The Los Angeles Wildfires

 

photo taken from the BBC news website

Natural disasters are becoming like school shootings.  We get upset for a day or two, maybe we blame whichever politicians we don’t like, and then we move on.  The political will to engage in preventative measures doesn’t yet exist, so we twiddle our thumbs until the next event happens and the cycle starts over.

This time around, it’s wildfires in the heart of metropolitan Los Angeles.  A prolonged dry spell, coupled with frenetically intense Santa Ana winds descending from the mountains, created conditions for wildfires to spread at highway speed.  The systems in place to control fires for the city of Los Angeles and the state of California were very quickly overwhelmed.  The human cost so far (as of the morning of January 11) thankfully appears to be relatively low — Hurricane Helene was far worse in that regard, and in a less populated area — but the property damage is enormous.  So what could have been, and can be, done differently?

Naturally, the President-elect didn’t hesitate to point his finger.  In a post on TruthSocial, he stated that “Governor Gavin Newscum” — misspelling presumably intentional — “refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snow melt from the North, to flow daily into many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way.”  First off, there was no explicit “water restoration declaration.”  Trump had, in 2019, signed federal regulations lifting limits on the amount of water that could be diverted from Northern California into the Central Valley.  Newsom challenged this action in court, on the grounds that the limits were designed to protect smelt and salmon habitat.  The President-elect would have a stronger argument if he could make the case that Los Angeles needed this water, but he can’t.  The state’s reservoirs are nearly all above their historical average water level (as of January 9).  The quantity of available water was not the problem at all.

The problem — besides the increasing vulnerability of all the Pacific states to wildfires that is a long-predicted consequence of our warming climate and has been borne out with progressively more unsettling examples — comes from how rapidly the water can be delivered to where it is needed when catastrophe strikes.  As is becoming all too common, the situation that Los Angeles is experiencing is worse than the worst case scenario that was prepared for.  The demand for water to fight the fires greatly exceeded the system’s ability to quickly replenish the water, especially for hydrants further up in the hills, and the water pressure dropped dramatically.  It has to do with Bernoulli’s equation and fluid dynamics, not with fish.

But that brings us to one of the arguments frequently made by people who advocate against preventative measures to stop the planet from warming: “we can always adapt.”  As if adaptation were the cheaper and easier strategy.  Sure, we can adapt, and Los Angeles has learned the hard way that it doesn’t really have a choice.  The city needs to completely overhaul how it delivers water, because this situation can and eventually will happen again.  Does that sound cheap and easy?  

And who thinks Los Angeles is the only place that needs to adapt?  I’ll refer you to a small news article about western North Carolina, published in 2022, touting the region as a refuge from a changing climate.  “When it comes to climate,” the article begins,” the mountains have always been an attractive place to live.  Now -- even more so -- as climate change makes severe weather events even worse elsewhere.”  (Emphasis added.)  Unfortunately, we’ve all now seen how good a choice of words “elsewhere” turned out to be.  So who in this country is still confident that climate change won’t affect them directly?  And if you are, why?

Personally, I agree with our country’s first great scientist, Benjamin Franklin: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.  There are things our warming planet will inflict on us that we’ve passed the point of preventing, but over the long run we still have our hands on the thermostat.  We still generally presume that renewable power sources are prohibitively expensive, but that’s not true at all.  And we also have to consider the full costs of the alternatives, whether it’s adaptation (and re-adaptation, if we allow the planet to warm further), continued global dependence on places like the Middle East and Russia, or cleaning up the messes when something bad happens.  What should we do, then?  Critically question the status quo, and the motives of people who advocate for doing nothing differently.  Get a sense of what the true costs really are.  Support measures that will lead to the stopping of the warming trend.  Maybe make sure that a few windmills get built in America over the next four years.  And don’t stay in place, because the climate will not wait for us to catch up.

Reduce, reuse, and reuse some more

 

 

picture taken from https://wise.uwaterloo.ca/.api2/api/v1/communities/2774924/previews/thumbnails/4f72ebc2-88cd-4fb4-b7f8-a4c256683a68?width=680&height=680&crop=False

Environmentalists often use the term “reduce, reuse, recycle” to describe ways that individuals can shrink their footprint on the planet.  But the phrase applies on industrial scales as well, and a recent report suggests that there is a way for the renewable energy industry to reuse something in order to substantially reduce its environmental impact with a similarly large savings in costs.  A couple of weeks ago, the journal Cell Reports Physical Science published an article titled “Taking Second-Life Batteries from Exhausted to empowered using experiments, data analysis, and health estimation” by a team from Stanford University and Relyion Energy in California led by Xiaofan Cui.  The paper talks about the potential for using retired car batteries as storage in the electrical grid.  The basic premise is that a typical retired car battery still maintains 70 to 80% of its energy storage potential, and that 40% of the projected need for energy storage in the grid by 2030 can be supplied by these retired batteries.  The primary logistical issue for using these batteries is that they will need to be repurposed, so this study set out to test whether this issue is a barrier or merely a small obstacle.

