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Learn From The Burn: What The California Fires Illuminate About The Energy Transition

This article is more than 4 years old.

To paraphrase remarks by my colleague Dan Vermeer at this month’s Duke University Energy Conference, energy transitions are not new—but what is new about the one we are going through now is that it is intentional. 

Previous transitions, such as the move from wood to fossil fuels, occurred largely as a result of spontaneous technical and market forces that revolutionized how to harness and use energy more efficiently and cheaply. But today’s energy transition is more goal-oriented, driven significantly by collective aspiration and targeted policies to decarbonize the energy system.

But while the transition is intentional, effecting it can be complicated at best. We are already exposed to climate risk today—it’s not just a potential problem lurking at some distance in the future. The dual challenge is to undertake an energy transition while also creating a system resilient enough to withstand the initial symptoms of climate change.

We can look to California to discover what may be in store for other locales. 

As wildfires rage across the state, its largest utility, PG&E, is still reeling from the bankruptcy caused by its legal liability for last year’s catastrophic Camp fire that killed 85 people. So the company recently declared a temporary no mas on transmitting electricity through its most fire-prone landscape when conditions were incendiary in the extreme—hot, dry, heavy winds blowing over a desiccated landscape. They did this for fear that faulty transmission lines or equipment failure might ignite another inferno, adding to their $30 billion bill for last year’s fires.

Fires are hardly new to California, but their increased severity—coupled with more people moving into fire-vulnerable areas—have folks on tenterhooks. Maybe it’s because Californians feel so deeply exposed to climate change that their state boasts some of the nation’s most aggressive policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In one of his last acts in office, former Governor Jerry Brown declared that the California economy—the world’s fifth largest if it were a country—would be net zero carbon emissions by 2045.  

The Art Of Decarbonization

California has begun pursuing the two approaches most commonly prescribed for energy decarbonization: (1) decarbonizing electricity and (2) electrify everything.  

California has the seventh least carbon-intensive electricity generation among U.S. states, due to geographic and policy factors that produce a higher-than-average mix of renewables such as hydro, wind, and solar. Together, renewables account for nearly half of all generation in the state now. Its policies target 60 percent renewables by 2030 and 100 percent carbon-free power—which could include nuclear and fossil power generation with carbon capture and storage (CCS)—by 2045. So the first part of the decarbonization process is underway.

What about the “electrify everything” part? Setting aside Berkeley’s recent highly publicized ban on the use of natural gas in new homes, California’s electrification efforts have been focused primarily on electric vehicles (EVs). Nearly half of all U.S. EV sales in 2018 were in California, where EVs now account for nearly 8 percent of new car sales, or 4 times the national average. With an annual growth rate of 62 percent, improved models being brought onto the market each year, and ramped up state mandates for vehicle fuel efficiency, EVs have rapidly become a significant force in California’s vehicle fleet. 

The EV sales growth rate in the rest of the U.S. is even higher than in California, though starting from a lower base. So how things play out in California as EVs move into the teens of market share and beyond could be instructive for other states.    

If You Electrify Everything, What Happens When The Lines Are Down?

The issue with electrification, naturally, is that you need electricity, which brings us to the twin issues of system reliability and resilience.

While concerns are commonly expressed about reliability when reliance on renewables is high, there is little evidence to date that higher rates of renewables undermine reliability. The American states with the highest frequency of power outages are Maine, Alaska, Louisiana and West Virginia, none of which are hotbeds of renewables. The two states with the highest duration of outages are North Carolina and South Carolina, where natural events such as hurricanes knock out power for days and sometimes weeks at a time.  

What about the super high rates of variable renewable energy (VRE) like wind and solar associated with the ambitious decarbonization targets discussed above? A study by the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) shows that very large power systems, such as the eastern or western interconnect in the U.S., can operate at 30% VRE with little problem today. Indeed, Texas, which gets about 17 percent of its power from wind on average over the year and has days where wind supplies multiples of that, has not seen its power system disrupted, even though it operates somewhat independently from the rest of the national grid. 

Of course, as the NREL study notes, advances in energy storage, grid technology, standards and planning will be necessary to achieve VRE penetration levels approaching 100 percent. But even the most aggressive state targets stipulate “net zero carbon” rather than 100% renewables, which does keep open the door for nuclear power and fossil-based generation with carbon capture and storage to lessen absolute reliance on VRE.  

