Science Vs - 100% Renewable Energy - Can We Do It?

Episode Date: October 5, 2017

We need to ditch fossil fuels. Can America go 100% renewable by 2050? Does the technology already exist? We speak to Prof. Mark Delucchi, Prof. Christopher Clack, and Prof. David Connolly. UPDATE: Since this episode was published, Tesla have unveiled a prototype of a electric semi truck. Check out the full transcript here: http://bit.ly/38ku2a4 Our Sponsors: Tushy | Wordpress.com | TuneIn Credits: This episode has been produced by Wendy Zukerman, Heather Rogers and Shruti Ravindran. Production help from Rose Rimler. Our senior producer is Kaitlyn Sawrey. We’re edited this week by Blythe Terrell and Annie-Rose Strasser, with extra help from Rachel Ward. Fact checking by Michelle Harris. Sound design by Martin Peralta. Music written by Bobby Lord. For this episode we also spoke to Professor Vijay Modi, Professor Mark Jacobson, Dr Gorm Bruun Andresen, Professor Willett Kempton, Dr Dylan McConnell, and Dr Jane CS Long. And an extra thanks to the Zukerman family. Selected reading: Mark Jacobson and Mark Delucchi paper showing that the US could be run on 100 percent renewable energy.Christopher Clack and his team’s paper criticising Mark’s workSurvey published this year of more than 100 energy experts on the future of renewables.National Renewable Energy Lab’s look at Renewable Electricity Detailed report on California’s energy future Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman and you're listening to Science Versus from Gimlet Media. This is the show where we pit facts against our future. On today's show, we're asking, could the US be run entirely on renewable energy? Like, is it even possible? So, just imagine a world where air is clean, where every car, instead of guzzling dirty petrol, is powered on electricity. Imagine a world where houses are plastered with solar panels

and in the distance, factories no longer pump out smoke, but instead wind turbines taller than trees blow in the wind. Yes, all around us, our computers, heaters, jetpacks are powered by the wind and the sun. Just imagine a world... Wendy, Wendy. We get it. Really?

We get it. All right. Well, that's the dream of the renewable future. And the thing is, we need to start making this dream a reality soon. Because the best science tells us that to reduce the risk of catastrophic climate change, we have to drastically cut our greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. That's only 33 years away.

33 years to completely change the way we live. And one path to save our planet is to run the world on 100% renewable energy. Can we do it? And for today's episode, let's make it easy and just focus on the United States. Two scientists who reckon that the US can do this are Mark Jacobson, a professor at Stanford, and Mark DeLucchi at the University of California at Berkeley. Here's Mark. Yeah, the second Mark. The one at Berkeley. We don't need engineering miracles. We don't need new Nobel Prizes in physics. We just don't. Yes, Mark thinks we already have almost all the technology that we need to make this renewable dream a reality.

But many scientists don't agree, and this debate over how far renewables can take us has snowballed into a bar fight. Well, the academic version of one. The battle reached fever pitch just a few months ago when a paper was published by 21 academics criticising Mark and his team's work. And this fight got international attention.

It was picked up by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Economist and more. And Mark, he was pissed. Jesus Christ. Frankly, I am just absolutely astounded at the degree of vituperousness, vituperativeness. Vituperativeness? What exactly does that mean? Vituperative is saying really nasty, sharp insults. Wait, I'm going to look this up. Vituperative, bitter and abusive. Yep. And part of the reason why this fight has gotten so bitter is because Mark's work cuts down the energy sources that we can use to just the cleanest

and greenest. Right now, we get our energy from a range of sources, coal and petrol, obviously, but also natural gas, nuclear power, biomass, solar power, wind and hydropower. And Mark's work strikes out all of those, except three. He's looking at whether the US can be run using only wind, water and heart. Go Planet! Oh, no, that's Captain Planet. He's looking at whether we can use wind, solar power and a little bit of water from hydropower to run the US.

