Can we have 100% Renewable Society in NZ?
The
question of can "we" have 100% renewable generation in New Zealand
now has two answers, yes and no.
We are living in the fossil fuel age, we are fossil fuel man. Our activities and expectations and
understanding of ourselves is based on "energy-on-demand" which can
be provided by fossil fuel supply and fossil fuel designed infrastructure. The fact that we, as fossil fuel man, have
these expectations does not change the fact that renewable energy is available
in cycles and both regular and rarandom patterns and with a good deal of
uncertainty.
Can
we, as fossil fuel man, meet our expectations of how things are using only
renewable energy?
NO
Can
we adapt to the habitat that does not have fossil fuels flushing through it?
Where fossil fuels are used only for investment building (as all other finite
resources are used) and renewable energy provides the energy for our daily
activities (as do all species)? Can we
evolve into people whose activity systems and expectations match the
availability of renewable energy, and thus become a "we" who use only
100% renewable energy?
YES
- BUT
"we" will be different.
When you start to become comfortable with the changes in "us"
that will happen as we evolve, then that next manifestation of the human system
simply becomes a project; a Transition Engineering project.
www.transitionengineering.org
Wicked Problem
Here
is why there are vested interests in fossil generation in New Zealand - because
we expect a power grid that supplies all the power to all customers
on-demand. (e.g. the base load coal,
peaking load petrol model of the 50's-60's that was developed in Europe and
America) Genesis Energy and Z Energy are
not evil people who don't care about the world.
They are engineers and business people doing what society demands of
them. There is no way to have supply-on-demand without the thermal generation
unless the demand is always -even on the coldest day in the driest year- 10%
below the renewable generation capacity. Adding wind generation does not
increase the renewable capacity for a supply-on-demand system in a way that
lets us mothball fossil generation, because wind is not available
on-demand.
As
long as we keep talking like Fossil Fuel Man and thinking that if we can just
find more renewable generation then "we" can go carbon neutral, then
we perpetuate the problem. This is a
"wicked problem": making a fossil fuel system 100% renewable. It may
seem like it should be do-able because there's all this solar and wind and wave
energy out there, and we're so clever, and we now accept global warming... BUT,
when you start to try to do the design work and try to deliver the on-demand
services at a fossil fuel price from renewable sources, you see that it can't
be done.
SORRY
Transition Projects
So
what can be done? Demand Response,
Demand Management and Distributed Generation for Advanced Energy Systems.
"Advanced Energy Systems" supply high quality services with
compliance and feedback from the consumers and within the ecological limits of
the regional system.
What
this means is that our innovation work needs to go into learning how to deal
with variably available, reasonably priced base-load power, and very expensive
supply-on-demand power from storage. We
have to be honest and admit that we do not know how to do this, as we have not
even thought to do it before - given that we've been seeing ourselves as people
who somehow deserve or should expect fossil fuels services at fossil fuel
prices. However, there are some insights we can use to understand what it might
be like to live with Advanced Energy Systems.
Have
you ever known anyone with a caravan, or a holiday home that is off-grid? Some retired people live in a big Winnebago
in the desert in the winter, and they haul in water and use a solar panel and
petrol generator to supply their power.
My sister and her family of 4 live off grid in the mountains of Colorado
where they have a little wind generator, solar panels, diesel generator, a big
shed full of batteries and a huge pile of wood off-cuts from their lumber mill
that is powered with a very large diesel generator.
Imagine
you live in an off grid house. Do you ever check their resources before you
decide what activities to do? This is the
first adaptation of an AES. If you're in your batch, with a wind generator and
a solar panel, and a stack of wood, you would obviously check your battery
level if it's been cloudy and still for a while, and then check your generator
fuel level, and if they are both a bit low, you might decide not to use a lot
of power for lighting, and you might delay those activities until the sun comes
out and you have power available.
This
behaviour is such a critical adaptation that I can't emphasise it enough.
People who exhibit this behaviour have a connection to their energy supply
system, and they adjust the services they demand to match the energy source
they have available. They have this information available through battery level
indicators, current generation level indicators, and their observation of the
weather. They have several different sources they can choose from. And if they
have plenty because it is a sunny day, they may use more power for more discretionary
things.
Renewable
energy will never be “free” or "too cheap to meter" but it can be
affordable for the essential services. Renewable energy is not free of
environmental consequences either – the materials in your panels and wind
generator have left a nasty footprint somewhere else on the planet. In the
design of this off-grid house, would you decide to size your batteries and
generation so that you could have the same energy service level as the grid? If you were really rich, you could buy more
panels and loads more batteries until the system could mimic a fossil fuel
system, most of the time. But for moderate income people with the AES
expectation and behaviour adaptation, they can get a pretty good level of
service from a reasonably priced system.