The deeper question coming from California is how resilient the electrical system is when confronted with massive disturbances like the recent wildfires. A resilient system is one that can withstand shocks that occur and bounce back quickly to full service. For California, this is not so much about how much of the transmission infrastructure is consumed by fire. Rather, it is about how to harden and smarten the grid to adapt to fire risk in the long run and, in the short run, whether to shut down the transmission system as a preemptive measure when fire conditions flare up. All of this is made more challenging as population continues to move into the wildland-urban interface where the threats are heightened. 

PG&E activated the recent shutdowns under the California Public Utility Commission’s (CPUC) Power Safety Power Shut-offs (PSPS) program, which allows investor-owned utilities to shut off electric power (or “de-energize”) to protect public safety. Utilities have extrinsic motivation for shutdowns beyond public safety, as California law holds that utilities can be held legally liable for fire damage caused by their power assets even if they are deemed not negligent. Indeed, this is the source of PG&E’s $30 billion liability for the 2018 Camp fire and pending bankruptcy. The shutdowns under PSPS are voluntary; but so is the decision not to walk in front of a moving freight train.    

Where Does This Leave Us? 

For some, the narrative goes like this: California serves as a cautionary tale against a decarbonized, electrified future because that would create an energy system that is too unreliable or require a massive and expensive overhaul of California’s grid that is not worth the cost. But that misses many points. California’s recent system disruption is not because of too much decarbonization but because of too much fire risk, too many people living in areas exposed to it, and a transmission grid that is too old to handle it. Electrifying more of our energy system—for instance, vehicle fleets—does raise the stakes for electricity reliability and resilience. However, natural disasters also impede supply chains and create shortages for gasoline and diesel that hinder conventional mobility, as witnessed dramatically with Hurricane Katrina in 2005. 

California’s electric power system is not inherently unstable because of the renewable-heavy generation mix it employs, nor should that be a source of instability as it takes on a more decarbonized mix in the future. Rather, the system needs a grid resiliency booster shot to handle more frequent climate-related disruptions and a growing and shifting population. The grid is old and, regardless of the degree of climate risk, needs to be upgraded through hardening (poles and wires), softening (smart automated management systems), and ramped up vegetation management. Land use policies and liability rules also need to be modified to ensure equitable distribution of risks. 

This is going to be very messy and expensive—even more so given the inherent uncertainty of the role climate will play in the equation. But it is necessary and requires new forms of intentionality.       

Opinion columns from The Wall Street Journal’s Dan Neil and Vox’s David Roberts offer a somewhat different view of the situation that the California fires present. They believe that the plummeting cost of solar power and the advancements in behind-the-meter storage such as the Tesla Powerwall may soon make it realistic for households and communities to become more far more energy-independent. In fact, they could even bundle resources via microgrids and peer-to-peer networking to provide the balancing and backup the grid now produces. If so, this means less reliance on a regionally expansive grid and less exposure to disruptions like voluntary shutdowns due to conditions many miles away. It may not be a panacea, but it may no longer be a pipe dream either. 

Not all places have the unique blend of climate conditions, population distribution, and grid conditions that produce such high fire risk in California, but fire is not the only natural disruption that climate change could exacerbate. For instance, I live in North Carolina, where, in the last two years, three hurricanes have shut down power in eastern parts of the state for days and weeks at a time. 

Like California, North Carolina has established ambitious decarbonization goals—and will be wrestling with how to meet these goals while contending with increased risk of natural disasters. (It’s worth noting North Carolina is already second to California in installed solar capacity; the utility-scale solar farms in the eastern part of the state fared pretty well through 2018’s Hurricane Florence, but conventional grid service was disrupted throughout, requiring legions of workers to restore it.)

As California takes on the dual challenges of a planned energy transition and resilience of such a system to natural disasters, the rest of the country should watch closely while grappling with similar problems and options. Good intentions are not enough; learning from the successes and failures of previous experimentation is critical.   

[This article benefitted from background research by Will Niver and editing suggestions by Braden Welborn of the Duke University Energy Initiative.] 


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