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December
29, 2022
Catherine Clifford
Here’s why the U.S. electric grid isn’t running on 100%
renewable energy yet
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The technology to
generate electricity with renewable resources like wind and
solar has existed for decades. So why isn’t the electric grid
already 100% electric?
Technologies like batteries and transmission lines would need
to be scaled up dramatically.
There would also have to be profound cultural and political
shifts with an eye toward solving tomorrow’s problems, instead
of maintaining the status quo.
![](images/images_12_29_2022/Pic1.jpg)
Solar panels are set up in the solar
farm at the University of California, Merced, in Merced, California,
August 17, 2022. Nathan Frandino | Reuters
Generating electricity to power homes and businesses is a significant
contributor to climate change. In the United States, one
quarter of greenhouse gas emissions come from electricity
production, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
Solar panels and wind farms can generate electricity without releasing
any greenhouse gas emissions. Nuclear power plants can too, although
today’s plants generate long-lasting radioactive waste, which has no
permanent storage repository.
But the U.S. electrical sector is
still dependent on fossil fuels. In 2021, 61 percent of electricity
generation came from burning coal, natural gas, or petroleum. Only
20 percent of the electricity in the U.S. came from renewables,
mostly wind energy, hydropower and solar energy, according
to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Another 19
percent came from nuclear power.
![](images/images_12_29_2022/Pic2.jpg)
The contribution from renewables has
been increasing steadily since the 1990s, and the rate of increase
has accelerated. For example, wind power provided only 2.8 billion
kilowatt-hours of electricity in 1990, doubling to 5.6 billion in
2000. But from there, it skyrocketed, growing to 94.6 billion in
2010 and 379.8 billion in 2021.
That’s progress, but it’s not happening fast enough to eliminate the
worst effects of climate change for our descendants.
“We need to eliminate global emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050,”
philanthropist and technologist Bill
Gates wrote in his 2023 annual letter. “Extreme weather is
already causing more suffering, and if we don’t get to net-zero
emissions, our grandchildren will grow up in a world that is
dramatically worse off.”
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And the problem is actually bigger than it looks.
“We need not just to create as much electricity as we have now, but
three times as much,” says Saul
Griffith, an entrepreneur who’s sold companies to Google and
Autodesk and has written books on mass electrification. To get to zero
emissions, all the cars and heating systems and stoves will have to be
powered with electricity, said Griffith. Electricity is not
necessarily clean, but at least it it can be, unlike gas-powered
stoves or gasoline-powered cars.
The technology to generate electricity with wind and solar has existed
for decades. So why isn’t the electric grid already 100% powered by
renewables? And what will it take to get there?
Sources of
U.S. electricity
1980 through 2021
![](images/images_12_29_2022/Pic4.jpg)
The economics of power generation
Economics play a big part.
First of all, renewables have only recently become cost-competitive
with fossil fuels for generating electricity. Even then, prices
depend on the location, Paul
Denholm of the National
Renewable Energy Laboratory told CNBC.
In California and Arizona, where there is a lot of sun, solar energy
is often the cheapest option, whereas in places like Maine, solar is
just on the edge of being the cheapest energy source, Denholm said.
In places with lots of wind like North Dakota, wind power is
cost-competitive with fossil fuels, but in the Southeast, it’s still
a close call.
Then there’s the cost of transitioning the current power generation
infrastructure, which was built around burning fossil fuels.
“You’ve got an existing power plant, it’s paid off. Now you need
renewables to be cheaper than running that plant to actually retire
an old plant,” Denholm explained. “You need new renewables to be
cheaper just in the variable costs, or the operating cost of that
power plant.”
There are some places where that is true, but it’s not universally
so.
“Primarily, it just takes a long time to turn over the capital stock
of a multitrillion-dollar industry,” Denholm said. “We just have a
huge amount of legacy equipment out there. And it just takes awhile
for that all to be turned over.”
Intermittency
and transmission
One of the biggest
barriers to a 100% renewable grid is the intermittency of many
renewable power sources. The wind doesn’t always blow and the sun
doesn’t always shine — and the windiest and sunniest places are not
close to all the country’s major population centers.
![](images/images_12_29_2022/Pic5.jpg)
Wind resources in the United States,
according to the the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, a national
laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy.
