>>BRUCE: Hi.
This is Bruce Moravchik from NOAA's Climate Series Education
Project.
I'm pleased to welcome Dr. Alexander "Sandy" McDonald
who will be giving our presentation today: "Can the
World's Carbon Dioxide be Stopped Short of a Doubling?"
Now Dr. McDonald is Director of NOAA's Earth System Research
Lab in Boulder, Colorado, and he's Chief Science Advisor for
NOAA's Oceanic and Atmospheric Research Line office.
Like many meteorologists, he became interested in weather as
a child and spent his career in the field.
His undergraduate degree was in math and physics at Montana
State University.
He started his professional career as an officer in the Air
Force.
Then he obtained his master's degree and doctoral degree in
meteorology from the University of Utah.
He started working for NOAA in the National Weather Service
Western Regional Headquarters in Salt Lake City in 1973.
When the Program for Regional Observing and Forecasting,
PROF, was established by NOAA Research in 1980,
Dr. McDonald became a leader of its advanced weather prediction
development team.
He was subsequently the first director of NOAA's Forecast
Systems Lab and also the first director of its Earth System
Research Laboratory.
The focus of Dr. McDonald has been to apply advances in
science and technology toward the improvement of services.
He's pushed for new observing technologies,
such as unmanned aircraft systems,
and has published extensively in advanced weather-predicting
modeling.
He's published important policy,
Relevant Discussions of the Dangers of Regional Climate
Change.
He is the inventor of Science On a Sphere,
a display system that's in over 100 museums and other
institutions around the world educating people of all ages
about our science.
Finally, he is the president of the American Meteorological
Society for 2015.
And now I'd like to, very gratefully,
turn over the cam to Dr. McDonald.
Welcome.
>>SANDY: Thanks, Bruce.
It's nice to hear my bio, but I like that part earlier where
you said Dr. McDonald is hot.
Anyway, we have a serious subject today which is,
"Can the World's Carbon Dioxide be Stopped Short of a
Doubling?"
And I really appreciate giving this talk to this group because
as Margaret Mead said, change starts with a few people who
really see the need for the change and know what needs to
be done.
So I'm going to talk about a study that was done here at
Earth Systems Research Lab in Boulder.
My idea started six years ago, but what I have is really
talented scientists and mathematicians who worked on
this with me.
I particularly wanted to mention Dr. Christopher Clack
who is with CIRES.
We work very closely with our Cooperative Institute at the
University of Colorado.
Chris and a team of other scientists really deserve the
credit for a lot of this work, so I want to make sure
everybody understands that.
I'll mention that Earth System Research Lab is a beautiful
building right in front of the Flatirons in Boulder with 600
people.
I've been privileged to be the director of Earth System
Research Lab and, again, this work is really based on their
work.
We have three main points that I want to emphasize.
The first one is that time is really running out on the major
efforts that need to be taken worldwide to deal with carbon
emissions.
Carbon dioxide is a powerful gas and it's going to have very
large affects.
I think all of you are pretty familiar with the science,
that's really where we are.
Now some people when they've heard this talk say, well,
I'm trying to reduce my own footprint,
and I think that's wonderful.
I think that the more that we can do ourselves the better it
is.
However, a major point here is that we need large solutions as
a way that worldwide we can get to where we need to be.
The second point is we did a study,
which I'm going to talk about, that shows that there's a path
to reliable, low-carbon electricity for the world's
biggest economies without a significant increase in cost.
I think that's a crucial point that I'll enlarge on.
The third point is that de-carbonizing electricity,
in other words, if you can produce electricity,
that's a necessary condition on de-carbonization other sectors
like transportation, home heating and air conditioning,
etc. So what we have is a great problem faced by the
world, and the question is how can we get these incredible
reductions in carbon dioxide.
And part of the answer is no matter what you have to start
with electricity.
So I want to talk about that as a vital part of the talk.
So I want to take you back to 2010 when they had the COP 15,
Conference of Parties, was in Copenhagen, Denmark.
I was there.
I'd like to say I was part of the US delegation, but,
actually, I was doing presentations on Science on a
Sphere emphasizing the difficult problem we face.
One of the things that I showed was what I call the Hofmann
curve, which is in front of you.
David Hofmann worked for me in Earth System Research Lab and
David came up with this idea.
I encouraged him to publish it.
Essentially, he pointed out that if you subtract off the
carbon dioxide that preexisted the Industrial Revolution and
put the graph of time and the amount of carbon dioxide on a
logarithmic diagram -- You see over here on the left side that
the amount of carbon dioxide in excess of what there was before
the Industrial Revolution starts at a little over 30 in
the 1950s.
