Stanford Webinar: Achieving a Sustainable Future with Clean, Renewable Energy and Storage
it is my pleasure to introduce you to our guest speaker today Professor Mark Jacobson Mark is a mark is a professor in the Stanford civil and environmental engineering department I'm one of the civil and environmental engineering department now resides in both the Stanford School of Engineering and the new school Stanford Dewar School of sustainability Mark teaches our exeit 100 course which you can view from within our webinar interface by selecting the link Mark has been a champion of clean renewable energy and working toward ensuring air quality for all for many decades welcome Mark and with that I'm going to hand the webinar over to you thank you very much Anita for your kind introduction and so I'm going to talk today about transitioning cities states countries and the world entirely to clean renewable energy and so I'm trying to get to here we go um and so I'm going to make the point that we don't need miracle Technologies to solve the problems of air pollution global warming and energy security we have 95 of the Technologies we need but let me first start out you know what are these problems that we're trying to solve and so as I've just mentioned I in my opinion we need to solve three major problems there's air pollution which causes on the order of seven million deaths per year prematurely uh worldwide and hundreds of millions more illnesses and this costs the world today based on statistical cost of life and morbidity about 30 trillion dollars per year global warming is a rising problem it's already seeing severe consequences and is estimated to cost another 30 trillion dollars per year or so by 2050. the third problem we're trying to solve is energy and security fossil fuels are limited resources they will run out eventually and we need replacement of them in place by then otherwise we'll see economic social and political instability in addition the many countries depend on fossil fuels from other countries and so those countries that have the source of fossil fuels can often cause disruption as we're seeing in Europe right now and that results in energy and security another type of energy and security is the fact that fossil fuels if they're if they have to be transported over the ocean to islands for example that results in very high electricity prices that's a type of energy and security anywhere anywhere there are several other types of energy and security problems these are all drastic problems that require immediate and drastic Solutions so our solution since 2009 when we developed our first energy plan was to Electrify all energy as much as we can and then provide the electricity and there's also some direct heat with just wind water and solar power and we Define wind water and solar as onshore and offshore wind solar photovoltaics on rooftops and power plants concentrated solar geothermal electricity and heat hydroelectricity and small amounts of tidal and wave power and if we Electrify all energy that means there are four major energy sectors there's electricity Transportation Heating and Cooling of buildings and Industry and so for example to Electrify transportation we go to primarily battery electric vehicles but also some hydrogen fuel cell vehicles for long distance transport like long-distance ships Planes Trains and trucks for buildings we would go to electric heat pumps primarily for heating individual buildings for Air heating water heating and also air conditioning heat pumps use one-fourth the energy as Natural Gas uh there's also what we call District heating where instead of heating individual buildings with individual heaters and coolers we would uh have centralized heaters and coolers and and then transmit uh heat and cold through water pipes to buildings uh bike is done around the world in the United States about seven percent of the US is already under District heating but in some Scandinavian countries for example it's up to 50 percent is up under District Heating and we provide that District heat and cold either with heat pumps or with direct geothermal heat or solar heat uh for industry we would Electrify that primarily with electric Arc furnaces induction furnaces resistance furnaces dielectric heaters Electron Beam heaters these are existing Technologies and we power the electricity uh in all these cases with just wind water and solar of course we will need storage for such a transition we need electricity storage some heat storage cold storage and there will be some hydrogen for some applications so we already have a lot of electricity storage options there's concentrated solar power with storage pumped hydroelectric power restorative which is a storage technology existing hydroelectric dams which are basically big batteries batteries themselves flywheels compressed air storage and gravitational storage with solid masses you know some of these like gravitational storage are emerging Technologies but you know batteries exist dams exist pumped Hydro storage exists concentrated solar power exists flywheels exist these are all for the most part existing Technologies and they can be they have been implemented around the world for heating and cooling water tank storage is aluminum presence everywhere for both hot and cold water storage and Ice storage and underground in boreholes water pits and aquifers for seasonal storage that's a way to store heat seasonally between summer and winter and also in