future clean tech

Australia’s left-leaning New Matilda yesterday published a piece asking, Is Geothermal The Baseload Alternative? It reminds me that I want to get around to publishing my own calculations of price per megawatt for various energy sources in both Australia and the US. Geothermal could be crucial to the energy mix over the next few years but there are too many figures floating around out there. So more on that soon.

The author, David Hollier, provides a neat summary of how geothermal works:

To harvest geothermal energy, you need to drill four to five kilometres below the surface, where the rock temperatures are 200 degrees or more, hot enough for the liquid they heat to drive turbines. The first challenge is to get wells down into this layer to check that the rocks are hot enough. If they are, you can pump water into the rock at a pressure high enough to fracture the rock, and to allow the water to move through the fractures, forming a reservoir. Then other wells are drilled, and the hot water is pumped back up to surface where it drives the turbines.

Once the system is up and running, this hot water can be constantly recycled. There are no other inputs into the process. Unlike wind and solar, it does not rely on specific weather conditions. And apart from the wells, there is no “mine” as such: minimal demands are made of the land. Geothermal is a renewable energy source that taps the ceaseless heat production at the earth’s core as it radiates towards the surface.

He raises an issue that I’ve mentioned a few times recently here:

So if all this is true, why have we heard so little about geothermal? If it’s a solution to the clean energy crisis, why hasn’t industry development been accelerated before now? Is it a victim of coal industry resistance — or a PR failure? Or might it have something to do with the fact that there are now more lobbyists than credible climate change scientists doing the rounds in Canberra?

Too bloody right. As Al Gore has noted many times, the lack of political will is the chief obstacle to action on global warming:

A couple of minor points. First, geothermal is not totally GHG-neutral. There are some emissions, primarily associated with the construction of the plant. Also, I take issue with David’s point here: “Solar and wind. Wind, tidal and solar. We all know that these can’t yet deliver baseload.” This is not true and I’ve written about it before.

Yesterday I wrote about an email exchange I had with a friend of mine back in Sydney about global warming science. Ultimately, he agreed that it would be prudent to stop burning fossil fuels, if only because the particulate matter they leave in the atmosphere is self-evidently harmful to human health. I find that there is usually common ground with even the most hardened climate skeptics (which my friend insists he is not, as he believes that “the climate is changing, but it is natural.”)

The conversation turned to the challenges facing clean energy in replacing energy from fossil fuels. He wrote:

The problem is that at the moment we don’t have an energy source which is as efficient and as reliable as coal for base-load power, i.e. power for industrial use.

Solar, hydro, nuclear are all fine for residences, but none of them will be able to replace coal at the industry level. You would need to cover the entire state of NSW in solar panels in order to supply enough energy to run our industries.

My reply:

I don’t agree with you about base load. I don’t know why this myth persists. It is true that you can simply keep feeding coal or gas into a traditional plant and keep it running at all times, but there are loads of ways to mitigate renewable intermittency.

One is by spreading the energy receptors across a broad footprint. A recent study showed that Europe could be fully powered just by wind, without any additional energy sources, because when it’s not blowing in Sweden it is blowing elsewhere. People with the training and disposition of actuaries are able to work these kinds of things out to a high degree of accuracy. We even know what percentage of the year a certain site gets wind – with astonishing levels of accuracy – even though we don’t know precisely when the wind will blow.

And then of course you have tidal, which is nascent but does not suffer from any intermittency; geothermal which is constant; and you can augment any of the intermittent sources with other intermittent sources. Wind by itself would do just fine if you located it over a broad area, as I’ve mentioned, and you could always have backup coal plants to fire up when needed; but you could easily have a 100% renewable grid by using an appropriate mix of solar, wind, tidal and geothermal.

And then you have additional measures like demand response and load shedding to manage demand; energy storage using large battery banks… the possibilities are endless.

Today I was discussing the future of hydrocarbons with a colleague whose family has been highly successful in the fossil fuel industry, and in addition to his skepticism on the anthropogenic nature of climate change, he raised the issue of cost. He was of the opinion that we will become steadily more, not less, addicted to oil, coal and gas in the medium- to long-term.

I disagreed strongly with him, and here’s why. Within a matter of seconds, I had him agreeing with me that vehicles are rapidly shifting from oil. We shared the belief that electric vehicles are the future. His objection? Where are we going to get the electricity from? And his definitive answer? Coal. And perhaps some nuclear.

Of course, if we’d had this conversation a mere decade ago, he would have laughed off the suggestion that our vehicles would run off batteries in a matter of a few years. The technology was unproven, expensive, heavy, and on and on. And yet, here we are in 2009, on the cusp of what is widely recognised as the next phase in vehicle production. The future, as they say, is now.

The same will be true of coal. Within the next few years, there will come a point when power generated by one or more renewable sources will be cheaper than coal-generated power. Ron Pernick and Clint Wilder have pointed out that this tipping point already occurred in Colorado after Hurricane Katrina caused natural gas prices to spike, and clean energy produced by wind power briefly became not just competitive with but in fact cheaper than hydrocarbon-derived power. Demand for the local green power program quickly outstripped supply that November in Denver and the rest of that state.

Of course, this was temporary, but it was a harbinger of things to come. Coal is cheap because it is an entrenched, old technology. It is financially “safe” and relatively plentiful. Wind happens to be the clean technology that has become most widespread and most cost-efficient – and as the technology improves and returns to scale increase, costs will dip even further. In the long-run, the same is likely to be the case for solar, tidal, geothermal, wave, and other renewables. And as soon as these technologies deliver energy more cheaply than dirty energy, the growth in takeup will be explosive.

This is the very reason why a price must be put on carbon today. Is pricing GHG emissions “artificial”? Perhaps. But it is simply a policy decision that must be taken to speed up the consumer uptake of clean energy. Rather than waiting for all smokers to die of lung cancer, we put a price on lung cancer by taxing cigarettes and funding public health with the revenue; rather than waiting for double-digit unemployment, we put a price on unemployment by taxing progressively and funding reskilling and work-finding programs; and now we will put a price on carbon to reverse the damage that dirty energy has hitherto caused. The reason in the short-term is that we must put a price on the externality of pollution and climate change, but in the long-term it is a no-brainer: burning fossils – literally – is a 19th century practice that will inevitably be replaced by clean energy.

It is my view that the tipping point will occur with or without what I regard as sufficient government intervention. The current ETS being considered by the Australian government doesn’t even begin to take the issue seriously. But even this scheme, the CPRS, will drive innovation, and the cost-efficiency of the technology will snowball, and we will rapidly come to the point where we view burning hydrocarbons to produce energy as quaint, if not downright barbaric. Like the mainstreaming of electric vehicles that is about to take place, renewable energy which is already competitively priced today will – inevitably – become cheaper than coal and extremely widespread.

As an aside, US Interior Secretary Ken Salazar today proclaimed that wind power off the East Coast could replace 3000 coal-fired power plants. This is just the very beginning of what is in store for clean energy over the next decade.