A Wind and Solar Future: Fantasy or Reality?
As I prepared for the last session I would teach at a class on creation care, I did some research on positives we can see in the world around us, hopeful signs that humanity’s future on this planet doesn’t have to look bleak. I wanted to present evidence that points to a world which in a few ways might be better than the one we live in now.
One of the signs I focused on is the plummeting cost of solar and wind. I have seen charts that show it’s now significantly cheaper to produce electricity with solar and wind than with fossil fuels. Given the glowing tone of the reports on this subject, I looked forward to giving the class the good news.
The Challenge of Energy Storage
But then I ran into a problem. I wanted to know, do those projections of cost savings with wind and solar take storage into account? If we truly switch to wind and solar, we will have to store a lot of energy. Unlike fossil fuels, which we can use whenever we need heat or electricity, wind and solar vary according to the weather. On calm, overcast days, they give us nothing. So on those days we have to use extra energy we’ve held on to from sunny, windy days. In fact, we might need to hang on to that energy for months if a part of the world has to get through a whole season of rainy, dark weather.
The cost of this storage is not trivial. I was taken aback when I started looking into it. The most alarming statistics came from a site that seeks to debunk the value of wind energy. The tag line on the site says “We’re not here to debate the wind industry. We’re here to destroy it.” This site claims that if the USA switched entirely to wind and solar for electricity even an optimistic projection from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory would result in a cost for storage of $22 trillion per year. That’s close to the USA’s entire annual GDP of $23 trillion.
If that’s true, I thought, the cost of wind and solar make them a fantasy, not a reality.
The MIT Study
But then I looked into the problem more and I came upon a very helpful article from the news site Vox written by David Roberts, an experienced reporter on climate-related subjects. After explaining the expensive problem of wind and solar energy storage, Roberts presented the intriguing results of a study published in 2019 by an MIT research team.
The team set out to answer this question: If wind and solar met 100 percent of the electricity needs for the entire USA, how inexpensive would storage have to be in order for this option to be the cheapest? They took a hard, long look at this question. They studied sun and wind data from four states (Massachusetts, Texas, Arizona, and Iowa) for the past 20 years. They discovered a few extended periods of time with windless, overcast days across the board. As they looked into the cost of storage to cover even these rare situations, they concluded that energy storage could not cost more than $20 per kilowatt hour in order for solar and wind to offer the cheapest option. That’s a challenging goal, Roberts wrote, because that price is about 90 percent less than today’s costs.
But Roberts added, this isn’t the end of the story. The MIT team also estimated the cost of storage if they lowered their goal a tiny bit. If they envisioned a storage system that would meet the country’s electricity demand 95 percent of the time, rather than 100 percent, the cost of storage could rise to $150 per kilowatt hour and the system still would be cheaper than fossil fuel alternatives. Roberts explained that the five percent of the time not covered could be accommodated by other options like load flexibility, run-of-the river hydro, geothermal and energy sharing.
This $150/kwh goal actually represents good news. The Vox article reported that this $150/kwh target is well within reach of several technologies now under development, each of which could even prove to be cheaper. The article mentioned: flow batteries ($108/kwh), sodium nickel chloride batteries ($130/kwh), compressed air systems ($50/kwh), and thermal storage ($10-$50/kwh).
Driving into Abundance
In the end, after reading this Vox article, I felt that I could confidently list the price of wind and solar as a hopeful sign. In fact, these prices made me optimistic. I know there will be enormous cost for the USA and other countries to build out a new infrastructure of clean power generation, but if the wind and solar costs including storage drop significantly under the cost of fossil fuel, then the money invested in building the infrastructure will be recouped in the short term and we will save money in the long term.
As I explained to the class, other articles I’ve read point out that there aren’t a lot of unexplored cost savings with fossil fuel. No matter how you look at it, you have to take stuff out of the ground, refine it and transport it. With renewables, however, you have relatively new technologies that are constantly being refined, making them cheaper and more effective, and you have economies of scale that haven’t been realized yet. So the cost of clean energy keeps dropping dramatically, at a rate that seems to surprise even the experts.
And that makes me think of the first time I drove an electric car. A couple summers ago I visited some friends in California. While I stayed with them, they offered to let me use one of their cars, a Nissan Leaf, an electric car. They explained that they had installed enough solar panels on their roof to pay all their electricity bills and cover the cost of charging their car. I was happy to take them up on their offer because I had never driven an electric car before and I wanted to see what it was like.
On my first trip, I turned onto a freeway onramp, punched the accelerator and felt that electric-car surge of power. I grinned and thought, “That’s sunlight. What I just felt was sunlight falling on my friend’s roof.”
Heading up that California freeway, it seemed like I was driving into a bright future where energy would be more plentiful and accessible than it has been. That car, and stories of people in Africa who make their living using solar panels to charge people’s phones, these are glimpses of an energy future that will not only be cleaner than today but also more abundant. The numbers in the MIT study show that this vision isn’t a fantasy. It can become reality.