Hi, this is Bruce ____ _,
from NOAA's Climate Steward education project.
I'm pleased to welcome Dr. Alexander Sandy MacDonald,
who will be giving our presentation, today,
"Can the World's Carbon Dioxide be Stopped Short of Doubling?"
Now, Dr. MacDonald 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.
Now, 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,
and 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.
Now, when the Program for Regional Observing
and Forecasting, PROFs, was established by NOAA Research
in 1980, Dr. MacDonald because 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. MacDonald has been to apply advances
in science and technology toward the improvement of services.
He's pushed for new observing technology
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.
And he's 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.
And 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. MacDonald. Welcome.
Thanks, Bruce.
It's nice to hear my bio, but I like that part, earlier,
where you said, "Dr. MacDonald is hot."
So, 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, you know,
change starts with a few people
who really see the need for the change
and know what needs to be done.
So I'm gonna talk about a study that was done here
at Earth System Research Lab in Boulder,
and my idea started six years ago,
but what I have is really talented scientists
and mathematicians who worked on this with me.
And 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.
And Chris and a team of other scientists
really deserve the credit for a lot of this work,
so I wanna make sure everybody understands that.
I'll mention that Earth System Research Lab
is a beautiful building right in front
of the Flat Irons 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.
So, 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 effects.
And I think all of you are pretty familiar
with the science, but 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 gonna 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, decarbonizing electricity
– in other words, if you can produce electricity,
that's a necessary condition on decarbonizing
other sectors like transportation,
home heating, and air-conditioning, et cetera.
So, what we have is a great problem faced by the world,
and the question is, how could 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 final part of the talk.
So, I want to take you back to 2010,
when they had the COP15, Conference of Parties.
It was in Copenhagen, Denmark, and I was there –
I 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.
And one of the things that I showed
was what I call the Hofmann Curve,
which is in front of you.
So, 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 pre-existed 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 100 parts per million of additional,
due to human causes,
and we're actually rapidly going up a graph toward 300.
And this is, essentially, what puts us at double CO2,
from pre-Industrial – a huge increase.
So, Dr. Hofmann was really noticing that, when you _____
an exponential graph like this,
it's usually because there's exponential processes.
And I wanna 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 emitted by people is increasing.
And you say, "Well, why is that wonderful?"
The reason that is is that,
we know that people have been lifted out of poverty
by advances in their ability to use energy.
And 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're basically kind of like Thelma and Louise,
really, headed for the cliff, here,
and we've got to find out if there's a way.
So, when I was at 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're, you know, conserving, and all these other things."
And one of the negotiators said to me,
"Uh, go look carefully: we really have not found a way
that is gonna 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 it's reliable.
And you go look at those studies:
none of those show that."
So, I sort of resolved, back in 2010,
to come back and look at the studies,
and 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're unreliable."
So the question is, how could this be done?
So, 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 on food production,
both agriculture and fisheries, that later in this 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 300 or 500 years to happen,
you're pretty much committed, once we get a doubling
or a 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 at work here
at 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 Percent
from the US Electric Sector By 2030."
So, this is something we hope to get
before the scientific community,
and you're gonna hear, generally, what is in the paper.
So, the basic idea is, will wind and solar power work?
And the question that I asked 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 back-up 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?
And the answer that we came up with is yes,
and I want to explain why.
So, I'm gonna 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 is, we collected weather information
on a highly-detailed grid,
over the United States and adjacent areas.
And these, we collected every hour for 3 years,
so that's about 25,000 hours over –
with more than 120,000 points.
So, 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 is, 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,
"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,
these deep-red areas, 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 areas where it would only be blowing
maybe 10 or 12 percent of the time.
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, you know,
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.
And, you know, that's true of everything.
If you wanna say, "Well, where am I gonna put a goldmine?"
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 goldmine," I said,
"Well, I don't think you're gonna find any gold, here.
You gotta 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.
And 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,
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 gonna get a lot of power.
So, 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.
So 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 got very big scale.
So, 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."
And so, I put a green line
in 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 powerplants
and where power is distributed –
I didn't mean powerplants, 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, 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?"
and 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,
and if you want it to be reliable – remember,
the first thing was low cost, I showed you that.
The second thing was, you want it to be reliable,
so you gotta 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 when 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 and –
and 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.
So, 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 every hour, at about eight-mile resolution.
And so, the blue areas are where there's not much wind blowing,
and this part of that 25, you know,
50 billion points of data.
And what you see is, there's great big areas
where there's wind always somewhere.
Here it is, moving across the United States,
and 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 the winter,
is a map of how much solar energy.
And of course, you'll notice, as you look at this,
it says "total solar radiation,"
you see that, since it's in the middle of winter,
the sun's only up for a while each day,
and yet, you 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 blueish 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 gets a little difficult.
And that's why you need six years
and some really talented scientists to work on it.
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.
So, over here in the left where I've got a 500 and a "GW,"
meaning gigawatts, this little red line indicates
that there is 500 billion watts being used on January 1st.
And we look across and we see, "Gee, during winter,
it can run about 500 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.
Now, why is this important?