building materials these are for all existing Technologies and then we'll store some hydrogen so what are the people hear a lot about hydrogen these days so I just want to say in my opinion what are the good and bad sources and uses of hydrogen well the only good source of hydrogen in my belief is green hydrogen that's hydrogen produced by electrolysis from wind water solar electricity what is not good is hydrogen produced from natural gas or coal or even Nuclear So natural gas produced when natural gas produces hydrogen 96 of all hydrogen today is produced from what's called steam methane reforming of natural gas and that's called gray hydrogen if you add what's called carbon capture to gray hydrogen you get blue hydrogen but carbon capture is not useful it does not it only takes out carbon from the from an exhaust stream does not take out any other air pollutants it takes 30 percent more energy than if you don't have carbon capture so that means in the case of this natural gas you need 30 percent more Mining and transport and refining of the natural gas and therefore 30 percent more air pollution 30 percent more Upstream leaks and the capture efficiency is not that great it's not a 90 or 95 percent for that type of capture it's on the order of 60 to 80 percent but in general carbon capture attached to Coal plants for example can be the efficiency can be down to 20 percent in any case you're increasing air pollution uh with any type of carbon capture especially when it's added to including when it's added to a hydrogen production uh black and brown hydrogen are from coal we don't want that uh nuclear electricity using that to produce hydrogen uh we're going to we're phasing out nuclear there's hardly any growth in fact there's less nuclear produced last year than in 2006 so that is not growing at all and it takes so long to put up new nuclear reactors that they're not an option going forward I'll mention that a little bit later turquoise hydrogens from methane methane pyrolysis again from natural gas we don't want that what are the good uses of hydrogen well as I mentioned long distance uh transport like aircraft ships trains and trucks for long distance also military vehicles with using fuel cells in all cases in industry for ammonia and steel manufacturing and also for electricity and heat using fuel cells for remote remote microgrids so isolated grids like in Alaska or it could be in Africa or anywhere if you need both electricity and heat which often you do you can get that from a fuel cell some Grid electricity but combined with batteries so having mostly batteries on the grid but some fuel cells can help out in some cases for Grid electricity but we do not want to use hydrogen for passenger vehicles to heat buildings you don't want to mix it hydrogen with natural gas and pipes and we don't want to burn the hydrogen because it produces air pollutants and for most great electricity we'll use batteries and other types of storage well okay so why not I talked about wind water silver but why not carbon capture direct air capture small modular nuclear reactors bioenergy non-hydrogen electrophils or geoengineering well several of these several of these uh Technologies they just increase air pollution I show photos here of air pollution in the 1950s in Los Angeles and I show a photo I actually took on February 19 2023 of Los Angeles we still have a lot of air pollution in fact there was a study that came out this week worldwide there are only five countries of the world that do not have harmful air quality in terms of particles and so there's pollution rampant around the world to kill seven million people each year this is a problem that's continuing and carbon capture direct air capture bioenergy electrofuels geoengineering they all increase air pollution why well as I mentioned carbon cap picture doesn't take out any air pollutants from the air but it needs more energy so 30 percent more energy if that energy comes from a fossil fuel you directly have more air pollution if that energy comes from wind water and solar well that prevents the wind water and solar from replacing a fossil fuel power plant where it could otherwise eliminate not only the air pollution from the power plant it could eliminate the mining of the fuel it could eliminate the fossil fuel infrastructure as well and it removes more CO2 than the carbon capture it would so there's a there's an opportunity cost 75 percent of all carbon dioxide captured today is also used for enhanced oil recovery during that process not only do we get more oil to burn but forty percent of the CO2 that was captured goes right back to the air so carbon capture is a complete waste for solving any of these problems it's an opportunity cost so we do not want to spend on that direct air capture is the same as carbon cap except we're taking carbon dioxide out of the air directly again you need energy you need equipment that if that energy comes from fossil fuels you have more air pollution directly if it comes from Renewables then you're preventing those removals from displacing fossil fuels there by increasing air pollution in comparison with replacing the fossil fuels what about bioenergy you burn it by over fuel there's biofuels which are a replacement like ethanol and biodiesel replacing gasoline and Diesel respectively you're still burning it and it takes a lot of energy to produce it so that energy releases a lot of carbon in the case of ethanol for example you can't pipe it around