While expanding renewable energy and developing more efficient power grids presents large challenges, it also offers large opportunities, according to Dr. Stephen Doig, a senior member of the Rocky Mountain Institute.
Doig will be one of the speakers this week at a Catawba College program looking at how the shift to a new energy paradigm offers growth opportunities for businesses and communities. The presentation will be at 1 p.m. Wednesday at the Center for the Environment building on the Catawba campus. It is free and open to the public.
Based in Colorado, RMI is a nonprofit organization that works with private and public entities to promote the efficient and sustainable use of resources. Doig, who has a Ph.D. in chemistry, guides RMI’s applied research and consulting work.
Doig spoke recently with Juanita Teschner, senior writer for the Center for the Environment. Here is a transcript of Dorg’s comments, some of which were edited for brevity.
Q: Why do we need a new energy paradigm?A: We have an electrical system today that is, in large measure, something Thomas Edison would recognize. It is based on a set of technologies that matured many, many years ago. We are at a point now that we have to make some decisions about spending our capital to build new plants, refurbish old plants, transmission lines, things like that, and what we would say is that given that a lot of capital ó trillions of dollars ó will have to go into the ground over the next 30-40 years, we should think very hard about what’s going to be the best and most reliable system that will give us the most bang for our buck. Our feeling is that, given the challenges we are facing in the world right now around climate change, air emissions, environmental degradation, there is a potential to show that knitting together a set of technologies that either exist or are emerging right now could provide a more robust, stable and cheaper system. So it’s really a matter of making some pretty significant decisions as a country and states and communities about where we’re going to get the best long-term return.
Q: Generally speaking, what will this new system look like?A: As you know, the current system is largely based on large, centralized generating plants complemented by some gas-fired generation and a few other things. They supply electricity to many, many, many thousands of homes and businesses. The idea now is that there is actually a suite of technologies available to us, some renewable ó wind and solar ó some gas-fired distributed generation and, most importantly, efficiency. Efficiency can replace demand. For example, if you have more efficient lights, you don’t need as much electricity. Rather than build a new power plant, why don’t we be efficient? The idea is that we would knit these together. If all these things could work together in concert, they could provide a stable and reliable output of electricity that exceeds or is equal to those of the very large plants.
Q: What are the advantages to that?
A: One is that you have actually distributed your sources of supply over a much larger area, so you’re not as susceptible to major storms, somebody finagling around with the grid and causing problems in your plant, etc. In order to do this, of course ó since you don’t have one big thing but many smaller things ó they need to be connected in a way that is more akin to the way the Internet works. They need to talk to each other. You need to be able to both control demand and modify the way you supply things. So it’s a much more sophisticated system from the perspective of data flow, but it’s not very sophisticated compared to our modern Internet and telecommunication system.
Q: What are some of the challenges we’re going to face in developing this new system?A: We are going to face the challenge of making sure that we figure out ways to prime the pump for small businesses so that they can participate in this transformation. Whereas in the past this has been utility led, there is an opportunity for business leaders to say, “This could be good for my business or a new business I want to start and also good for the community.” We need to make sure we have a way of having smaller businesses participate in this.
Another challenge is for people to work together to make the solution happen rather than be in conflict. I am very much wedded to the idea that we have to figure out how to get the utility, the regulator, the business leader and the communities lined up to say, “Let’s figure out a master plan to move this forward and figure out how we’re all going to share the benefits and reap those rewards but also share the challenge of trying to get there.”
The last, and fairly important, challenge is the technological challenge. Fortunately, it’s not like a Buck Rogers film where we’re trying to figure out what could even work. In fact, a lot of these technologies are quite mature. It’s a matter of bringing them to scale and bringing down costs.
