Energy Impact Partners: A primer on the next three decades of the energy transition - Part 5

(Climate Action, 23 Apr 2020) Energy Impact Partners research lead, Andy Lubershane, releases a five-part series examining technologies needed to fully decarbonize the energy system, relying on as few technology “moonshots” as possible.

This is the last article of a five-part series examining the technology we’ll need to fully decarbonize our energy system, relying on as few technology “moonshots” as possible.

I. The Electric Future We Need

II. Two Storage Technology Revolutions

III. Cheaper, Deeper Offshore Wind: completing our renewable resource portfolio

IV. Clean Heat

V. The Grid of the Future

Choose almost any definition for the word “complex”, and you’ll find that the most complex machine ever designed and operated by humans is an electrical grid — specifically, at this point in time, the massive grid covering the eastern half of the United States, known as the “Eastern Interconnect”.

This unfathomable machine transmits electricity from thousands of power plants, through hundreds of thousands of switches and circuit breakers and transformers, across millions of miles of transmission and distribution lines, into the messy wiring of homes and buildings, and onward into tens of billions of individual devices that vary in their consumption needs from smart phones to elevators. It performs this feat in real time, all the time, with little room for error, with greater than 99.8% reliability. Every part of the system is dependent on the weather, from the energy produced by wind turbines, to the price of natural gas — which flows through an interconnected network of pipelines — to the operation of millions of air conditioning systems. There is no single operator; instead, dozens of entities must coordinate to make sure everything stays in tune.

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Climate Action, 23 Apr 2020: Energy Impact Partners: A primer on the next three decades of the energy transition - Part 5