But some say that his idea is just too starry-eyed. I think, frankly, and forgive my swearing, I think that's a little bit of a chick-ass cop-out. I think it's a little bit of an unwillingness to say, I think it's an unwillingness to be hard-headed. And for the academics who criticised Mark and his team, this isn't about not being hard-headed. They say the stakes are high, and Mark's 100% renewable future has problems that you just can't overlook. If we just ignore them and just assume we're going to have this utopia,

I think we're going to be in for a sharp realisation. This is Christopher Clack, a renewables researcher at Vibrant Clean Energy in Colorado. And Chris was the lead author on the paper that criticised Mark's work. He says that if we just use wind, water and solar, our power might not be reliable, which could mean mass blackouts. Now, that's OK for you and me, so long as Game of Thrones isn't on. But it's...

A bit more difficult for hospitals who have ICU units to say you need to turn off for eight hours. People tend to die when those things happen. And actually, just day to day, this is serious. Just even simple things like, we don't think about it, but if you want to run your water, if you want a drink of water, electricity has to be available because that's how you get water into your taps. If you don't have electricity, you don't have running water.

And Chris says that if the energy situation becomes dire, we might end up crawling back to burning dirty coal and other fossil fuels. So, who's right? Is a 100% renewable future just a pipe dream? How far can renewables really take us? When it comes to renewable energy, there's a bit of... Bitupertiveness. But then there's science.

Science vs Renewables is coming up just after the break. After decades of shaky hands caused by debilitating tremors, Sunnybrook was the only hospital in Canada who could provide Andy with something special. Three neurosurgeons, two scientists, one movement disorders coordinator, 58 answered questions, two focused ultrasound procedures, one specially developed helmet, thousands of high-intensity focused ultrasound waves, zero incisions. And that very same day, two steady hands. From innovation to action, Sunnybrook is special. Learn more at sunnybrook.ca slash special.

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At Wealthsimple, we're built for whatever you're building. Built for Jane, who wants to break into the housing market. We're built for Ted, who's obsessed with what's happening in the global markets. And built for Celine, who just wants to retire and explore the world's flea markets. So take a moment and think about what you're building for. We've got the financial tools to help make it happen. Wealth Simple, built for possibilities. Visit wealthsimple.com slash possibilities. Welcome back. Today, we're asking, how could the US be run entirely on renewables?

And to do that, we'll look at the following pieces of the energy puzzle. One, transport. Two, homes and businesses. And three, what happens when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow? Will we always have access to HBO? And our guide isn't someone in the vituperative debate. Instead, our referee will be David Connolly. Yeah, hey, Wendy. How are things? Yeah, I can hear you, yeah.

David worked for years gaming out how European nations could be run entirely on renewables when he was at Aalborg University in Denmark, one country that's leading the charge on renewable energy. He's now at the Irish Wind Energy Association at home in Ireland. Now, David says that if we want to go 100% renewable, the task we have ahead is huge. I think the scale of that change is just so enormous that it impacts everything about what we do. It's just so fundamental from the very bottom to the very top. Right now, roughly 5% of America's energy comes from wind,

solar and hydropower. Could we really bump that up to 100% in just 33 years? Okay, the race is on. Let's go. Here's what we need. To start us off, we need a lot of solar panels. But that doesn't mean that whole chunks of the countryside will be plastered with solar fields because solar panels in the future might just become a part of the buildings around us. Maybe it won't look like a piece of, let's say, steel or glass sitting on top of the roof, but it might just look like any material in the roof.

Yeah, scientists are working on solar panels that look like clear glass and you can already buy solar roof tiles, which is pretty cool, huh? It's estimated that by 2050, we really could power millions of homes using just solar power. Next, we need wind turbines. Right now, there are around 50,000 in America and we'd need to build hundreds of thousands of them. And a big report from a US Department of Energy lab couldn't see any insurmountable problems to building all those

wind turbines by 2050. And the thing is, David has seen big changes in wind energy happen fast in Ireland. Just a few decades ago, there was practically no wind power. And now, it gives enough electricity to power almost 2 million homes, which is really impressive for a country of less than 5 million. The first thing that comes into my mind when I see them is progress and is innovation and is, you know, change and good and positive. You get a sense of pride almost in humanity that we can do these things if we put our mind to them. Whoa, whoa, whoa.