The authors tested eight cells from retired Nissan Leaf battery packs for their ability to continue supplying electricity once repurposed.  The results show that the reduced-voltage state that comes with supplying grid power instead of moving a vehicle can substantially extend the usable lifetime of the battery.  While the sample size was tiny and these results do depend significantly on the health of the battery when it is retired, the authors did establish proof of concept.  And if these results can be replicated on a bigger scale, the technology has game-changing potential.  I’ve discussed in a previous post that the cost of battery storage, while declining, remains high enough to slow down the adoption of renewable energy.  But if much of the needed storage can come from batteries that are otherwise headed for the scrap heap, that would reduce the overhead enormously while simultaneously enhancing sustainability.  It is worth paying attention to see how this story develops.

Where We Are in 2024, part 1: Clean Energy

 

The Edwards & Sanborn Solar and Energy Storage Project in Kern County, California became the largest solar farm in the country when it went online last month.

2023 has come and gone, and while some progress has been made in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, this past year was the warmest globally on record by a wide margin.  And it was just announced that we started this year with the warmest January globally on record.  So what are world leaders doing to make it possible to reduce the temperature trend sooner rather than later?   Well, December saw the 28th Conference of Parties (COP28) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.  It was held in Dubai, the most populous city in the oil-rich United Arab Emirates and chaired by Sultan Al Jaber, head of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company.  This made climate activists suspicious that the UN had essentially put a fox in charge of the henhouse, and these suspicions were strengthened by a report early in the conference that Al Jaber intended to strike oil and gas deals during the conference.

Having said all that, COP28 did produce a noteworthy agreement to transition “away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner.”  The optimistic view is that the world’s nations have agreed that moving on from fossil fuels is necessary to stabilize the Earth’s climate.  The pessimist would point out that representatives of Pacific Island nations, who are more vulnerable to the effects of rising seas than anybody else and were not in the room when the agreement was made, feel that the agreement lacks a level of urgency commensurate with their situation.  The pessimist would also point out that this need to move on from fossil fuels was sufficiently clear at the time of COP1 back in 1995, if not a decade or two sooner.  The science made this acknowledgement inevitable, but it took this long for it to happen.  

In practical terms, what does a phaseout mean?  Many processes emit greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, but how quickly can these processes be altered to suit to what the climate needs?  It’s worth taking a look at the different processes, and where we stand in each case.  For this post we will start with power generation, which contributes 34% of global greenhouse gas emissions according to the most recent IPCC report and 25% of United States emissions, according to a recent report from the EPA.

Power generation remains a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, but the good news is that it doesn’t have to stay that way for very long if people don’t want it to.  The primary obstacle right now is no longer cost.  As I mentioned in my previous post, utility-scale solar and onshore wind are cheaper than the alternatives in many locations, and are now at least cost-competitive where battery storage is necessary.  The primary logistical hurdle at this point is the availability of land.  To that end, the Bureau of Land Management just updated its roadmap for solar energy, significantly expanding the area of public land available for development.  

Where cost does matter right now, quite a bit in fact, is with offshore wind.  Several offshore wind deals have fallen through recently, with the primary obstacle being that an inadequate supply chain in this country is keeping the cost of development sky high.  Offshore wind has a logistical advantage over other renewable power sources in that it doesn’t compete for dry land with other industrial and residential demands, but that won’t help it if it remains so expensive.  And while the supply chain will likely catch up with demand eventually, onshore renewable power continues to expand in the meantime.  Offshore wind companies like Oersted may have a hard time re-convincing people that the need justifies the cost, especially if they have to start from scratch.

As for the role of carbon removal in power generation, the most recent Lazard report shows that even “dirty” coal is not cheap enough at this point to compete with other power sources.  So unless gas prices drop quite a bit compared to renewables in the future and a major cost-reducing innovation in carbon removal happens, it will remain quite a bit cheaper to generate the electricity without emissions in the first place.  In other words, where power is concerned, “net zero” means “zero.”

So the bottom line is that the biggest present barriers to creating an energy sector reliant solely on non-emitting sources are political ones.  I’ve written in the past that creating a fully clean grid by 2035 in this county would  strand assets in the hundreds of billions, but this administration has already approved bigger spending packages over shorter periods of time.  And while stopping and hopefully reversing climate change will require a global effort, we’re the United States.  We still have the world’s largest economy and most prosperous democracy.  The developing world will look up to us and follow our example, one way or the other.

