Should We Risk It?

Should We Risk It?
by Daniel M. Kammen & David M. Hassenzahl

Main Points:

"I began by trying to quantify technical risks, thinking that if they were 'put into perspective' through comparison with familiar risks we could better judge their social acceptability. I am ashamed now of my naivety, although I have the excuse that this was more than 20 years ago, while some people are still doing it today."- Harry Otway (1992)

• Background:
• Daniel Kammen teaches a course at UC Berkeley called "Environmental Classics" where they rotate through key papers/books like Amory Lovins' paper "A Road Not Taken", the Wedges paper. They read the original items- the critiques that came at the time and the critiques that come after. Only Silent Spring becomes a fixture in the course year after year. 
• Take a look at Kammen's lab RAEL and BREG for sustainability tools and what tools we need to alter the dialogue around clean energy or sustainable energy futures. The tools we need merge innovation in science with innovation in the policy sector. 
• Energy Innovation: Enphase (has 40% of the inverter market), power hive, renewable impact. 
• Big Papers:
• IPCC (2007): trends of global average surface temperature, global average sea level, and northern hemisphere snow cover. First assessment that the group made in 1990 said that the unequivocal detection of human impact not likely for a decade. Second assessment says balance on evidence suggests discernible human influence. Third assessment says most of the warming in the last 50 years is likely (>66%) due to human activities. Fourth assessment says most of the warming very likely (>90%) due to human activity: warming will strongly and quickly impact the global poor. 
• "Wedges Paper": Art Roseneld's famous graph from December 1974 on California peak power show the Business as Usual (BAU) path, but then shows a small triangle or "wedge" where you can get rid of the growth. California has kept energy use per capita fairly constant over the course of decades. The SF Convention Center were going from old incandescent lights to new T-5 lights- they saved so much money ($400,000) that they invested in the largest solar panel array at the time on the roof of the Moscone Center.
• Jane Long at Lawrence Livermore National Lab created the graph where you have GHG Intensity on the y-axis and Demand for fuels/electricity on the x axis. Shrink box by improving efficiency. Shift box towards electricity by using electrification. Then use low-carbon biofuels and electricity to a box with or new final target. 
• Solar Learning Curve: says that costs decreases 10% per year. Every time you double the number of widgets constructed you get a 20% drop in price. At a cumulative production of 1,000GW we can beat wholesale coal electricity costs at 5 cents/kWh. 
• Household electricity costs in the US in 2011- despite investment in renewable energy, the average energy bill in California is 30% less than the rest of the United States. Combination of carbon savings and electricity cost savings. 
• California Global Warming Solutions Act: 25% cut in emissions by 2020 to 1990 baseline, and then reduce by 80%
• Major Projects:
• Ivanpah Solar Thermal Project is 370 MW in San Bernardino County, CA is the world's largest solar thermal project. Three large concentrating fields and not ideal location in terms of the grid. It was picked to reduce ecological issues regarding desert tortoise. 
• Desert Sunlight Solar Project- 550 MW - world's largest thin film solar farm
• Alta Wind Energy Center- 1550 MW- world's largest wind farm is in Kern County
• Enervault Iron-Chromium Technology 1 MW-hr capacity at 250kW (4 hour duration) in Turlock, California. 
• Capacity expansion models: models every power plant and every transmission line. There are some powerplants that pay to take away the energy away. SWITCH modeling efforts are being used by several nations (Current Low-Carbon Modeling Effects). They do a full optimization and look at the cost of generating energy 10,20,30 years in the future based on several factors. If we could coordinate where we build power plants (geothermal, nuclear, solar) and the building of transmission then all of the West could meet their clean energy targets by 2030 with a trivial change in costs.
• Spatial distribution of US Household Carbon Footprints Reveals Suburbanization Undermines Greenhouse Gas Benefits of Urban Population Density (Env. Science and Technology James & Kammen)- smaller urban households leave out the suburban sprawl around them have "carbon shadows" where people are living in energy intensive households. 