Well, people have said, "Well, the problem is,
we're gonna set up these little areas where we put,
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 3 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.
And 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.
Now, I wanna give you a hint of where I'm heading.
The only way to do this would be to,
essentially, have a superhighway of power distribution.
And everything that I'm gonna 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 power line,
which is actually alternating current
instead of direct-current,
except, the poles don't have to be as big.
They're more efficient when you use this high voltage.
But the huge thing is, you can move power 1,000 miles,
or 1,500 miles, or 2,000 miles across the US,
without losing much power. So, these high-voltage DC,
you could imagine building a superhighway of these,
to distribute power over the whole US.
So, I wanna just point out one more thing.
So, 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 this 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;
there are still gonna 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 wanna 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 superhighway 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.
So, 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.
And I'm gonna show you a real-time look at this.
So, when we did this calculation,
we actually had a simulator that used all the costs –
the cost of the powerlines, 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,
and this is a system – we can go in the computer –
and this is one of the next things about our modern era:
as difficult as the problems we face,
there's also very powerful tools.
And this thing called a linear programming,
it was a problem that actually had trillions of datapoints.
It took a week to solve the best power system for the US
in terms of those three things, and 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 all the wind turbines that you put up,
the cost of the gas plants,
the cost of the natural gas fuel, the costs."
So it wants to minimize total cost
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 8,760 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.
And this is a big complicated mathematical system.
Dr. Clack I hired
from one of the best universities in England,
as the mathematician who could make this happen,
_____ incredible amount of work.
And there's a paper published, referred paper,
that explains how we did it: "Linear Programming Techniques
for an Optimal Electrical System Using High-Voltage DC."
So, this is a referred paper,
and for those of you who love math,
this oughtta be really a smorgasbord.
So, what did we start with?
So we got this thing that's gonna 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 powerplants.
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.
And these little green things,
the green things are wind turbines.
And these little red things, these little red dots,
those are where there's photovoltaic plants.
You'll notice that there's a lot in New Jersey, over here.
The blue things are hydroelectric,
and 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.
So, we didn't start from ground-zero.
By the way, there's also nuclear plants and 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 could also talk other countries, Europe,
China, et cetera, if we could do that,
we really would have a chance at stopping
before the doubling of carbon dioxide.
And 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.
And you notice I talked about the wind triangle
that went from Texas to Maine to Montana,
and you notice it put a lot there, but not only there.
There's a whole bunch in the Carolinas,
there's 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,
and you notice there's a lot in California, Arizona,
and New Mexico.
But another really interesting thing is that it actually,
the system – this is a computer program –
it also put'em near every major city.
You go near every major city,
and you'll find some of these powerplants.
And it's basically smart enough to know
that cities need more electricity during the day,
so this optimizer is gonna put those.
So, if you just take a look here in the right,
what we see is that it put in – this green area here is showing
that it put, installed, a whole lot of wind turbines.
And the purple things
are the amount of installed natural gas plants.
And the main point about that is it's actually pretty much
the ones that already exist.
The red thing, here in the installed –
I've got installed and usage, but the red in the installed –
is that it installed a whole lot of solar plants.
So, these grey lines are our superhighway
to carry the power around the country.
And what you'll notice is that these thicker ones
are basically, we had to – this system is smart enough
to know that it's gotta install bigger lines.
So these will carry up to 12 billion watts of energy,
these big thick ones, and these little skinny ones
will carry more like 1.5 billion watts.
So, this is a big system, and we run motion of this –
I'm gonna show you this on the next slide.
And what you really see is that it's taking the power from areas
that are really rich in cheap power,
and moving it to where people are using.
So, I'll point out, also, we assume that the hydropower
and the existing nuclear power stay the same.
And I wanna make a little parenthetical comment:
nuclear power is basically very low-carbon,
even including lifecycle costs. So we left nuclear and hydro
exactly the same as they are today;
we didn't assume 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 gonna show you is,
hour by hour, how this would work.
So we're looking at the whole 48 states,
and we see these black lines
flashing as the power flows along'em.
And those blue things that get darker and lighter
is when there's actual wind blowing, creating the power.
And you'll notice _____ 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 it 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,
and 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 for,
across the United States, is 9.84 cents a kilowatt hour.
That's close to what I pay; there's parts in the east
where people pay as much as 15 or 18 cents;
there's parts in the west, northcentral,
where they pay as little as 6 or 7 cents.
So, this is the average. And this grey area is the –
it's signifying, on the left here,
you see is the total emissions of carbon dioxide.
We have over two million metric tons of carbon dioxide
being put out in 2012.
And what we're gonna take a look 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. And what it shows
is that our power costs are gonna go up 11.5 cents,
and current policies get us to a 9 percent reduction.
A key point, here, is a 9 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 coal scenario,
and 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 up by 24 cents – 24 percent, rather.
So now, here is another – 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
2,100 million metric tons of,
or, 2.1 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide.
We want to get down as far as we can,
if we're gonna get off of the Hofmann Curve.
If we continue and allow coal at the current rate,
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 wanna 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.
That 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 wanna 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. So, 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 $35,000.00 car just like this,
in the next few years.