We're already up over a hundred parts per million of additional
due to human causes.
And we're actually rapidly going up a graph toward 300.
This is essentially what puts us at double CO2 from
pre-industrial, a huge increase.
So Dr. Hofmann was really noticing that when you get an
exponential graph like this it's usually because there's
exponential processes.
And I want to just say what I mean by that.
We know that the growth of population is an exponential
process.
The more people there are the more the population grows.
And there's another thing happening that I think is a
wonderful thing which is that the amount of carbon dioxide
being admitted by people is increasing.
You say, why is that wonderful.
The reason that it is is that we know that people have been
lifted out of poverty by advances in their ability to
use energy.
Right now, the only way to get access to the high amounts of
energy to lift people out of poverty is a fossil fuel
economy.
The whole point of this talk is to say there's another way,
but right now if you look at China and India and much of the
world, these great advances are a very positive thing,
but what they really show us on this graph is that as more
people get lifted out of poverty there's been almost no
cessation.
There's no decrease in the rate of increase of carbon dioxide.
So we are basically kind of like Thelma and Louise,
really headed for the cliff here.
We've got to find out if there's a way.
When I was in Copenhagen I actually was sitting having a
beer with some of the US negotiators and I said,
I can't believe I show this graph and it shows we really
haven't made a dent in carbon dioxide.
I said I think we're doing all kinds of things;
we are conserving and all these other things.
And one of the negotiators said to me, go look carefully.
We really have not found a way that is going to be politically
palatable in either authoritarian or democratic
countries.
You can't basically get people off of fossil fuels unless you
have an alternative that is low cost,
that is no increase in cost, that it really does greatly
reduce carbon dioxide, and is reliable.
And you go look at those studies none of those shows
that.
So I sort of resolved back in 2010 to come back and look at
the studies.
In my opinion he was right.
There's methods of decreasing carbon dioxide without,
you know, by doubling the cost which I think is not
politically palatable.
There's methods of saying, well,
we can have wind and solar energy,
but people have really shown that they are unreliable so the
question is, how can this be done?
The stakes, I think you know very well.
A decision to do something -- if we don't do something we
have a large negative impact in food production,
both agricultural and fisheries that later in the century are
really climate change converts.
This is a picture of eastern Colorado on the right here,
a beautiful field producing food.
If you take the climate from the climate models in 2100,
the same area has about a 10 degree Fahrenheit warmer
temperature and much drier summer.
So if you look at the equivalent climate,
it's very close to the Sonoran Desert of northern Mexico.
So to convert a huge food-producing area like the
Great Plains into an area that doesn't produce food has a huge
implication.
John Englander's recent book on sea level rise he points out
that even though the sea level rise may take three or 500
years to happen, you're pretty much committed once we get a
doubling or tripling of carbon dioxide in the air.
And finally, Elizabeth Kolbert's great book on the
natural biological world.
So these are the stakes that you all know so well.
Here's the paper that came out of six years' worth of work
here in Earth System Research Lab.
We've submitted it to Nature Climate Change and it's called,
"Cost-competitive reduction of carbon emissions of up to 80%
from the US electric sector by 2030."
This is something we hope to get before the scientific
community, and you're going to hear generally what is in the
paper.
So the basic idea is will wind and solar power work.
The question that I ask our scientists to work on was if we
recognize that weather, wind, and sun are basically parts of
the weather system and weather actually is very big in scale.
So if we take advantage of using the whole of the United
States, the whole 48 states, or a large area like Europe or
China, and we had some way to backup and last resort if the
wind and sun were not adequate over the whole country,
would we have power costs that are equivalent today,
no more expensive, and would it be reliable?
The answer we came up with is yes, and I want to explain why.
I'm going to start with what I call wind capacity factor,
and that's this pretty kind of colored diagram that came from
our work.
What we did was we collected weather information on a
highly-detailed grid over the United States and adjacent
areas.
These, we collected every hour for three years,
so that's about 25,000 hours with more than 120,000 points.
It ended up being about 50 billion points of weather data
that went into this, and that actually was the real problem
with the previous studies.
We really felt that nobody had ever really used the proper
weather data.
Some people had just assumed that weather has a very small
scale variation which is not true.
They made other assumptions that weren't correct.
So this study was really a "we're a weather and climate
lab, let's do the weather right."