The Levelized Cost of Energy, 2023 Update

Taken from the latest version of Lazard's Levelized Cost of Energy.

Once before, I have written a post about the financial firm Lazard and their surveys of the levelized (meaning, over the full lifetime of the source) cost of different types of energy generation.  Lazard did not publish a new edition in 2022, but instead waited until April 2023.  (The above diagram is from the newest edition, and the information presented below is mostly based on it.)  Some costs have remained essentially the same, which is both good and not-so-good news.  But Lazard also reported a significant drop in the cost of one facet of energy production.

New utility scale solar ($24-96/MWh) and onshore wind ($24-75/MWh) drop on the lower end, but have risen significantly on the higher end.  The lower end in both cases is extremely competitive compared to new coal ($68-166/MWh, with the high end including carbon capture) and gas ($39-101/MWh).  But the sharp upward revisions on the high end suggest that the cost is more sensitive to location than previously reported.  Intermittency remains a serious practical concern with both solar and wind, but the cost of battery storage is definitely going down. The cost of solar plus storage ranges from $46-102/MWh, after it was estimated at $85-158/MWh in 2021.  Onshore wind plus storage fares even better, with a cost of $24-75/MWh.  Offshore wind, by contrast, is still quite expensive at $72-140/MWh (not even including storage).  That is a significant obstacle.  But as long as there are parts of the country where onshore wind would compete for land with housing and agriculture, or where the potential for wind power is significantly greater a few miles offshore than a few miles onshore, there will be enough demand for offshore wind that people will continue to look for ways to get that cost down.

The cost of nuclear and coal have been evaluated both in terms of overall cost and the cost once construction has been accounted for (see the orange diamonds above).  For coal, the latter cost is $52/MWh.  This is higher than the lowest estimates for solar and wind plus storage.  Why is that significant?   Because it means that there are already at least some locations in the country where it would be cheaper (taking the cost of construction of the coal plant to be set, and something which will necessarily be paid, regardless of how long the plant operates) to decommission the coal plant in favor of renewables plus storage right now.  And that assumes that storage of a significant portion of the power generated by the renewables is needed; where this is not true, a greater portion of coal plants could be decommissioned quickly.  For nuclear, the cost of continuing to run a plant whose construction has been accounted for is only $31/MWh.  But the total cost of nuclear is heavily skewed toward construction of the plant, ranging from $141-221/MWh (compared to $131-204/MWh in 2021).  Simply put, new nuclear plants are not cost-competitive right now with anything, the most expensive offshore wind included.  And with the cost of battery storage for renewables dropping sharply, it would take a major innovation in the construction of nuclear facilities to put nuclear back in the picture at all.  (Keep in mind also that nuclear plants take more than seven years to build on average, while solar and wind farms can be installed in a year or two.)  But existing nuclear plants are still cheap to run, and as long as a plant continues to run well and safely without requiring major renovations, I don’t see any benefit to closing it.

Recently, Lazard has started to take a closer look at the cost of hydrogen as an energy source.  The burning of hydrogen does not directly emit disruptive amounts of any greenhouse gases (burning it will release some water vapor, but not in proportions that will noticeably affect the total atmospheric amount).  However, most present means of creating molecular hydrogen do involve the combustion of fossil fuels.  The one exception would be the electrolysis of water using electricity generated from non-emitting sources.  For combined cycle gas, Lazard estimates the cost of generating 20% of the power using “blue” hydrogen (meaning the hydrogen is produced by burning methane) at $116/MWh and using “green” hydrogen (from electrolysis) at $156/MWh.  This is obviously too large for now, but hydrogen technology is at the state of development where solar and wind were about 15 years ago and battery storage was about 5 years ago.  Significant innovation is needed, but the precedent is there.

So where does this leave us, relative to two years ago?  The big positive is that battery costs have come down, bolstering the feasibility of a quick transition to renewables.  That being said, the cost of wind and solar remains very heavily dependent on location.  And given the space required for renewables relative to more conventional power plants, it will take some very good planning to optimize costs in a way that doesn’t interfere with housing and agriculture or cut into nature.  Coal and nuclear are still losing the cost battle, to if anything an even bigger degree than in 2021.  Barring a major technical breakthrough, it will never be cheaper to produce “clean coal” than it will to be to generate the same amount of energy without emissions in the first place.  And solar and wind with storage are clearing technical and cost hurdles much more rapidly than nuclear is.  There is room for hydrogen in the transportation sector, but while the cost of hydrogen could drop substantially with increasing demand like it has for renewables and batteries, there’s no guarantee that it will.  

Over the last decade, progress has been made on a number of fronts to bring down the cost of a clean energy transition.  More progress would help, to be sure, but I honestly don’t think the price tag is holding it back at this point.