National Renewable Energy Laboratory, a national laboratory of the
U.S. Department of Energy.
The solution is a combination of batteries to store excess power for
times when generation is low, and transmission lines to take the power
where it is needed.
Long-duration batteries are under development, but Denholm said a lot
of progress can be made simply with utility-scale batteries that store
energy for a few hours.
“One of the biggest problems right now is shifting a little bit of
solar energy, for instance, from say, 11 a.m. and noon to the peak
demand at 6 p.m. or 7 p.m. So you really only need a few hours of
batteries,” Denholm told CNBC. “You can actually meet that with
conventional lithium ion batteries. This is very close to the type of
batteries that are being put in cars today. You can go really far with
that.”
So far, battery usage has been low because wind and solar are
primarily used to buffer the grid when energy sources are low, rather
than as a primary source. For the first 20% to 40% of the electricity
in a region to come from wind and solar, battery storage is not
needed, Denholm said. When renewable penetration starts reaching
closer to 50%, then battery storage becomes necessary. And building
and deploying all those batteries will take time and money.
![](images/images_12_29_2022/Pic6.jpg)
Solar resources in the United States,
according to the the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, a national
laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy.
National Renewable Energy Laboratory, a national laboratory of the
U.S. Department of Energy.
Transmission lines are another
limiting factor.
“We have been able to build a fair amount of wind and solar without
adding new transmission, but we’re really kind of running up to the
limits, especially for wind, because there’s not a whole lot of
transmission located in the places in the country where it’s super
windy,” Denholm said. “So we absolutely do need to build more
transmission to tap into those super-high quality wind resources,
particularly in the middle of the country.”
The transmission system in the U.S. is built for the electricity
capacity that is already on the grid, and building new transmission
lines that run hundreds of miles can take anywhere from 10 to 15
years, John
Moura, the director of reliability assessment at the North
American Electric Reliability Corp., told CNBC. “The type of
transmission we’re talking about here are 1,000 [or] 2,000 miles
long, large projects.”
Currently, when a utility wants to add electricity to the existing
grid, it has to pay for the upgraded transmission line and for the
interconnection, which is where multiple
local grids are brought together. Those grid upgrades are
expensive, and the permit process is slow.
Several components of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act
signed in November 2021 gave the Federal Energy Regulatory
Commission much stronger permitting authority, transmission line
analyst Rob
Gramlich told CNBC. Still, some key rule changes did not get
across the finish line. There was no transmission tax credit
included in this year’s Inflation Reduction Act, and efforts by Sen.
Joe Manchin, D.-W.Va., to reform permitting have so far failed to
pass.
“Transmission was not meaningfully addressed in the 117th Congress.
There is a lot of unfinished business on the transmission front, for
sure,” Gramlich told CNBC.
Putting transmission lines underground is another option, but that’s
prohibitively expensive.
“Your classical old-school, large overhead transmission lines are
pretty much the only thing that we are likely to see at least in the
next decade or two,” Denholm said.
Land requirements? Not that big a deal
One commonly cited worry is that going 100% renewable will
require massive tracts of land covered with solar panels or wind
farms.
But “that is definitively not the challenge,” Moura said.
It would take a total of 0.84 percent of U.S. land to support an
entirely renewable-powered energy system, Stanford
professor Mark Jacobson told CNBC. By comparison, the fossil
fuel industry takes up 1.3 percent of U.S. land.
“Offshore wind, tidal, and wave power do not take up any new land.
Rooftop photovoltaic does not take up any new land,” he said.
So really, the only new land required would be for solar facilities
run by utilities, and for wind turbines on land.
But many people are reluctant to embrace a new way of doing things
when they can’t see what the future will look like, and when
maintaining the status quo is the path of least resistance,
according to Griffith, the mass-electrification advocate
“The biggest barrier is a lack of imagination,” Griffith told CNBC
in a video interview from Australia, where he currently lives. “So
everyone is like, ‘Well, I’m not quite willing to do this, because I
don’t know what it’s going to look like. And maybe it’s going to be
terrible.’”
So what would a 100% renewable-powered world look like, according to
Griffith?
“It’s going to look like every house has solar on its roof. There’ll
be solar over every parking structure. Some roads will probably have
a solar panels elevated down the middle of the road. And every time
you go driving in the countryside, you’ll see some wind somewhere on
the horizon,” Griffith said.