So here's the first thing that you notice: if you look at this
map of wind power, there's an area -- this deep red area -- I
call it the wind triangle that goes from the big bend of Texas
up to Maine and back across the Great Plains into northern
Montana.
So this is the wind triangle.
By wind capacity factor what we mean is,
if you had a wind turbine and you had it for a long period,
like a year, would it produce the full power -- let's say it
was a one megawatt, one-million-watt turbine?
It wouldn't because sometimes the wind doesn't blow.
And, in fact, if you look at these green areas and these
blue areas, these are areas where it would only be blowing
maybe 10 or 12 percent of the time.
But, and there's quite a bit of area especially in southeast US
where the wind doesn't blow that much.
However, if you go to the Northern Plains or the central
plains anywhere, you see that there's areas where the wind is
blowing half the time, so the wind capacity factor means that
on average that thing would be producing half as much of its
rated power over a whole year.
That's a lot of power, and if we could just essentially plop
our house right beside that wind turbine and get it at
wholesale, you'd be buying power at three to four cents.
So what we really learn here is that like every other economic
good there are places where wind power is really, you know,
economically cheap.
You know that's true of everything.
If you want to say, well, where am I going to put a gold mine?
I found my son one day digging a hole in the backyard,
and I said what are you doing.
He said, I'm digging a gold mine.
And I said, well, I don't think you're going to find any gold
here; you have to go to a place where there is gold.
And that simple thing that some places have really great wind
power and solar power and others don't,
is the first main point that we wanted to prove.
So that's wind power.
Here's what the solar power looks like.
If you look at the US, you see that there's red areas where
there's an incredible amount of solar power.
But interestingly, all the way up the East Coast and well up
the West Coast there's a pretty large area of these yellow
areas which are really very good solar power.
Here again, there's good portions of the US where if you
put up a solar panel on your roof or somebody builds a solar
photovoltaic plant, they're going to get a lot of power.
The first point about it is there's parts of the US that
are really poor for solar power and really poor for wind power.
But if you look across the whole US,
there's parts that are really good.
And that's, by the way, also true of Europe and China.
That's the first thing that we discovered.
Here's something that's a little bit complicated,
and I won't go into it too far, but we've known in the
meteorology field for a long time that weather has really
big scale.
This diagram shows this in kind of a formal way.
It basically says, well, if you look at this area on the left
side it shows how much energy is available.
And if you look at the bottom part here it shows how big are
these areas.
So I put a green line that's the size of the US 48 states,
and you see this line up here showing there's an incredible
amount of energy.
And then if you come to the size of current power plants
and where power is distributed -- and I didn't mean power
plants, I meant utility companies -- in what they call
balancing areas.
Because of AC power, they can't get power very efficiently
across the country, so these small areas -- if you take
those, there's a lot less energy available.
This one, again, needs a little explanation.
If you think about it, if what you want for wind and solar is
to have an area that's big enough so that if it's not
blowing in part of the area where you have your plants,
it's blowing somewhere else.
So then you say, well, how big is the weather?
The answer is, if you want an area that's big enough where
the wind is really almost certain to be blowing
somewhere, you look at this chart and what it shows is
that's pretty much the scale of the whole 48 states.
So weather energy is large.
If you want it to be reliable -- remember the first thing is
low cost; I showed you that.
The second thing was you want it to be reliable,
so you've got to be big enough so it blows somewhere in the
area that you can get power to your house from.
Here's just a picture of that.
I picked this one.
I did a talk a couple years ago,
and we see that this is a typical weather map.
This area in the east is a great big high pressure system.
In the west, there's a big low coming.
And this is what you see in the weather map: a great big low
over part of the US.
A simple way to think about it is,
if we want to make sure that we always have power,
we just have to have a big enough distribution system.
So we bring the power from where it's actually blowing at
any given minute.
Here's what the wind looks like if you display it for every
hour.
And what we're looking at here is the wind speed and these red
areas are where it's very windy.
And we're looking at it every hour at about eight-mile
resolution.
So the blue areas are where there's not much wind blowing,
and this is part of that 25, 50 billion points of data.
What you see is there's great big areas where there's wind
always somewhere.
Here it is moving across the United States.
You can see why, if you have something that's big enough,
it's always got one of these areas where it's windy.
So that's true of the wind; it's also true of the sun.
Here in the middle of winter is a map of how much solar energy,
and, of course, you'll notice as you look at this it says
total sun, total radiation.
You see that since it's in the middle of winter,
the sun's only up for a while each day, and yet,
see that kind of nice orange-reddish area on the
bottom of the map that means there's a lot of energy in
southern United States.