Okay, before we have too much pride in humanity. We need some global warming. It's freezing. Okay, okay. So, say we build our solar panels and our wind turbines. What next? Well, they're going to create electricity. But the problem is that a lot of the stuff we use every day doesn't run on electricity. And that needs to change, which means we've got to electrify.

It's electrifying. To get a sense of what that would take, we're going to look at four areas sucking up a lot of power. Transport, industry, homes and businesses. Let's start with transport. That includes planes, trucks and cars. And this is where around a third of carbon emissions in the US come from. And David says that when it comes to getting cars to run on renewables,

this will be straightforward. We're going to switch to electric cars. Ten years ago, it was definitely one of the solutions, whereas now it's the solution. There's so much excitement about electric cars that just this year, the UK and France announced that they'd stop the sale of petrol and diesel cars by 2040. And in September, China started talking about the same thing. Now, if we're going to get to a 100% renewable future, we have to go even further and replace every single car in the US with an electric one.

Right now, there are around 250 million cars on the road in the US, which could mean that in 30 years, we'll need some 300 million electric vehicles. Oh, and we've got to convert our petrol stations into stations that charge the car batteries. Whew! But still, for cars, we've got the technology to do this. Where things start to get tricky is here. It's powering trucks and planes using electricity. The problem with that is that these big guys are heavy, which means you need a big heavy battery to power them. And this becomes a vicious cycle. You can imagine an

airplane needs to be light in order to get it up off the ground and also to go over long distances. And as you put more batteries in the plane, it becomes heavier and heavier and heavier. But people are working on this. In the last couple of weeks, a company announced that they would try to power planes using battery for short flights, two hours or so. But still, they said that technology is about a decade away. And for flights longer than two hours,

we're going to need a different solution. And one of them that has some scientists excited is using hydrogen. Here's how that can work. You split water to get hydrogen. So you're taking the H from H2O. And once you have that hydrogen, you can use it to create electricity. It's more complicated than that, but that's the basic idea. And hydrogen vehicles have been in pilot projects for some years now.

But there are a few problems with it. According to a big, detailed report on California's energy future, hydrogen is, quote, very expensive, end quote. And storing hydrogen, they said, very expensive, end quote. And storing hydrogen, they said, is not yet technically feasible. Plus, hydrogen is very explosive, which is pretty scary when you're talking about flying commercial passenger planes. But Mark DeLucchi, our wind, water and solar guy, doesn't think hydrogen's as scary as it sounds. After all, he says, think about how people might have felt when the first

gasoline cars were being developed. Who is ever going to want to be driving around sitting on the equivalent of 400 pounds of TNT? We managed. Gasoline has terrible risks. And in a 2012 report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change wrote that the big issue with hydrogen is cost rather than technical feasibility. We can make a hydrogen plane that flies a whole bunch of people across the ocean. We can do it. Something close to it's already been done.

It's not a huge technical issue. But here's the thing. The closest we've gotten to a commercial hydrogen plane is a four-seater that flew for just 10 minutes. It was a pilot project. A pilot project. It was on a plane. Anyway, a survey published this year of more than 100 energy experts from around the world found that aviation was, quote, a weak link in the chain to a 100% renewable energy future, end quote. Conclusion. Can we power all transport with electricity? Not entirely. We could power all transport with electricity? Not entirely.

We could power all of our cars, but for trucks and planes, we need something different. And we haven't quite worked that out yet. OK, so the next sector that needs to be run on renewables is industry. Here, think factories, manufacturing plants, mining, concrete and glass production. Basically everything in the built world. And all that industry accounts for about 30%

of our carbon dioxide emissions. Now, a lot of industry, like manufacturing those electric cars we'll need, making clothes and canned foods, that actually can be run off electricity. That's according to a report by the IPCC. But they said that some industrial processes just need so much heat that it becomes really tricky to run them on electricity.