So, that means that if we decarbonize electricity,
we can also decarbonize our transportation,
or at least most of it,
so you do the electric sector first.
So, 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'em. There's no new technology.
And 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.
So, 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.
And I would like to thank all of you for listening,
and stop here. And ask for questions.
Thanks so much, Dr. MacDonald.
Yeah, we've gotten some questions in,
and certainly if folks have some more questions,
please type them in to your question box.
But to address one of the first questions,
which is going back to one of your earlier slides:
What's the optimal minimum windspeed to be effective
for AC power generation?
Okay, the windspeeds that are required are something –
I think they start producing power at something like six-
or seven-mile-per-hour winds, and there's also a maximum.
And we didn't actually use a simple thing;
we used 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 6- or 7-mile-per-hour winds,
and they turn'em off when it gets over,
like, 33 or 34.
Thanks. You know, one question that came up
was about environmental degradation or energy use
for, actually, construction of these pipelines.
Can you go into a little bit of detail about that,
as well as potential costs financing of this project?
Okay, so, the first cost, there is definitely an effect
if you have more overhead powerlines.
The size of high-voltage DC lines is less, in proportion,
if you pipe AC power.
So there are about a third as much in terms of,
you know, the big overhead lines and so on; they're smaller.
But it 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.
And we looked at the costs of putting them underground,
so, you could put'em along railroad right away,
or even, you could put'em underneath the ground
adjacent to interstate highways, so they would really be –
not have such a big environmental effect.
And the costs would increase by about –
it would increase the cost of our electricity,
if we put'em 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.
So, we essentially said, "If you have these lines,
the cost of constructing them
and the costs of operating and running'em,
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 _____.
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,
you know, $700,000.00 for the house.
You essentially, when you build a powerplant,
you get what amounts to a mortgage for the powerplant.
So, the capital costs of this we have taken a hard look at,
and got some help from some great economists on this.
The capital costs of this is, the investment we'd need to make
between now and 2030 are about $2.6 trillion.
It turns out that replacing old coal plants
with new coal plants, and the other capital
costs associated with the energy system,
are gonna 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.
So, now, so you've mentioned some of these costs
and some of the different opportunities.
What can you say is,
if you could speak to the perspective
of some of the transmission utilities
or some of the generation utilities,
what do they think about this plan?
'Cause, you know, in an earlier talk,
I know that you mentioned
that you've had some input from them on this.
Yeah, I think it's a big change.
It's basically what I call the third energy revolution,
where 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 we're switching to low carbon,
but we wanna do it at the same cost.
So, what do 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 aren't worried about it, you know,
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 a tripling of carbon dioxide,
and a ten-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.
And the original arguments in congress included
everybody saying,
"Look, if you build an intestate highway
and it doesn't come through the center
of my little town in Montana, we're all gonna go broke."
So, every time you have a giant revolution that changes things,
people are worried, they are nervous, they argue,
"Gosh, this is gonna 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.
Well, thanks. You know, we had another question
which the asker says
that your map showed huge offshore wind resources.
And, you know, we're aware of some of these
that are in the process of going up now,
and I believe that a talk was given,
last week, about some of these off
of Block Island and Rhode Island.
You know, do some of these figure in to your plan, as well?
Because there didn't seem to be any,
in the map that you showed.
Okay, so we've done many, many of these simulations,
and 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 offshores,"
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 cost,
they aren't gonna be used.
And 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."
Hm, I see. And, you know, we did have a couple of other
just questions, in here, just talking about sort of
what a proposed timeframe might be for implementation.
Because 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?
Yeah, so, 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 a doubling
is gonna require the nations of the world
to do very large changes.
And, so, 15 years would be very fast to do it.
There's precedence 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.
So, when you build a toll road, nowadays, you wanna build it
where there's gonna be a lot of people using it right away,
and they're gonna be willing to pay for it.
And there's lots of places like that;
we're having a bunch built here in Colorado.
Well, this is the same thing, they want,
when you build an electronic high-voltage DC toll road
from North Dakota to the East Coast,
that thing'll 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'll fit with our system
that we're gonna have in place by 2030."
And there's an implication, when I mention toll roads,
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.
So, there's a way to do this rapidly,
provided, you know, the political
and global establishment agreed that it should be done.
And just, you know, you've been very generous with your time,
today, Dr. MacDonald, and certainly do thank you.
Just, perhaps, two final questions.
In your model, what happens
if you take natural gas out of the equation?
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.
So you can – 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.
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.
Yes, and we actually made a little headway.
We're not as far as we'd like,
and I apologize that we 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.
So, 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.
No, that's fine, I'll add it in to the last part
of my presentation, which I actually have over here.
So, 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've 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 Education Awareness Network,
that focus particularly on energy and energy usage.
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.
And thank you, again,
Dr. MacDonald, for your time, this evening.
It's really been a pleasure having you.
It was definitely my pleasure. Thank you for inviting me.
Thanks. And with that, we'll say good evening to everyone.
If you have questions or comments,
please feel free to send them my way.
And look forward to seeing you again.
Have a good evening. [End of Audio]