Now the bluish, to the north, is indicating at least during
the middle of winter, with a lot of clouds and so on,
there's not much.
So our problem is not that wind and solar energy are too
expensive; they're actually really cheap.
Our problem is not that you couldn't get it somewhere;
our problem is that we have to move it from where it's cheap
every hour over the whole country,
and that's where this is a little difficult.
That's why you need six years and some really talented
scientists to work on.
So here again is a chart that shows what the total energy
used in the entire United States for an entire year.
So this is a graph, and on the left side we see how much the
300 million people in the United States are using.
Over here in the left where I've got a 500 and GW meaning
gigawatts, this little red line indicates that there's 500
billion watts being used on January 1st,
and we look across and see during winter it can run about
five or 600 billion watts, gigawatts.
And look at this in summer, we get this big peak where the
total United States usage is running up toward 800 billion
watts.
So this is every hour for the entire year.
Why is this important?
Well, people have said, well, the problem is we're going to
set up these little areas where we put up, you know,
every state can put up their wind and solar plants,
but the trouble is if you use it by every state,
it won't be reliable.
It's not big enough.
So if we put it up over the whole United States,
the question is could we ship it from where the wind is
blowing at a given time or where the sun is shining at a
given time, and get it to the whole country.
So in our study we got data from the Federal Regulatory
Commission, and we actually calculated for every hour,
for three years, in 130 areas over the US how much
electricity they were using.
So if we look at this little area here,
I've got a little circle and blow up the amount of power
usage, so this is the whole US power usage for a week in
January.
These little bumps here are the morning peak and the afternoon
peak on Monday.
I know it's Monday because those little notches down here
and up here, those are the weekends where you don't use as
much power.
So there's Monday, there's Tuesday, there's Wednesday,
and so on.
So what we have to do is prove that for this three-year period
power can be distributed over the United States.
I want to give you a hint of where I'm heading.
The only way to do this would be to essentially have a
super-highway of power distribution.
Everything that I'm going to talk to you about this evening
are technology that exists right now.
So there's something called a high-voltage,
direct current line.
And that looks like a regular powerline which is actually
alternating current instead of direct-current,
except the poles don't have to be as big.
They are more efficient when you use this high-voltage.
But the huge thing is you can move power a thousand miles or
1500 miles or 2000 miles across the US without losing much
power.
So these high-voltage DC, you could imagine building a
super-highway of these to distribute power over the whole
US.
I want to just point out one more thing,
we're coming to kind of a solution here which is built
around you have to meet all the US power, hour by hour.
We look over here in the center here in July,
in the middle of July, and we see there's this giant peak in
the middle of every afternoon.
That's the eastern US air conditioning peak that drives
us to almost 800 billion watts.
So to just review a little bit, we had to prove that a wind and
solar system -- now one more problem before I go on: Wind
and solar are not enough by themselves.
They're still going to be cases where it isn't quite enough.
For that, we need some kind of fossil fuel,
and we chose to use natural gas because it has half as much
carbon intensity for a given kilowatt hour of energy.
So now we have everything in place,
and what we want to do is see if the US could have a low
cost, reliable, low-carbon system.
Here is a picture of this thing I just described: high-voltage,
DC transmission.
If this looks a lot like the super-highway system,
the interstate highway system, that's not by chance.
Because it actually is the same thing.
What President Eisenhower knew in the 1950s when they created
the interstate highway system is that it would create a
national market.
A lot of people on both sides of the aisle in Congress
believe in markets.
This makes a national electric market where power produced in
North Dakota can be instantly available to the air
conditioners running on a hot summer day in the East Coast.
I'm going to show you a real-time look at this.
When we did this calculation, we actually had a simulator
that used all the costs: the cost of the power lines,
the cost of the wind turbines, and everything and it
calculated a system based on where the wind blows and to
ensure reliability.
Now this is a pictorial that explains what we did
mathematically.
The mathematics is called linear programming.
This is a system.
We can go on the computer and this is one of the neat things
about our modern era.
As difficult as the problems we face,
there is also very powerful tools.
This thing called a linear programming,
it was a problem that actually had trillions of data points.
It took a week to solve the best power system for the US in
terms of those three things.
Here's what it did: It says, okay,
minimize the total cost every year,
the mortgage cost of the solar panels,
the mortgage cost of the all the wind turbines that you put
up, the cost of the gas plants, the cost of the natural gas
fuel, the cost.
So it wants to minimize total costs over the whole United
States on a high-resolution grid,
but it's subject to something really important.