So, for example, to create iron ore or steel, which, by the way, will need to make wind turbines, you need almost 3000 degrees Fahrenheit. That's over 1600 degrees Celsius for everyone outside America. Here's our referee, David. So to get to those extremely high temperature levels is really, really difficult in some processes. And we don't simply have the technology we need using electricity as the fuel source to get there. And right now, burning fossil fuels is one of the only ways we know how to get those crazy high temperatures. But David said that those processes are still a relatively small part of industry, so maybe we don't have to sweat it so hard.

Conclusion. When it comes to running industry on 100% renewables, we can go a long way, but we don't know how to do it all just yet. Let's take a look at the last piece of the puzzle that we'd need to convert to renewables. Businesses like banks, law firms and supermarkets, as well as our homes. According to the EPA, all of that pumps out just under 40% of US carbon dioxide emissions. And technically,

we could run all of our lights and vacuum cleaners and computers on electricity powered by wind turbines and solar panels. And technically, we could convert all the gas stoves and the gas heaters that we have into electric. But here's the thing. When it comes to heating our houses using an electric heater, it can suck up a lot of power. So here's the thing. When it comes to heating our houses using an electric heater, it can suck up a lot of power. So here's another idea.

David reckons that we should use something called a heat pump, which looks a lot like an air conditioner. That's a device that uses electricity because it's basically moving heat, you could say, from one area to another. And the key is that it does that really efficiently. Plus, good news. This technology is so well proven,

you've probably got a similar device in your house right now. Have you ever noticed on the back of a fridge, you'll see a lot of coils and you'll hear a little hum off your fridge when it's turned on? Well, what your fridge is actually doing is it's taking the heat out of the fridge and putting it into your kitchen. Part of David's idea is that in cities there would be this huge centralised heat pump. And then that heat would be shuffled through hot pipes to each building using a system called district heating.

And the IPCC is on board with this plan. And I know this sounds, it is a bit hard to fully grasp what is happening there, but I suppose the key point is just to let you know that this is not a new technology or a new idea. This is something that's mainstream in many countries. Conclusion. When it comes to businesses and homes, we have the technology to use 100% renewable energy to run our lights, our internet and to warm us up. But the thing is, in Sweden and Denmark, where district heating and this kind of system is used,

these countries aren't just relying on solar and wind power to then drive those heat pumps. They actually rely on biofuels and even some fossil fuels, which are not allowed in our perfect renewable future. So the big question is, will we have enough power from the sun and the wind to warm up all of our houses across the US come winter? Because...

Winter is coming. And what happens if the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow? Do we freeze? That big, big problem. Coming up after the break. Welcome back. So we've learned that we have the technology right now to power a lot of our lives using renewables. With giant wind turbines and fields of solar panels, we could create a ton of electricity that could power our snazzy new electric cars. And we could convert our homes into efficient heat pump machines

that get warmed and cooled by electricity. But there's one big crack in the 100% renewable dream. And that is this. What happens when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow? Sure, we've still got water, hydropower, that third pillar of the renewable future. But even in Mark DeLucchi and his team's work, that would only give us a fraction of the power that we need.

You see, what's been so great about fossil fuels is that we can shove them in a barrel, leave them there and burn them whenever we need them. Here's our referee, David Connolly. That has been an absolute gift for humanity in the last 150 years because it has meant that we could move energy around very easily. You know, in other words, we could just put the oil in barrels and ship it around the world. But with wind and solar? You can't tell the winds to blow when you want it to blow

or you can't tell the solar panel to produce electricity when the sun doesn't shine. You can't put sunshine into a big barrel and leave it there. No, and you can't move it around quite as easily either. So we need something else.

We need a way to store power for a rainy day. What about batteries? Well, there's one problem here. Batteries are expensive, particularly the ingredients that make them, like lithium and copper. In fact, no academic that I spoke to thought that we could use batteries as the only thing to rely on when the wind and the sun aren't cooperating. Here's David. The price of that would be just far too large for anybody to realistically imagine it as a reasonable thing for people to do.

Do you know by how much our electricity bill would go up? Like is it doubling, tripling? All I can say is that it's such a high number that we've never gone to the effort of actually calculating it because it's just, it's like it's so beyond what we would propose as a realistic solution. Like you might not be as big of a fan of renewable energy systems as you were before. I think by the time you add all those numbers together. So if money was no object, maybe we could use batteries to store a big chunk of power for the US. But because money is an object, we need another plan.

