David B. Spence
The Trump Administration continues to pursue a suite of pro-coal policies of questionable wisdom and legality while energy leaders from around the world gathered in Germany to discuss how to combat climate change.
These two sets of conversations represent the polarized energy policy debate we have.
But two other recent news items suggest a much more productive energy policy debate we could be having, one that recognizes and deals with the inevitable tradeoffs that accompany complex energy policy questions.
The first news item was the bizarre decision by Stanford researcher Mark Jacobson to sue authors of an academic article critiquing Jacobson’s plan for an all-renewable electric grid. The second is the publication by the consultant Lazard of its most recent estimates of the cost of generating electricity from different fuels, showing that renewable electricity is now the cheapest electricity, even without subsidies.
The Lazard announcement is wonderful news. A few days ago I asked my students to search for the cheapest electricity options in five states with competitive retail electricity markets. In several of those markets “100 percent renewable” electricity was the least expensive.
But this good news comes with important caveats relevant to the Jacobson dispute. Wind and solar power are intermittent: they cannot generate power when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining. And they require new transmission lines to bring renewable power from the windiest and sunniest areas to consumers.
Part of Jacobson’s solution to the intermittency problem is to build many more wind and solar power stations, geographically dispersed on a continental scale, and linked together by transmission lines. The reasoning here is that when it is cloudy and still in some places it will be windy and sunny in others, thereby reducing the magnitude of the intermittency problem.
A second part of his solution involves supplementing wind and solar with hydroelectric generation: constructing more hydro stations, and changing the way we operate the ones we have. Hydro stations would store more water behind their dams until it is needed to generate power (when wind and solar generators cannot). Jacobson's lawsuit turns in part on disputes with his critics over whether hydropower can indeed play this role in an all-renewable system.
But many American hydroelectric dams provide other values to society as well: flood control, irrigation, water supply, recreation, etc. Operating them as Jacobson suggests would upset farmers, water districts, fishing groups, and others. Indeed, many environmentalists and Indian tribes would like to see the dams removed altogether, in order to restore historic fish migration patterns.
A continental transmission grid faces similar hurdles. Siting new transmission lines is notoriously difficult legally and politically. The law gives states (and sometimes local governments) a veto over new lines, one they exercise freely, inhibiting the development of efficient wind and solar plants in remote windy and sunny areas.
If transmission were not an issue, we could build new storage mode hydroelectric facilities that would be less socially and environmentally contentious. They might not be the complete solution Jacobson envisions, but they would help. And the new numbers from Lazard underscore that it is utility scale wind and solar power that is most affordable; smaller-scale distributed generators like rooftop solar are are four to five times more expensive.
So when we lack the political will to build transmission, we effectively choose more expensive renewable alternatives. There are those pesky tradeoffs again.
Importantly, Jacobson's is a claim about what is technically and economically possible, not what is politically possible. But the technical is intimately intertwined with the political in energy markets, and assuming away real tradeoffs confuses and polarizes energy debates.
Congress could change the law to remove local vetoes over new transmission, as it has for interstate natural gas pipelines. But in this populist political moment there seems to be a little political appetite for that alternative on either side of the aisle.
So it is ironic that even as Jacobson’s plan for an all-renewables grid looks more affordable than ever, its failure to consider political feasibility renders it less useful than it might otherwise be. In the meantime, his lawsuit sets back the historic give and take and earnest debate upon which scientific reasoning is based.
David Spence is Professor of Energy Law & Regulation at the University of Texas, and Visiting Professor of Energy Law this fall at Georgetown University Law Center.