Energy Efficiency
Of
course, Advanced Energy Systems (AES) put the priority on providing services
with utmost efficiency. But this is paramount for each individual customer
because it allows them to get more services for the (sometimes) limited
resources they have available. This is another key adaptation for people
evolving to the Advanced Energy System. The fossil fuel man has to justify
energy efficiency in economic terms of the cost savings from an equally
acceptable lower efficiency alternative.
The AES customer reasons energy efficiency as a way to increase their
service level within a given level of energy availability. This is another behaviour that you see
exhibited in the design of off-line systems.
Lights are very low power and there are a lot of them. Thus, you can
just turn on one, and get something like candle light which is fine for sitting
around talking. You can turn on more if you have tasks to do, and when battery
or fuel levels are getting low, you turn everything off and go to bed and do other
things. Refrigerators are small and highly efficient; electricity is not used
for heat or cooking. Showers have very low
flow nozzles.
Advanced Energy System
The
Advanced Energy System looks like this in short: The "large low hanging fruit" type renewable
resources are developed by govt. and big power companies with the capital for
investment in plant. Hydro and geothermal provide a base-load national grid. Electricity
use from the national grid is designed and managed to meet essential services
and to match the supply availability. This system provides plenty of power for
household needs, work and market and education spaces, agriculture and
processing. However, these places all are
designed for high utilization of local passive resources like day-lighting,
ventilation, shade and solar heat. Big processing and manufacturing facilities
like an aluminium smelter must look for power to meet their needs, not from the
national grid, but from resources they develop for themselves. This is where distributed generation comes
in. Big users have to find their own big
supplies to top up what they can get from the shared resource of the grid. Individual businesses like banks who decide
it's valuable for them to have power on demand will spend more and install
their own power collection and storage systems. These are more expensive than
the grid power, but there are businesses and households who have a higher value
on more power, and so invest in providing it for themselves. People in an AES
probably have several options, like wood pellet fires for heat as well as good passive
solar design.
Transportation
The
issue of adding transportation to this Advanced Energy System is the biggest
challenge to our perception of who "we" are, and what our
expectations are of what we "need".
Fossil Fuel Man expects 100% individual mobility on-demand, and is
willing to allocate an extraordinary proportion of their wealth into
maintaining this mobility. (e.g. look at
how much of your budget goes into cars and how much of your council and
national budget goes into roads and signals and police and ACC and emergency
services and funerals for car accident victims). Can the environment provide
this expectation of 100% mobility on-demand from its current energy flows and
not from those stored 100 million years ago?
NO
Again,
it's our expectations that have to evolve, not just our technologies. What will it be like, what will we do? There aren't any answers just yet, as people
haven't even asked the question, they've been too distracted with dreaming that
somehow biofuels could be substituted for fossil fuels or that the mythical
"natural trend" to lower carbon fuels would bring about the hydrogen
age.
The
AEMSLab research group took a hard look at the question of fossil fuel free
transport in 2003, and we found that an Advanced Energy Transport System is a
profound evolution from a fossil fuel transport system. It requires that
communities, urban/rural/regional be designed for it. It requires that manufacturing, processing,
production and waste management be designed for it. It requires integration of the built
environment and land use, but it also requires new multi-purpose public vehicles
and evolved expectations and activity patterns. We named this place that we
explored Silke, after the student who built a physical model of the AETS city
as we discovered it. It was quite an
adventure to go there to Silke, as it challenged so many of our Fossil Fuel Man
assumptions. But we found the people
were actually doing quite well, even if they did live a bit differently that we
do. There were a lot of things that were definitely better for them. We were all profoundly changed by our visit
to Silke, and we've since been working on developing models of some of their
AETS ideas so we can understand how they might work for us, and how we might
actually be able to evolve from our rather dependant existence to a much more
civilised one.
Where
do we start? Is it by showing you all
Silke so you will understand? Or should
we first explain to you why your biofuel and hydrogen and hybrid dreams are not
actually low carbon sustainable transitions so that you'll stop being
distracted?
Conclusion
Can
we have a 100% renewable energy system that supplies power on demand at fossil
fuel prices?
NO
- We can't increase renewable capacity to keep ahead of unconstrained demand,
in particular peak demand, and there is no way that the new renewables and the
massive storage facilities which would be needed will be available at the old
prices.
Can
we have a 100% renewable energy system that provides services for well-being
that are economically viable and ecologically integrated (e.g. and Advanced
Energy System)?
YES BUT we have to start thinking about adapting and evolving, not just
getting more. Someone will have to do a
lot of thinking and innovating and developing of the new components that will
transform our Fossil Fuel energy system into and Advanced Energy System.
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