders of magnitude and you know, from a theoretical point of view it's great, but it's not something we would want to dump subsidies in at the expense of trying to actually transition to real solutions, right?
BRUCE MCCABE: When we have them! When we have them right here and we can do it now, right?
MARK JACOBSON: Right.
BRUCE MCCABE: Amazing. So are there any other messages out there? One of the things I wanted to ask you is, “Any other messages you wish people really understood more, about transitioning these grids?” And the other question I've got is, “Are there any other places to watch for inspiration?” You know, within the US particularly, but also around the world, countries you'd pick out and say, everyone should take a close look at what they're doing.
MARK JACOBSON: Well, let me address that first. There are several countries that are doing remarkably well in terms of electricity.
I should point out that the four main sectors are electricity, transportation, buildings and industry. And if we look at electricity, which is about 20% of all ‘end-use’ energy, because that's what most people are focused on in terms of keeping the grid stable, and there are seven countries in the world that are between 99.8% and 100% wind, water, solar in terms of their annual electricity production. Now, they're all dominated by hydropower, but some also have geothermal power and wind. Among them are like Albania, Bhutan, Nepal, Democratic Republic of the Congo, you know, but there's is Costa Rica and Iceland. So Costa Rica has a actually a good distribution of not only hydro but wind and solar and geothermal, so it has all four of those. And Iceland has hydro and geothermal and wind, but no solar. But Norway is was way up there, and there are other countries, like Namibia and Kenya, not too far behind. And I should point out regions too. South australia has done extremely well and has a really high percentage of wind, water, solar renewables, mostly wind and solar.
BRUCE MCCABE: 75% now, I think. Between 70 and 75.
MARK JACOBSON: Yeah, doing remarkably well. In Scotland, which is part of the UK, it's over 100% renewable wind, water, solar in its generation in terms of its consumption. It produces more than that, mostly wind. So there are bright spots in the world. In fact, there are 47 countries that generate between 50 and 100% of their electricity from just wind, water, solar, but they are not China, which emits one third of all emissions worldwide, or the United States. But although China is now close to, I think they're around 27%, and the United States is around 25% wind, water, solar electricity in the annual average, and many of the industrialized countries are in the 20s. So there's a lot of progress, but we still have a long way to go. And then we have to transition transportation, which there's progress starting to come each year. I mean, there was just a report by the International Energy Agency on how there's suddenly a big spurt of electric vehicles being sold and a lot of them are being brought on the market through China. But around the world there's a big growth of electric vehicles.
BRUCE MCCABE: Oh incredible growth, yeah.
MARK JACOBSON: Yeah. And then in buildings we need to transition buildings, get rid of gas from buildings, make them all electric. There's no reason to have both gas and electricity in a home or a building, because electricity does everything that gas does, but cheaper and better and cleaner. And then industry we want high temperatures to be obtained from electricity and from heat storage, such as these fire bricks.
BRUCE MCCABE: I'll make a comment on China, because they're so underestimated. In my travels I constantly come across people that really underestimate what China is doing and how economically strong that future looks because of what they're doing. I mean EVs, I believe just for a month anyway, touched more than 50% of new car sales in China. So that's where they're at on Evs. Which is just years ahead of what anyone would have predicted. But the real one that I was looking at the other day that really struck me was, their installs for renewables last year were 10 times the amount of what was installed in the US last year. So the install rate is phenomenal. Yeah, I mean that's going to change the economics profoundly. They get that!
MARK JACOBSON: Yeah, well, that's good. I mean we need all the help we can get from wherever we can get it. So I'm happy to see growth on all these sectors, anywhere we can get it, and that's going to benefit everybody, because everybody's going to benefit from less air pollution, from less global warming, from more energy security. It doesn't matter where the improvement occurs. That's going to benefit humanity, and so we just need more efforts throughout the world and people working together to get to that solution.
BRUCE MCCABE: Yep, Mark, is there anything we've missed? I think we've done some good things here, building off the California story. Perhaps we'll come back and revisit in a year or so and find another big good news story to sort of keep pushing out there, because I think you and I have found - I mean, I'm following very distantly in your footsteps in trying to be a voice out there -but I've definitely found that, talking in terms of dollars and economics and jobs, it just does ‘cut through’ where, if you just talk about the really profoundly scary things that are happening in climate change which neither of us are, you know we've got to fully acknowledge we're in very, very steep predicament here. But if you just talk about that, people switch off. And so there's some really profoundly good news stories, and I'd love to revisit another one with you at some stage.
MARK JACOBSON: Yeah, well, the nice thing is that people, you know there are a lot of people who don't believe in global warming and like there was a poll that said a few years ago I saw this poll that said only 69% of people believe that global warming was an important issue. I mean it's great that they should believe that it's an important issue. But the nice thing was, the same poll found that 82% of people believed in 100% renewable energy. The poll found that 82% of people believed in 100% renewable energy. So the moral of the story was, okay, we don't care if you believe in the problem, just as long as you believe in the solution!
BRUCE MCCABE: [laughter]
That's what's important. I mean, just help us solve the problem. You can have your own reasons for it. Well, there are reasons people believe in renewable energy. They create jobs. Renewable energy creates jobs. It provides energy security, allows people to own their own power and, you know, reduces air pollution.
BRUCE MCCABE: A lot of people care about air pollution! A lot of people respond to the air pollution story yeah, absolutely.
MARK JACOBSON: Yeah, so there are a lot of reasons for people to support it, and that's the good thing and that's why we have a transition. Like the states in the US with the most wind, nine out of ten of them are states that have no policies for wind. And that's because it's so cheap! They're all red states, Republican states that, where there are no policies to promote wind, but they have wind as a majority of their electricity supply now.
BRUCE MCCABE: I love that! That's a great way to sort of wrap things up, because, hey, when the physics and the economics align, the dollar aligns, nothing is stopping this transition. Absolutely nothing is stopping it. It's 100% definite!
MARK JACOBSON: Yeah, I mean it's just a first and that's fine. I mean if people do it for economic reasons, that's great. If they do it for social reasons or health reasons, that's great too. Or jobs, you know. So I mean we need everybody to be on board, and if everybody can find a reason to be on board, that's great. I mean that'll help us solve the problem faster.
BRUCE MCCABE: Absolutely, and you're doing more than just about anyone else on this planet to promote that message and to educate people on that. So, um, I'm respecting your time here, yeah, thank you, Mark, for coming on the pod and sharing the bigger story around California and where we're going. What you do is amazing. It matters. Please keep doing what you do. I don't know how you get the energy to keep doing what you do, but please keep doing it and we'll keep following and, and reading everything you put out as well.
MARK JACOBSON: All right. Well, thank you, Bruce. Appreciate it.
BRUCE MCCABE: Thanks for coming on.