Is a Future With High Renewable Electricity Production Really Possible?

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The 'Renewable Electricity Futures Study' points to an 80-plus percent renewables future, in which 60 percent of electricity generation comes from wind and solar; hydro provides about 12 percent, with biomass and geothermal making up the remainder.

Reposted with permission from Rocky Mountain Institute.

In recent weeks and months, there’s been much to celebrate about renewable energy and the electricity system—wind and solar in particular are continually breaking records for installed capacity and actual generation. But amidst the celebratory fanfare there’s also been an undercurrent of skepticism—skepticism that a high renewables future could be here soon, or is even possible at all.

Last month the Washington Post ran a skeptical opinion piece by Matthew Stepp, senior policy analyst at the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation. One month earlier, another skeptical article called renewables a “pipe dream.” Last year IEEE published “A Skeptic Looks at Alternative Energy,” which chastised the renewables movement for “wishful thinking” and suggested that a high renewables future for our electricity system, if it comes, is generations—not decades—away.

Such skeptics often point to a number of familiar criticisms: that high penetrations of renewables are not possible; that such a future requires major technological innovation; that it requires unreasonable amounts of energy storage to balance variable wind and solar; that it requires massive build-out of transmission infrastructure, biomass generation capacity, large-scale hydro, or all of the above; that it requires major investment that simply isn’t there; that it is uncompetitively costly (at least without large subsidies); that variable renewables will undermine the reliability of grid power.

Couple such skepticism with IEA’s recent report noting that renewables have yet to make a serious dent in the carbon intensity of the global energy system—on which fossil fuels seem to have a strangle hold—and it’d be easy to side with the skeptics, but they are wrong.

  • Published on Jun 6, 2013
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