In fact, we need to think of storage in a whole new light. Like, we need to think about a giant smart power grid. Now, this means different things to different people, but the way we're going to talk about it is like a hypothetical giant grid that spans coast to coast and it carefully shuffles power wherever it needs to go. And this grid would be supplied in a large part, or really completely, by renewable energy sources

like wind, solar and hydropower. So this means that if it's a windy day in the Great Plains, but it's cloudy in the Californian desert, you could send that wind over to the West Coast. Yes, that's right. Here's Mark DeLuki. You have probably high voltage power lines and you might then be able to use solar energy output in the southwest of the US, California, Mojave Desert, to help balance the load over on the east coast.

Now, to work out whether we actually will have enough wind and solar power to keep our lights on and our HBO running, Mark and others use what are called models. Now, these look at how much energy we've used in the past to try to predict how much energy we'll use in the future. And this is complicated stuff because they also have to include the weather in their models. Now, that's because the weather affects how much energy we need. So, is it freezing outside? Is our heat going to be cranked up? Winter is here. But the weather also affects how much energy we're going to get from the sun and the wind. So, if we don't want any blackouts in the future, not for a single minute. These models ultimately need to predict how much energy we'll use and how much energy we'll have for every single minute in the future.

That's a big ask. And if they get it wrong and it's night and there's not enough wind power around, what are we going to do? There's never no wind across the entire US. But you can't, like, take all the West's wind because then they need their wind power, right? Like, it's not like it's free, it's all free for New York to take. Would there be a scenario where people are doing tug of war with the energy grid?

Well, this is exactly where the need for backup comes in. It's because there could be scenarios, that's right, where you have to have backup capacity for individual days. And by backup, Mark means building extra wind turbines. So what happens if your backup is in a place where there's still no wind blowing? I mean, it is possible that, I suppose, that you could have a situation where just, even with your planned backup that you planned wrong.

But all of the analyses that I have seen suggest that that's unlikely, like really unlikely at continental scales. One group from the University of Delaware modelled what a big grid could look like across 13 eastern states, and they analysed four years of data from 1999 to the end of 2002. Now, this team found that most of the time, using a little bit of battery and their enhanced grid, you could actually run these states on 100% renewable energy.

But not always. There were a handful of times, often in summer, when they did have to go back to the fossil fuels. But still, when we asked our referee, David Connolly, about this idea of a giant grid, he just wasn't sure about it. After all, there's just so much uncertainty in these models. And if they're wrong, you just can't flip a switch to get more wind. You simply cannot call upon wind and solar to be there whenever you need it. You would be assuming that it's always windy or sunny somewhere.

I have heard, though, that it's always sunny in Philadelphia. Okay. Yeah, you never know. So maybe that's the magic solution we've all been waiting for. If my culinary genius was to result in something like a Philly cheesesteak, I think I'd always see the sun shining as well. These were all the smartest scientists on the planet. Only problem is, they kept being wrong! Conclusion. To power the US on just wind, water and solar power,

we would probably need to create a giant grid connecting renewable energy sources from all over the United States. And even then, that might not be enough. But here's the thing. There are countries around the world that are committing to renewables. Denmark is aiming to be 100% renewable energy by 2050, and they think they can do it. But how? How are they solving these problems?

Well, they're not restricting the tools they have to get that future to just wind, water and solar. They have a broader definition of renewables, and that includes things like biofuels. That's where you can take plants or even just manure and heat it up to make fuel. Now, the name biofuels sounds better for the environment than fossil fuels and it is but it's not perfect. For example making and heating biofuels can still release some greenhouse gas into the air which is the whole problem we're trying to avoid. But David says we still shouldn't rule it out entirely. We don't want to end up in the extreme situation

where we're using nothing because then we're missing the opportunity to use cheap, sustainable energy in the form of bioenergy. Ultimately, David says there's a middle ground here where we could use a little bit of biofuels when we have to. And this is what the IPCC, the leading body on climate change, kind of says we should do.