“And otherwise, the future is going to look a lot like it does.”
‘The right thing to do is not the easy thing to do’
Firm and consistent rules from the federal government are another
shortcoming in the U.S., and that comes down to politics.
“In Norway, you can’t buy a gasoline vehicle after 2025. That
creates a huge amount of market certainty. Everyone knows when it’s
going to happen, what you have to do,” Griffith said.
The Inflation Reduction Act in August 2022 was chock full of
incentives to push renewables forward, but it didn’t put any firm
sunsetting dates on fossil fuel generation.
“It doesn’t really clearly send a signal to the utilities that, ‘No,
you can’t install natural gas networks to heat homes anymore. No,
you can’t do this or that or the other.’ So I think more regulatory,
legislative certainty would help America a lot,” said Griffith.
Until then, its going to continue to be cheaper and easier to keep
doing things the same old way.
![](images/images_12_29_2022/Pic7.jpg)
Saul Griffith’s electric home in San
Francisco. Photo courtesy Saul Griffith
Griffith lived in the U.S. for more
than two decades and built an all-electric home in San Francisco
starting in 2014. It took him eight years and cost an estimated
extra $80,000 compared to building a traditional home, he said.
“There’s sort of that inertia and red tape and at every single level
the system,” Griffith said. “And then even after I finished and
build that house, it’s hard to turn on. There are people who are
really skilled at maintaining a digital electric house, [but]
there’s no software that makes it easy yet. There’s a couple of
startups working on it. ... It’s like the early days of the
cellphone.”
Even incremental repairs are harder to do with an all-electric home.
“If you call a contractor and say, ‘I’d like to install an induction
cooktop, I’d like to get take the gas out of the kitchen,’ the
contractor is probably going to tell you, ‘You’re crazy, buy natural
gas instead.’ Or if you call them at midnight and say, ‘My water
heater’s gone, can you please replace it with an electric heat
pump,’ which would be the right choice for climate and even for
economics, the contractor will be like, ‘No, no, no, I’ll have a
natural gas one there in the morning, but the heat pump will take me
six weeks,’” Griffith said.
“So we’ve got a skills and capacity and supply chain shortage on all
of these things, which means that the right thing to do is not the
easy thing to do,” he said.
In Australia, more than 30 percent of homes have rooftop solar and
it’s “the cheapest energy that humanity has ever had,” Griffith
said. In the U.S., only about 1 to 2 percent of homes have rooftop
solar.
“In America, it’s more expensive than electricity from the grid.
That’s a regulatory and a workforce training problem in the U.S.”
For instance, in Australia, Griffith said he can call 10 companies
and get 10 quotes for rooftop solar the next day at 65 cents per
watt. In California, rooftop solar cost him $5.80 per watt. Even
given the higher cost of living in San Francisco in general, “it
shouldn’t be 10 times more expensive than in Australia,” he said.
![](images/images_12_29_2022/Pic8.jpg)
Saul Griffith’s electric home in San
Francisco.
Photo courtesy Saul Griffith
It’s his view that in the U.S. it all comes down to regulation and
preserving the status quo.
“America thinks it’s all about free markets and anti-regulation, but
really, it’s the most over-regulated, most f----- up energy market in
the world,” Griffith said.
For example, many utility companies provide both electricity and gas
to their customers in the U.S.
“One of their businesses is in conflict with the other and they
haven’t resolved that,” Griffith said. “So we’re still handicapping
electric solutions versus natural gas solutions.”
For all of this to change, he said Americans will have to see a better
alternative actually working outside of the U.S. — and then push
politicians and private industry to do better at home.
“You just got to show that this works somewhere. And once you’ve done
that, that might unlock America’s full political paralysis,” Griffith
said.
In the U.S., the successful pitch for rooftop solar will revolve more
around escaping utility bills and rebelling against utilities and
governments, than it will around saving the Earth, Griffith added.
Given those economic and political realities, he said it’s more likely
that rooftop solar will first take off in more conservative states
like Texas or Florida.
“It’ll be a company named Liberation Solar — it will be the largest
solar installer in the U.S.” he said, perhaps only partly in jest.
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