• What is the optimal size of cities?
• Amount of infrastructure per population. 
• Account for mass transit
• Liveability of cities 
• Current Context
• Business as usual (BAU) vs. pink reductions (NDC and Paris agreements) vs. Kigali Accords (around HFC's and CFC's). A revolution in climate politics: US-China Joint announcement on climate change in 2014 - which opened the door for Paris Accords. 
• Carbon Crunch: There is a mean budget of around 600 Gigatons of CO2 left to emit before the planet warms dangerously, by more than 1.5-2 degrees celsius. 
• Theoretical Approaches to Innovation
• How do we think about innovation? Cuts in funding can hurt US energy innovation, even though there are new players in China and Kenya that are coming out.
• NREL graph not only talks about the efficiency, but the $/kWh (deployment and market pull policies). The world of quantum dots and perovskites is an interesting part of the story. Webber would talk about how the traditional solar cells would continue to be better and in recent years that thin film cells might reach there as well. 
• Learning Curve: log-log in price (Installed cost of electricity $/kWh) vs. capacity (GWh). Detailed story for systems cost structure. Dramatic cost in the modules, but solar was once 2/3s of the cost was the module, to now the module is only 1/3 of the cost. 
• Solar thermal recently fell to about 3 cents/kWh. This was about 800 MW plant. Similar solar thermal plants in Saudi Arabia, Mexico, and India.
• Japanese "Sunshine" Program- can think about investment innovation and market pull.
• Invested in R&D base amount, a larger R&D program that began to ramp up, and a delayed later investment in deployment.
• Technological learning curves: C_2/C_1= (V_2/V_1)^(-b)
• used to explain decreased in costs with increases in production volume (economies of scale). May underestimate surges of innovation or breakthrough discoveries. 
• Lithium ion storage is developing at faster learning rates than solar PV or wind. With the goal of reaching $100/kWh target by DOE. The Learning rate in terms of annual production is 17.31%, the learning rate in terms of cumulative production is  15.47%, and the learning rate in terms of PCT patents is 31.43%. 
• Open-Access Approaches to Energy Systems
• Under2MOU Coalition: 1.2 billion people and $28.8 trillion in GDP. Sharing of best practices of private-public partnerships for renewables. 
• SWITCH Electricity Model: deterministic linear program that jointly minimizes Gx/Tx/Dx investment and operation costs over a period of 30-40 years with explicit temporal and spatial representation of all grid supplies, transmission and loads.
• Constraints: sub hourly time steps to 2050. Capital costs of all investments. Carbon prices is a constraint, bottleneck, transmission, DC/AC medium and high voltage lines are outputted. 
• SWITCH-China- the carbon price to drive change in China is not too different from the one faced in US. Using SWITCH model to estimate demand as you push to electrification. 
• SWITCH-Kenya- Kenya is building a few coal plants and they are mainly powered by Hydro. The strategy that is most attractive in terms of cost is to move from 2/3s powered by coal to 2/3's powered by geothermal. 
• Ecoblock Coalition: using system architecture of 100kW distributed energy systems and a garage that contains a flywheel by Amber Kinetic to store energy (very fast response properties)- net energy rating is 250 kWh. 
• CoolClimate.org- tells you the carbon footprint in various areas and the next 20 things that you haven't done and the amount of carbon/money you can save.  
• California : don't understand the difference between kW and kWh
• Peak demand is 65 GW (summer), winter peak is ~30GW
• Storage mandate: By 2020 utilities need to have 1.2 GW = 2% of the peak demand
• There was a lot of worry on the utility side about requiring a performance for batteries or flywheels that are not yet in the market.  So there was an agreement to make it about the nameplate rated capacity of the peak storage. The next target (E3- deep decarbonization project) is to get 4% in 2024. 

Listen to Daniel Kammen's lecture at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs titled "Building a New Dialogue of Energy and Sustainability"

Listen to Professor Kammen's lecture on "Innovating for the clean energy economy" at the MIT Energy Initiative!