The actual sun shining on the panels,
every hour for 8760 hours a year,
and the actual wind blowing on the wind turbines, plus,
what you have to add with natural gas,
minus the losses in the power system have to meet the power
needs across every area of the United States.
It can't be just one value for the whole US; it's 150 areas.
This is a big complicated mathematical system.
Dr. Clack, I hired from one of the best universities in
England as the mathematician who can make this happen.
It's an incredible amount of work.
There's a paper published, refereed paper,
that explains how we did it, "Linear programming techniques
for developing an optimal electrical system using
high-voltage DC."
So this is a refereed paper, for those of you who love math
this ought to be really a smorgasbord.
So what did we start with?
We got this thing that's going to design the US power system.
What did we start with?
Well, we started with what it was in 2012.
So all these little dots are power plants.
I'm from near Glendive, Montana;
and there's a little coal plant right near Glendive,
and I was happy to see that it's on here.
These little green things, the green things are wind turbines.
These little red things, these little red dots,
those are where there's photovoltaic plants.
You'll notice there's a lot in New Jersey over here.
The blue things are hydroelectric.
You'll see in the Tennessee Valley Authority area there's a
lot of those, and there's a lot of those in the Pacific
Northwest.
We didn't start from ground zero.
By the way, there's also nuclear plants, coal plants,
and everything in this.
So we didn't start from ground zero.
We said evolve between 2012 and 2030 a system that has the
lowest cost, lowest carbon, and is 100 percent reliable.
Because if we could get off of a lot of carbon by 2030,
and we can also talk other countries, Europe, China,
etc., if we could do that, we really would have a chance at
stopping before the doubling of carbon dioxide.
To me that is a paramount goal for anybody who thinks about
the future.
So we put it in the computer; it cranks away for a week,
and it designs this system.
So here it is.
These green things are where it put wind turbines.
You notice I talked about the wind triangle that went from
Texas to Maine to Montana.
You noticed it put a lot there, but not only there,
there's a whole bunch in the Carolinas.
There are some in the west.
It's kind of scattered over a lot of areas.
The red areas, the little red dots,
are where it put photovoltaic plants.
You'll notice there's a lot in California, Arizona,
New Mexico.
Another really interesting thing is that it actually,
the system, this is a computer program,
it also put them near every major city.
You go to every major city and you will find some of these
power plants.
It's basically smart enough to know that cities need more
electricity during the day, so this optimizer is going to put
those.
So if you just take a look here in the right,
what we see is it put in this green area here is showing that
it put, installed a whole lot of wind turbines.
The purple things are the amount of installed natural gas
plants.
The main point about that is it's actually pretty much the
ones that already exist.
The red thing here in the installed -- I got installed
and usage -- but the red in the installed is that it installed
a whole lot of solar plants.
These gray lines are super-highway to carry the
power around the country.
What you notice is that these thicker ones are basically,
we had to, the system is smart enough to know that it's got to
install bigger lines.
So these will carry up to 12 billion watts of energy,
these big thick ones.
These little skinny ones will carry more like one and a half
billion watts.
This is a big system and we run motion of this -- I'm going to
show you this on the next slide -- and what you really see is
taking the power from areas that are really rich in cheap
power and moving it to where people are using it.
So I'll point out also we assume that the hydropower in
the existing nuclear power stayed the same.
I want to make a little parenthetical comment: Nuclear
power is basically very low carbon even including lifecycle
cost, so we left nuclear and hydro exactly the same as they
are today.
We didn't assume it building anymore.
We said let's see if we can move from where we are today
with just natural gas, wind turbines,
and solar power and essentially do it as the optimal economic
solution.
So the next thing I'm going to show you is hour-by-hour how
this would work.
So we're looking at the whole 48 states,
and we see these blank lines flashing as the power flows
along them.
Those blue things that get darker and lighter is when
there's actual wind blowing creating the power.
You'll notice that part of the time you'll see these red dots
move across the map.
That's actually when the sun is shining.
So what this system, that is designed,
is doing is it's guaranteeing that every hour,
through the whole year, it delivers power to every part of
the United States.
So here's the results, and we're almost through here.
I will be looking forward to your questions here in a few
minutes.
If you look at 2012, the average retail cost, price,
that you pay across the United States is 9.84 cents a kilowatt
hour.
That's close to what I pay.
There's parts in the east were people pay as much as 15 or 18
cents.
There's parts in the west, north central,
where they pay as little as six or seven cents.
This is the average.