In their latest report, they wrote that to rein in climate change, we should consider biofuels, along with other things like nuclear energy, which emits no greenhouse gas when you use it to create power. We actually did a whole episode on nuclear energy and safety last season. You should check it out. And just quickly, there's one final thing we want to talk to you about. You. In this renewable future, we're going to have to be a lot more thoughtful about the way we use our energy. And that means we're going to need to change the way that we live. Right now, Americans use, on average,

around four times more energy than your average person anywhere else in the world. But that can change. The power is yours. It's not crazy to imagine that your future house, which, by the way, can talk, will tell you that there isn't a lot of wind power, and so you need to stop charging your jetpack.

We're the Planeteers. You can be one too. So when it comes to science versus 100% renewables, does it stack up? With current technology, we could definitely ramp up our use of renewables. We could build solar panels and wind turbines to run a lot of America's power. Our houses could run on electricity fuelled by the wind and the sun. And when it comes to electric cars, we have the technology. Now, the rest of the transportation sector, planes and trucks,

as well as some industrial processes, they are a bit of a puzzle right now. Scientists are working on it. But the big question, will we have reliable power when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow? Well, there's lots of debate about this. But if we broaden our renewable vision, we include biofuels and maybe even nuclear power, we could get pretty darn close. But for David, he wishes that right now we didn't get so bogged down in the details of a perfect renewable future. After all, America uses so little renewable power right now. Why not just bump that a bit up first? Or in other words...

Don't waste time trying to figure out what the finish line looks like if you haven't even started the race, because your first challenge is just to get moving. You go to a country like Denmark, where over 40% of the electricity comes from wind power already today, why could America not go to 40% in the future without having to get caught up in the details of what might work in 20 years or 30 years? David says there's just so many things we can do right now. We have so many wind turbines to build, solar panels to build, heat pumps to install

that we'll be more than busy enough in the next 10, 20 years to do all of that. With so much to do, why aren't we moving faster? Well, David says it's not the gaps in the technology that's holding us back. It's the lizard people. No, it's definitely not the lizard people. It's something else. The changes that we need in the next 20 or 30 or 40 years are so enormous that somebody is going to lose out and lose out badly.

The people who sell oil, who sell gas, who sell coal, they're all going to lose out very badly if we move into a 100% renewable energy system. And that's why politically it can be very, very challenging to get policy to move. That's science versus renewable energy. And before we finish off today, we spoke to a lot of different academics for this show.

Unfortunately, we couldn't include them all. But in the mix, we spoke to Jim Sweeney, a professor at Stanford, and our senior producer, Caitlin Sori, asked him a kind of personal question. We wanted to share it with you. So I guess I have a question that kind of goes to optimism. So, like, if you were our age, would you have kids right now? Oh, absolutely.

Absolutely. Wait a minute. Of course I'd have kids if I had now. I'm not going to give up on the future because there's challenges. There's always been challenges. I was born during World War II. There were real challenges there too. My parents had children. I don't see that there's any reason for believing that we're all going to go to hell in a handbasket. We will have challenges. There's no doubt about it. This episode has been produced by me, Wendy Zuckerman, Heather Rogers and Truti Ravindran. Production help from Rose Rimla.

Our senior producer is Caitlin Sorey. We're edited this week by Blythe Terrell and Annie Rose Strasser, with extra help from Rachel Ward. Fact checking by Michelle Harris. Sound design by Martin Peralta. Music written by Bobby Lord. For this episode, we also spoke to Professor Vijay Modi,

Professor Mark Jacobson, Dr Gorm Brun-Anderson, Professor Willett Kempton, Dr Dylan McConnell and Dr Jane C.S. Long. And an extra thanks to the Zuckerman family. Thank you, guys. Now, next week, we're tackling one of the biggest mysteries of all. Bigfoot.

Does it exist? Parks and Recreation, how can I help you? Hello, my name's Wendy, and I'm calling from the podcast Science Versus. And I heard that you guys had a Bigfoot sighting? Uh-huh. I'm Wendy Zuckerman.

Back to you next time.