you have to train truck and Barge it around so that means more diesel emissions more air pollution more global warming emissions so the carbon balance on bioenergy is some studies show that there's a slight reduction of carbon compared to gasoline diesel some studies show there's actually more carbon emitted so it's we're not getting anything close to zero uh we're getting what we are getting close to zero with electrifying everything just for example photosynthesis for producing a biofuel is one percent Efficient Electric solar panels are 20 efficient so you get 20 times more energy for the same land when you put solar panels on that Land versus growing a bio crop in addition an electric vehicle uses one-fourth the energy as a gasoline or ethanol vehicle so a solar powering an electric vehicle uses 180th the land to go the same distance as a biofuel crop powering an internal combustion engine vehicle electrofuels non-hydrogen Electro fuels these are fuels where carbon dioxide is used with other chemicals and processed to produce a replacement for gasoline so not only does that I told you about to get that carbon dioxide you use carbon capture which increases air pollution first of all but then you're creating a fuel that you're going to burn just like gasoline so you create the same amount of pollution it's argued that this reduces the carbon footprint however it doesn't as I mentioned it does not decrease the air pollution and because you take so much energy to make this Fuel and it takes a lot of energy to capture the carbon you're hardly reducing any carbon from this as well geoengineering is basically spraying pollution one of the main solar radiation management is one of the main geoengineering techniques that's basically spraying pollutant particles into the stratosphere where they can affect the ozone layer and also reduce photosynthesis affecting crops at the surface but what's the big problem with doing this the goal is to reflect more sunlight to cool the surface of the Earth the big problem is it makes people complacent and allows fossil fuels to continue allows air pollution to continue and grow it allows energy and security to continue and grow and it has multiple side effects it doesn't solve any problem it only masks temperature it doesn't even address other aspects of climate change associated with the increase of fossil fuels so and then finally small modular nuclear reactors well conventional nuclear reactors have a big problem uh new ones it takes 17 to 21 years between planning and operation for a new nuclear power plant in in North America and Europe there's a plant in Georgia it's taking it's on year 17 and 18 for two reactors and it's already laid a enough concrete for a sidewalk between Miami and Seattle it costs 34 billion dollars or 2.2 gigawatts that's that's about 15.2 million dollars a megawatt compared with one million dollars a megawatt for wind new wind and solar and so it's 15 times more the capital cost about eight times the electricity cost and it takes 17 to 21 years as I mentioned versus one to three years for a winter solar we need to solve 80 percent of the problem within seven years by 2030 and 100 of the problem between 2035 and 2050 if we can't and small modular reactors won't even be available for testing until 2030 they've already been studied for 10 years so they have the same delay problem their cost problem is similar to the conventional reactors and plus there's energy security risk of nuclear weapons proliferation risk waste issues meltdown risk uranium mining lung cancer risks and also CO2 there's CO2 emissions associated with nuclear it's about 9 to 37 times the CO2 emissions per kilowatt hour as wind most of that's due to the fact that it takes so long to build it you're waiting you're burning fuels fossil fuels in the background okay so let's let's move on I want to summarize really quickly this is a just an example of District heating this is Stanford University where I work um replaced the natural gas cogeneration plant uh with this that which provided 80 of the campus electricity and heat with this fourth generation District heating and cooling system they let out 35 miles of cold water pipes 35 miles of hot water pipes and that uh and now provides 100 of the heating and cooling of the University with this District heating cooling system and bought sufficient solar 160 megawatts to power not only this system but all the electricity for the campus so it was the first campus in the world to be 100 renewable for electricity Heating and Cooling this is another type of District heating system this is underground borehole system in Okotoks Canada where there are 52 homes that have solar collectors on their garages are on the roofs of their garages on the top left where a glycol solution is heated up during the summer and transferred by pipe to this building on the right where the heat is transferred to water the water is piped underground and set through boreholes to the soil the heat is stored six months up to six months and then in the winter when the snow is on the ground like in the bottom left everything is run in Reverse so to provide 100 of the wintertime heating at less than one dollar a kilowatt hour of heat storage which Compares with about 100 to 200 a kilowatt hour for electricity storage we can transition individual homes and buildings I just want to say something this is my own home in 2017 I built it with no gas on the property I have solar on the roofs