This gray area is signifying on the left here you see is the
total emissions of carbon dioxide.
We have over 2 million metric tons of carbon dioxide being
put out in 2012.
What we're going to take a look at is what we discovered when
we ran all kinds of different simulations.
First, we show the estimate of what would happen if we go with
our current approaches, our current policies.
What it shows is that our power costs are going to go up 11 and
a half cents.
Current policies get us to a nine percent reduction.
A key point here is a nine percent reduction by 2030,
in my opinion, if that's duplicated across the world
along with the growth of essentially power because of
people becoming essentially coming out of poverty,
we really have very little chance to stop before the
doubling.
So this is our reference from the Energy Information
Administration.
Here's what happens if we basically build this
high-voltage DC line but we don't change any policies with
regard to coal.
So we did a goal scenario.
Essentially, your power gets cheaper because you can pipe
the power around, but the total amount of carbon dioxide on our
current policies would go about 24 cents -- 24 percent rather.
So now here is the result of our study.
If we were able to implement the system that I showed you
with the high-voltage DC lines and all of the wind and solar,
the average cost of power is 10.71 cents.
In other words, less than what we're expecting for 2030,
but the key point is the amount of carbon dioxide going into
the air is down 86 percent.
So this slide really says it all.
It says, basically, we're putting out 2100 million metric
tons, or 2.1 billion metric tons, of carbon dioxide.
We want to get down as fast as we can if we're going to get
off of the Hofmann curve.
If we continue and allow coal at the current rate,
we end up with -- but we built a high-voltage DC line -- we
would end up with an increase of CO2.
But a wind, solar, and gas power on top of our existing
nuclear and Hydro would get us to a huge decrease in carbon
dioxide.
I want to mention that this is -- we have several cost
estimates: a cost estimate where you get the high side of
what people expect for wind and solar costs,
the reduction is not as much.
It's down about 60 percent, but it's a huge reduction
nevertheless.
We did a study that's less detailed over China and over
Australia and over Europe and pretty much the same thing
holds for all these: You can reduce your carbon dioxide
globally by a huge amount if you have distribution of power
using these high-voltage DC lines.
There's only one more step that I want to mention.
And here's a picture of my son and his Tesla.
He went in to be a cardiologist.
I'm a poor weatherman who doesn't drive a Tesla;
I drive a beat-up, old car.
The point here is that if it's manufacturing-possible to build
a Tesla, it means that we could probably,
in the coming years between now and 2030,
have inexpensive cars.
Elon Musk is building a factory to do just that.
He says he'll have a $35,000 car just like this in the next
few years.
So that means if we de-carbonize electricity we can
also de-carbonize our transportation or at least most
of it.
So you do the electric sector first.
The big problem of the 21st century we have technologies
that exist now, I'm not talking about new battery technologies.
There's none of that in here.
Everything that I'm talking about: wind turbines,
PV plants, high-voltage DC transmission,
that exists in the US.
It exists in China.
People are building them.
There's no new technology.
Elon Musk is building his giant battery factory,
so there's a solution that we could work on right now that
would allow us to cut down.
The summary is we think that there is a way to mitigate
carbon dioxide.
I think our study points a way that people should be
considering.
I would like to thank all of you for listening and stop here
and ask for questions.
>>BRUCE: Thanks so much, Dr. McDonald.
Yeah, we've gotten some questions in,
and certainly if folks have some more questions,
please type them in to your question box.
To address one of the first questions which is going back
to one of your earlier slides, what's the optimum minimum wind
speed to be effective for AC power generation?
>>SANDY: Okay.
The wind speeds that are required are something that I
think they started producing power at something like six or
seven mile-per-hour winds.
And there's also a maximum.
We didn't actually use a simple thing,
we use the actual curves used by manufacturers which are
pretty complicated and nonlinear,
but they sort of show that the wind turbines don't start
operating until you've got six or seven mile-per-hour winds
and they turn them off when it gets over like 33 or 34.
>>BRUCE: Thanks.
One question that came up was about environmental degradation
or energy use for actual construction of these
pipelines.
Can you go into a little bit of detail about that as well as
potential cost financing of this project?
>>SANDY: Okay.
The first cost, there is definitely an effect if you
have more overhead power lines.
The size of high-voltage DC lines is less in proportion if
you pipe AC power, so they're about 1/3 as much in terms of
the big overhead lines and so on.
They are smaller.
But it is still would really require a lot of building of
these transmission lines.
An interesting possibility is that it's possible that a lot
of these lines could be put underground.