Q: What is the benefit to businesses and communities?A: At the highest level, it will cost all of us money to refurbish the capital and expand the grid and build out transmission lines over the next 30-40 years, and it’s a lot of money. Essentially, we as rate payers will pay for that. So of course we want to do that in a way that gives us the maximum benefit for the lowest cost. More particular, if you think about putting a very large piece of capital in the ground, like a large coal-fired power plant, that does create quite a number of jobs during the course of actually building the system and, of course, the parts that go in there ó generators, steam turbines and such things. But it might be 3,000-4,000 people that build one of these things over the course of four years, and then it’s operated by hundreds of people.
When I think about converting over to a system óhopefully at equivalent cost and better stability ó that is going to be based on renewables and other distributed generation, like wind, it’s going to require essentially an IT background, a communications backbone. I think the opportunities for job creation over the long term can potentially be much higher because unlike a large capital project, which is built to do economies of scale and take out the labor component, this new system would have a very large labor component in it. If you think about the amount of solar required to replace a power plant, that’s a lot of jobs to build the solar panels, jobs to install the solar panels and some jobs to maintain them.
When I think about the efficiency opportunity to close that gap, those are jobs that cannot be outsourced from America because you’ve got to work on a house and you’ve got to work on a commercial building or on a factory. Because that is equal to 60 percent of coal-fired power plants, that is going to be millions of jobs. And they’ll range from quite low-skilled to quite high-skilled. So there’s the potential to train people to do this kind of work.
Q: We’re talking, I assume, about weatherizing homes and that kind of thing?A: Yes, insulation, weather sealing, new roofs. Ultimately it will be refitting air conditioning systems that are much more efficient. It will be getting involved, for example, in the communications backbone of the grid. It should run the gamut. But there’s a lot of basic stuff that we need to do to get our buildings up to snuff in terms of efficiency.
Q: How long would it take to pull this together?A: It comes in several phases. There are large efficiency opportunities right now that we could capture as a nation if we were able to bring the average of America up to the average of the top 10 states in the nation. Closing that gap is equal to 60 percent of the coal-fired plants in the United States.
So there’s a near-term opportunity that is on the order of 10-15 years, and then I think the journey to a fully integrated, low-carbon electrical system is more on the order of 30-40 years ó about the same time period that it’s going to require to turn over all the old capital we currently have on the ground. It could go faster. It’ll be a matter of costs and benefits, as usual.
Q: If we wanted to get in on the ground floor here, what should we do?A: For both businesses and communities to get going on this, they need to ask, “What are the opportunities for us?” These opportunities come in a couple of flavors. From a community standpoint, there will be efficiency opportunities. If people’s electric and gas bills are lower and they are spending less on that, it keeps money in the community and allows it to be recycled for other things. Community leaders and business leaders should also think about where the job opportunities are, where the growth is going to come from. At an industrial level, if we had a plant that made air conditioning equipment, is there an opportunity to re-stimulate them so that they are building a higher efficiency product?
When we think about these things, it isn’t just this product gets cheaper for the homeowner and therefore it pays. The other part is from the utility perspective: If enough people adopt these efficient air conditioners, they will not have to build the next big power plant for some period of time. It will put off a very large capital cost. So the second piece is for community and business leaders to say, “Where are there opportunities that are inherent in our community already? How can we redirect ourselves to take advantage of the opportunities that might arise from an electrical system that is of much lower carbon content?”
Then, finally, there’s a piece about real entrepreneurs for individuals or groups of individuals to say, “Where could we grow a new business? What are we good at here?” For example, maybe there are people in communities who already run a small fabrication facility that makes bent metal parts for whatever. … Suppose they build a system that holds these solar panels up at much lower cost? By reducing cost, we can prime the pump for those solar panels and thereby all of us will benefit.
… Rather than think about a few monolithic systems, think instead of a variety of small systems that have to work together in concert much like a symphony would. There are many, many types of entry points that range from retrofitting houses to expanding current technology to developing a new potential way to solve a problem. And they don’t all require hi-tech, Silicon Valley type of entrepreneurs.
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To register for the program, contact Amanda Lanier at 704-637-4727 or allanier@catawba.edu.