batteries in the garage electric cars these are electric heat pumps that I don't have time to go into but they transfer the transfer heat rather than produce it and as a result these one-fourth the energy is natural gas here's a heat pump water heater that uses one fourth of the energy of it as a natural gas water heater an electric induction cooktop stove it boils water in half the time of this gas and you know these all these Technologies are really efficient so over the five first five years of energy use like produce 120 percent of all my home and vehicle energy needs with the solar on the roof I had no electric bill no natural gas bill or gasoline bill I received money back for the extra electricity from the Community Choice aggregation utility that I subscribe to but I also avoided a gas hookup fee of about six thousand dollars this shows a range for typical homes and gas pipes of about ten thousand dollars you don't need two forms of energy in your home or building electricity does everything that gas does but does it better so after all the savings were accounted for it's a five-year payback time with subsidies that are also available in California in the United States and about 10 years without subsidies the solar is warranted for 25 years so right now it's free energy for the next uh 20 years okay can we transition the world for all purposes uh to win water and solar so we did studies of 145 countries in all 50 states let me just summarize the results quickly the end use demand among all these countries in 2018 was 13 trillion Watts or terawatts that's expected to go up to 20.4 terawatts by 2050 but if we Electrify everything and provide the electricity with wind water solar that goes down 56.4 percent to 8.9 terawatts for five reasons one is that battery electric and hydrogen fuel cell Vehicles use less energy much less energy than internal combustion engine vehicles the electrifying industry uses less energy than fossil fuel industry using heat pumps for air and water heating reduce energy requirements 13.6 across
all energy sectors and then 11.3 percent of all energy worldwide is used to mine transport and refine fossil fuels and uranium this goes out the door we don't need that mining anymore for those purposes so that's 11.3 and then we think we can get another 6.6 efficiency improvements Beyond business as usual so that 56 percent reduction significantly makes it easier to to provide enough energy for the world with just wind water solar this shows a timeline of the same information from 2020 to 2050. if we don't do anything we go along the top line but if we Electrify and provide the electricity with wws we go down those five shades of colors to the 100 wws line and then we provide that wind water solar with onshore and offshore wind Etc in the mixes shown this show is an 80 transition by 2030 and 100 by 2050 which is needed to avoid 1.5 degrees or more
global warming since the 1850 to 1900 period however if we can solve 80 of the problem by 2030 there's no reason we shouldn't be able to solve 100 by 2035 which is or really should be our goal we have 95 percent of the technologies that we need right now and well you might ask is there enough land to do this uh so for those 135 145 Country plans we find that well we we don't need new land for offshore wind tidal wave power or rooftop PV we're not adding new Hydro in any of these plans geothermal editions are small so the new land required is for utility quotable takes plus concentrated solar power which we call Footprints so that worldwide is about 0.17 percent of world land will be needed and then the spacing between onshore wind turbines which can be used for farming ranching open space or even some of the some of the PV so that's about 0.36 percent so a total of 0.53 so around half of one percent of
the world's land in the U.S that would be about 0.84 in comparison the fossil fuel industry occupies about 1.3 percent of the U.S land area so we think we'll go down can we keep the grid stable yes we can we've done grid stability analyzes and not only for all the 145 countries broken into or divided into 24 World regions but also all U.S states here so here for example is the continental U.S
a grid stability analysis finding that we can keep the grid stable uh every 30 seconds for two years here with just wind water solar storage and using demand response what's the cost of energy with such a conversion in keeping the grid stable well the capital cost worldwide is around 62 trillion dollars this is what I call the worldwide Green New Deal cost in the U.S it's about nine trillion dollars and in China it's about 13 trillion dollars but what's really more important is the annual cost of energy comparison with businesses as usual today worldwide we spend about 11 to 12 trillion dollars per year on energy that's expected to go up to 18 trillion dollars per year by 2050. the health costs around 33.6 trillion dollars per year in 2050 the climate cost around 32 trillion that's a total social cost of 83 trillion dollars if we go to windwater solar for everything we eliminate the health and climate costs of energy and our energy requirements go down 56 percent and the cost per unit energy goes down another 15 so we go from 17.8 trillion in the energy cost to 6.6 trillion or 63 percent lower and our total social cost goes down 92 percent these are phenomenal reductions uh due to going to wind water solar and finally I just want to say something about uh policy we developed our first energy plan in 2009 uh and it was really a world plan without looking at individual countries and the conclusion was well it's technically an economically possible to transition the World by 2030 to wind water and solar but for social and political reasons a more likely transition is by 2050 with most 80 by 2030. this turned out to be the basis