We looked at the cost of putting them underground,
so you can put them along railroad right-of-way or even
you could put them underneath the ground adjacent to
interstate highways, so they would really not have such a
big environmental effect.
The cost would increase by about -- it would increase the
cost of our electricity if we put them all underground,
by about a penny a kilowatt hour.
So it's a significant cost, but it wouldn't be impossible.
The final thing I'll say about the high-voltage DC
transmission lines is that this analysis essentially included
all the costs of those lines.
We essentially said if you have these lines,
the cost of constructing them, and the cost of operating and
running them, all of those costs are included just like
the cost of wind turbines and the cost of the fuel for the
gas plants.
This is what's called an economic minimization where we
allow the computer program to decide on how much high-voltage
DC and where to put the wind and solar plants so that the
total cost is least.
So all the costs are in there.
A final point, and this may be beyond what the questioner was
asking, a final point is that what is the cost of this system
total; could it be done?
It's like everything else, nobody goes and plops down
$700,000 for the house.
Essentially when you build a power plant you get what
amounts to a mortgage for the power plant.
So the capital costs of this we've taken a hard look at got
some help from some great economists on this.
The capital cost of this is the investment we'd need to make
between now and 2030 are about 2.6 trillion dollars.
It turns out that replacing old coal plants with new coal
plants and the other capital costs associated with the
energy system are going to be about 2.1 trillion.
So it's really not too much different whether we decide to
build wind and solar or whether we decide to build more coal
plants to replace the ones that are end-of-life.
>>BRUCE: You mentioned some of these costs and some of the
different opportunities, what could you say if you could
speak to the perspective of some of the transmission
utilities, or some of the generation utilities.
What did they think about this plan?
In an earlier talk I know that you mentioned you had some
input from them on this.
>>SANDY: Yeah, I think it's a big change.
It's basically what I call the third energy revolution.
The first one was switching from human power to animal
power.
The second one was switching from animal power to fossil
fuel power.
This is the third one that essentially says were switching
to low carbon, but we want to do it at the same cost.
So what are the utilities and the regulators and the local
governments and the investor-owned companies and so
on, what do they all think of this?
I think everybody who has a stake in it, you know,
if they're not worried about it then they'd be pretty poor
stewards of their companies.
I also think that many of them recognize that we can't go to a
doubling or tripling of carbon dioxide and a 10-degree
Fahrenheit temperature rise over the continents without
monstrous effects.
So I think there's many companies that are thinking
about, well, is there an alternative?
And I think part of the problem has been there have not been
realistic alternatives.
If the alternative is we'll double the cost of energy,
as I said earlier, I don't think that any company thinks
that that's a viable alternative.
So I think companies who become aware of this, you know,
if and when we get our paper published which is problematic,
but as they become aware of it, it gives them an option for a
future energy economy.
And what I like to compare it to was,
I hate to admit this but I'm old enough to remember when the
interstate highways were being built.
The original arguments in Congress included everybody
saying, look if you're building an interstate highway and it
doesn't come through the center of my little town in Montana
we're all going to go broke.
So every time you have a giant revolution that changes things,
people are worried.
They are nervous; they argue, gosh,
this is going to ruin me economically.
But in the end, I think the reality is we can have low
cost, reliable, low-carbon energy economy that has all
kinds of advantages among others you're not so dependent
on foreign oil.
And I could mention a bunch of others.
>>BRUCE: Thanks.
We had another question which they ask are your map shows
huge offshore wind resources.
And we are aware of some of these that are in the process
of going up now, and I believe a talk was given last week
about some of these off of Block Island in Rhode Island.
Do some of these figure into your plan as well,
because there didn't seem to be any in the map that you showed?
>>SANDY: Okay.
So we've done many, many of these simulations.
It gets a little complicated.
If we take the best Energy Information Administration
estimates of the cost of offshore wind and we put it
into an economic analyzer, it doesn't use any.
It doesn't use any because it's too expensive.
So we looked at some other possibilities.
People will pay a premium sometimes and say, well,
rather than have wind turbines all over the land we'd like to
do some of it, or a lot of it, offshore in which case you get
a higher price.
So this is simply an economic analysis.
There's many things like concentrating solar power and
others that if you just take it on costs,
they aren't going to be used.
It gives you important information.
It basically says, well, at current cost estimates for
2030, the offshore would not compete with the onshore and
the onshore solar.
>>BRUCE: I see.
You know we did have another couple questions in here just
talking about sort of what a proposed timeframe might be for
implementation.
