Tucked into a narrow valley straddling the border of Virginia and West Virginia lie two
bodies of water. Reservoirs carved from the earth of the Allegheny Mountains. One lies
uphill of the other and a stream of water flows between the two. But if you look closely,
that water seems to be defying gravity. Instead of running downhill, it’s going up it. The
lower reservoir is feeding the upper one. These two lakes and the water flowing between
them might just be a solution to a zero-carbon world. This is a story about how renewables
work, what they offer for a fossil fuel free future, and how two bodies of water nestled
in the Alleghany Valley of Virginia could make that future a reality.
On April 21st, 2020 documentary filmmaker Jeff Gibs released his movie, Planet of Humans,
onto YouTube. The premise of the film was simple: renewable energy wasn’t working
and wouldn’t save us from climate change. Throughout the film, Gibbs details the failings
of the renewable industry and comes to a conclusion that teeters on the edge of a dangerous precipice:
if renewables won’t save us, then population growth must be curtailed: “If we get ourselves
under control, all things are possible.” This vein of environmentalist thinking has
historically been used to excuse eugenicist and violent population control measures. But
that is a topic for a whole different video. Many of the points in Planet of Humans have
been refuted or are just simply outdated, but Gibbs arguments epitomize a worrying trend
of “renewable bashing.” A trend that rejects these young wind and solar industries wholesale
without offering feasible solutions to replace them. That being said, renewables like solar
and wind definitely do have problems, but these technologies are not hopeless like Gibbs
seems to think. So let’s briefly look at the obstacles renewables face in order to
understand how best to navigate a path towards 100% clean energy by 2050.
When it comes to wind turbines, a common takedown, especially among right-leaning politicians,
is that they kill birds. Unfortunately, this is true. In North America, wind turbines kill
between 140 to 500,000 birds a year, but if you zoom out to look at the whole picture,
that number looks a little different. Both a 2009 and a 2012 study revealed that fossil
fuel plants caused 9.7 bird deaths per gigawatt-hour produced while turbines caused only .27 deaths
per gigawatt-hour produced. Oh, and cats kill roughly 10,000 times the amount of birds than
turbines do. So, when contextualized, bird deaths caused by wind turbines are comparably
small.
The lifecycle impacts of both solar panels and wind turbines are yet another point of
attack for those looking to discredit renewable. These technologies require resources to assemble,
install, and eventually dismantle, so some, including Jeff Gibbs, argue that renewables
are not as clean as we think they are. But according to one 2017 paper that compared
the emissions from the lifecycle of a variety of energy sources, solar and wind consistently
produced some of the lowest impacts compared to coal or natural gas. This research reinforced
an earlier, widely cited 2013 study, that found similar results. In short, despite the
amount of concrete and raw materials required to construct wind and solar arrays, they can
quickly pay off that initial carbon debt. And these technologies are comparably young,
so as renewables continue to be honed, these installations will last longer and longer
making waste less of a problem.
One of the largest problems facing renewables, however, is that they create too much energy.
Or rather, they generate too much energy when we don’t need it. Wind and solar are variable
in their outputs and produce energy when the sun shines the strongest or when the wind
is blowing the hardest, which often doesn’t match up with the times we need it. This mismatch
means that when energy demand is low, but production is high, the grid must curtail
or get rid of some of its excess energy supply or risk overtaxing the grid. This curtailment
is happening in real-time in California, which dramatically increased its solar capacity
in the last decade, but has yet to build energy infrastructure to support it. As a result,
the state had to curtail over 318,000 MWh worth of electricity production in April of
this year, and as more solar and wind plants come online that number seems to only be growing.
In short, California shows us that to successfully scale up renewables we must also have enough
capacity to use the energy these technologies produce. Which brings us to storage.
Back in the Allegheny Mountains, water is still running uphill. Because, after all,
this is a pumped-hydro storage plant. An age-old solution to a modern problem. The Bath County
pumped-hydro facility is one of the biggest batteries in the world, with the capacity
to store 3003 megawatts of energy. For comparison, the capacity of the largest lithium-ion battery
storage facility in the U.S. is currently 62.5 megawatts. The facility achieves this
massive energy storage through a simple method. When there’s excess energy in the grid,
instead of curtailing it, the facility uses the energy to pump water from the lower reservoir
into the upper one, and then when there’s high electricity demand, they let the water
run downhill through turbines into the lower basin like a conventional damn, fulfilling
that demand. A shockingly straightforward solution to the problem of energy storage.
And if done right, it can stabilize the variability of renewables so that electricity is readily
available whenever we need it. There are some drawbacks however: it requires a large amount
of water for one, and it also requires mountainous terrain. But the concept of pumped hydro is
being tinkered with to create alternative methods that don’t require open basins or
mountains. One proposal envisions a large cylindrical rock set in the earth that gets
pushed up with excess water when energy production is high, and then through the force of gravity,
pushes that water back down through a turbine when electricity is needed. But really, pumped-hydro
storage is just one solution of many that needs to be expanded if we are to successfully
achieve 100% renewable output by 2050.
Interconnectors are yet another piece of a successful clean energy puzzle. In simple
terms, interconnectors combine separate grid systems, which allows states or even whole
countries to trade-off excess energy. So, when storage is limited and demand is high,
the local grid doesn’t need to curtail or waste electricity, it can instead transport
that energy to a place where energy is needed or can be stored for later use. These are
the types of solutions we need if we are to quickly transform our electricity from fossil
fuels to renewables. Technologies that are already available, ready to deploy, and offer
tangible solutions to the problems that renewables face.
The future of renewables will not be without hiccups, but according to the Standford Solutions
Project, a 100% renewable energy system is feasible by 2050. So the biggest problem then
is not some technological barrier but instead finding the political will to do the needed
work. And the European Union is showing that initiative. They’ve begun to trailblaze
a path towards net-zero carbon by 2050. By 2030 they will reach an average of 33% of
their energy sourced from renewables with countries like Denmark, Finland, and Austria
well ahead of that amount. And crucially, the EU has and is expanding the interconnectedness
of their grid so when the sun is shining in the south of Spain excess energy can be traded
to Denmark when the wind isn’t blowing through their turbines. But, at the end of the day,
renewables can only get us so far. Recognizing and transforming the way we in the West consume
energy is also an essential part of mitigating climate change. If we continue with business
as usual, we’ll need to transform a lot more. The average US citizen consumes 10 times
more energy per year than the average Indian citizen, 4-5 times that of someone from Brazil,
and 3 times that of someone from China. On top of that the wealthiest 10% of the world
consume 20 times more than the poorest 10%. So, if through policy and behavior change,
the amount of energy that countries in North America and Europe uses decreases, then the
challenge of scaling renewables to meet energy demand will no longer be as daunting.
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