for the green New Deal this this scientific study but since then they're now 62 countries that have committed to 100 Renewables in the electric power sector only one country Denmark has committed to 100 Renewables in all energy sectors there are in the US there are 19 States and territories and districts that have committed to 100 percent uh Renewables in the electric power sector again these are not all sectors and I'm just going to run through these really quick to get to the end there are 180 plus cities and counties in the U.S that have committed to 100 Renewables uh these are really important the blue ones are the bigger cities there are over 400 international companies that have committed included including 100 sorry to eight of the ten biggest companies of the world which were the ones in blue uh and there are also countries in state and states that are actually already at 100 on the left very left there are nine countries that actually generate 100 of their electricity already from wind water solar the middle three countries generate 91 or more of their electricity from wind water solar most of these are generating primarily with hydropower uh Kenya has geothermal on the right or South Dakota is actually generating 126 percent of its consumed energy with wind water solar with 77 percent wind and the rest hydro and it also produces fossil fuels so it exports the difference Washington State's at 98.5 percent Scotland's around 91 as is Montana so these are all good uh this is all good news so just to summarize uh we also think we can create jobs with a transition 28 million more long-term full-time jobs than lost we require like point five three percent of land for such a transition worldwide we'd avoid 7 million deaths per year we'd slow than reverse global warming we think we can keep the grid stable with 100 wind water and solar energy costs are 63 percent lower annual energy plus Health Plus climate costs are 92 percent lower than with fossil fuels and finally for more information as Anita said there's an online course that discusses this in a lot more depth uh there's a new book called No Miracles needed that is a Layman's book summarizing that that we don't need miracle Technologies to transition it gives us an example of how how we can transition and we have individual State and country and city plans at the third uh link and there is actually an infographic map where you can click on a map and upload each of these uh plans if you're interested and and happy to answer any questions that you might have thank you very much mark thank you so much there's so much to be covered here um this is so important and um I just want to I'm looking at all the questions and I have to just make this uh known out to our audience that many of your questions mark teaches in his exeit 100 course and he goes into deep detail that course is the foundation course for our energy Innovation and emerging Technologies program um and it's com it's comprehensive it covers all the Technologies uh policy uh impacts to humanity and uh to people all around the globe I have one question here that I I know you dress in the course but it would be interesting to to hear your answer at this point with the transition of what's happening with hydrogen and the question question is specifically for using hydrogen in uh passenger vehicles uh is a straight electric vehicles yeah so the reason we don't want to use hydrogen in passenger vehicles it's not because it's not clean it actually is clean if we use green hydrogen in passenger vehicles it's almost as clean as using battery electric and the only the difference is though you need about two to three times the number of wind turbines or solar panels to run that hydrogen fuel cell vehicle versus the battery electric vehicle so it's it's so you'll need more land and you'll there's a little more emissions in building these turbines and so it just makes the transition more difficult so if we want to be really efficient we need to focus the hydrogen on useful applications it turns out when you get to larger and larger Vehicles the efficiency turns and the hydrogen fuel cell Vehicles become more efficient than battery electrics when you get to like long distance aircraft and ships just because otherwise you're carrying you're spending a lot of energy just carrying around batteries and that's that that's the case where you want to use a hydrogen for those long distance applications great um we have one minute left and I want to thank you and thank everybody who attended today and uh if you have other questions you can always reach out to us through our email which is on the EIT program website um and um you can see on your screen if you would like to enroll on the course you should be able to select one of the links there to learn about Mark's course Mark I want to thank you again for joining us today and giving us this so very important and excellent webinar and I want to thank everybody else who took the time to join us today from wherever you are in in the world it has been an absolute pleasure and we hope you all have a great rest of your day
2023-04-05 03:19