Some folks have mentioned here that 15 years seems to be a
pretty short time to create such a different system,
to create such a radical shift.
Have you proposed like a phasing-in process or a
development process for this?
>>SANDY: What our study basically says is,
is this a global emergency?
If it is a global emergency for the reasons that I put on this
slide, if it is a global emergency stopping before
doubling is going to require the nations of the world to do
very large changes.
15 years would be very fast to do it.
There's precedents in history in the United States after
Pearl Harbor, the industrial production had grown by a huge
factor in creating airplanes and aircraft carriers and those
kinds of things.
So the basic point here is that economically if it's feasible
these high-voltage DC lines are like toll roads for electrons.
When you build a toll road nowadays you want to build it
where there's going to be a lot of people using it right away
and they're going to be willing to pay for it.
There's lots of places like that.
We're having a bunch built here in Colorado.
This is the same thing.
Day one, when you build an electronic,
high-voltage DC toll road from North Dakota to the East Coast,
that thing will start making a lot of money.
So capital-wise and construction-wise it's very
feasible to essentially say to people,
here's a license to build something;
it will fit with our system that we're going to have in
place by 2030.
And there's an implication when I mentioned toll roads that if
you look at the economics of it,
I think it should be built by -- essentially the government
should specify what it wants, but just like the toll roads,
it's built and financed commercially.
There's a way to do this rapidly provided, you know,
the political and global establishment agree that it
should be done.
>>BRUCE: You've been very generous with your time today,
Dr. McDonald.
I certainly do thank you.
Just perhaps two final questions.
In your model, what happens if you take natural gas out of the
equation?
>>SANDY: You can do that.
We actually did some with just wind and solar power and the
prices go up significantly.
So you end up with more like 13 or 14 cents per kilowatt hour.
You know about a 40 percent increase.
This is a simulator and what I think we've really done is
created a simulator that can be used by the policy people who
will ultimately decide this.
We're just saying, well, this is something that can tell us
if we did pure carbon-free, we could do it except the prices
would go up about 50 percent.
If we basically allow coal, the prices will go down but the CO2
will go up.
So this is simply a simulator that can tell us the future of
various policies.
>>BRUCE: And speaking of simulations,
we actually had a request from one teacher who wanted to know
if you had considered working with some of the great people
you have there at CIRES and also at UCAR to take this model
and maybe perhaps make it into something educational that
could be used in high schools or colleges or even possibly
middle schools for students to see how this sort of process
works.
>>SANDY: Yes.
We actually made a little headway;
we're not as far as we'd like.
I apologize that I don't have it,
but we have some of this model data,
kind of with a little slider and some interactive stuff,
on our website for the project.
Part of it is there and maybe I would ask you, Bruce,
to distribute the website that has some of these interactive
tools that allow people to look at it.
I just don't have it handy right now.
>>BRUCE: That's fine.
I'll add it into the last part of my presentation which I
actually have over here.
As folks can see, we have a number of educational resources
that we have available, that we've looked up that are
relating to this.
Of course, we got the Energy Literacy: Essential Principles
and Fundamental Concepts that are available online as well as
some wonderful resources from energy.gov,
US Department of Energy's website addressing research and
innovation to address climate change.
And finally, there are a number of resources from the CLEAN
network, Climate Literacy and Energy Awareness Network that
focus particularly on energy and energy usage.
And just to close out some reminders,
those of you who registered if you attended this evening you
should have received an email with a link to a post-webinar
poll.
It should take you about three minutes to fill it out.
Really appreciate it if you could do it after you log off
of this webinar.
And don't forget to save the date, November 3,
our next webinar: Communicating Uncertainty in Climate
Predictions and Impacts with Tarlie Townsend from the
University of Michigan's Ford School of Public Policy.
And, of course, Monday, October 26th, the end of this month,
be there for the next NOAA Climate Stewards book
discussion club, Food Choices and Climate Change is the
topic.
The book is, Diet for a Hot Planet;
The climate crisis at the end of your fork and what you can
do about it, by Anna Lappe.
And finally, for our moment of Zen at the end of our webinar,
we can really sort of see what one of the things that
Dr. MacDonald is talking about.
Thank you again, Dr. McDonald, for your time this evening.
It's really been a pleasure having you.
>>SANDY: It's definitely my pleasure.
Thank you for inviting me.
>>BRUCE: Thanks.
And with that we'll say good evening to everyone.
If you have a questions or comments,
please feel free to send them my way and look forward to
seeing you again.
Have a good evening.