Category: Renewable Energy

The Midwestern Pragmatists Behind the Renewables-Ready Power Grid

Power line congestion is forcing “dramatic drops” in wind power production, yet we need far more wind power and even more solar. As one renewable energy developer put it last week: “We are sprinting towards a brick wall.” My latest grid feature profiles the Made-in-the-Midwest fix that could vault North America’s power grids over the hurdles, forging a truly continental network to reliably deliver clean power for homes, highways and industries.

It’s a story of innovative policy and technology, advanced by a pragmatic yet tenacious band of environmental activists and industry planners who are determined to push the power grid to green greatness. And it’s my first for an explicitly ecologically-focused publication like Sierra Magazine, whose readership is more likely to view power lines as an ecosystem disruptor.

In the 70s, Minnesota farmers were severing power lines with high-powered rifles and toppling transmission towers to block grid expansion. But 20 years ago they joined enviro activists, wind developers & utilities to back grid growth that fuelled a wind power boom, inspiring innovative planners at the Midcontinent Independent System Operator or MISO (the nonprofit entity that runs the Midwest’s grid).

Dale Osborn: Talking power grids over Swedish meatballs at the #MSP Ikea

MISO’s grid guru Dale Osborn took their winning policy formula and ran, showing how advanced transmission technology could extend MISO’s approach to deliver massive renewables and shutter coal nationwide.

MISO’s transmission train stalled when Gulf states’ utility Entergy joined the club, then used its monopoly muscle to gum up MISO’s grid planning. Trump’s fossil-friendly Energy Department killed action in Washington, DC, burying the evidence that Osborn’s ‘macrogrid’ scheme benefitted both consumers and the environment — political interference that I exposed for The Atlantic and InvestigateWest.

But MISO planners and Osborn’s macrogrid vision are making a comeback. Northern states recently broke Entergy’s filibuster, yielding a historic plan to more than double Midwestern solar & wind energy. And Osborn’s macrogrid plan has gone mainstream in Washington, D.C.

The question now: Can grid operators like MISO, political leaders and conservationists forge bipartisan consensus to build a truly national grid. Without which, it will be far harder to endure the ravages of climate change, and may be impossible to freeze it.

Read the full story online at Sierra Magazine

by pfairley

And, for the win, it’s… Who Killed The Supergrid !

In August 2020 over 18 months of reporting paid off with my investigative feature Who Killed The Supergrid – an InvestigateWest production co-published with The Atlantic. Today that work and its immediate impact was recognized with an investigative journalism award from Covering Climate Now. That consortium, created in 2019 by the Columbia Journalism Review, The Nation, The Guardian and WNYC, has since grown into a who’s who of international media, and I’m honoured that they picked my work from more than 600 nominated entries.

In the words of the judges:

This meticulous story revealed the Trump administration’s deliberate effort to bury a federally funded study that provided evidence that a connected super grid would accelerate the growth of wind and solar energy. The story made the abstraction of the nation’s power grid interesting, and Fairley’s explosive disclosures also led to regulatory change.

Individual panelists added commentary during the video awards celebration (see below). Giles Trendle, Managing editor for Al Jazeera English, called my story, “another great example of holding power to account.”

I have thanked many of the talented people who contributed to this success in the Twitter thread at right. But a few bear repeating:

My friend, longtime SEJ colleague, and editor Robert McClure, co-founder of InvestigateWest, jumped at the opportunity to take on my project and helped me take it all the way. I’m grateful that ‘just good enough’ isn’t in Robert’s DNA.

The team at The Atlantic, including Ellen Cushing and Faith Hill, further improved the prose and managed a very thorough fact check.

And the Fund for Investigative Journalism provided financial support plus access to a valuable pre-publication legal review by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

FYI the awards video hosted by ‘America’s weatherman’ Al Roker and NBC Live NOW anchor Savannah Sellers showcases all of the 2021 award program’s winning entries from around the world. It’s inspiring and informative. Definitely worth watching, and sharing…

by pfairley

‘It just goes into a black hole’

In August my exposé in The Atlantic detailed the Trump administration takedown of a clean energy study. Since then I have been working hard to document how deep the political interference goes at the U.S. Department of Energy. The answer is DEEP.

My story for InvestigateWest and Grist shows that political interference is a pervasive practice targeting research funded by the DOE’s efficiency and renewables office. In all, Trump appointees have blocked reports for more than 40 clean energy studies, according to emails and documents I obtained as well as interviews with more than a dozen current and former employees at the Department of Energy and its national labs.

“There are dozens of reports languishing right now that can’t be published,” said Stephen Capanna, a former director of strategic analysis for the Energy Department’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy — the office that Simmons runs — who quit in frustration in April 2019. “This is a systemic issue.”

Bottling up and slow-walking studies violates the Energy Department’s scientific integrity policy and is already harming efforts to fight climate change, according to energy and policy experts, because Energy Department reports drive investment decisions. Entrepreneurs worry that the agency’s practices under the current White House will ultimately hurt growth prospects for U.S.-developed technology.

The meddling is also fuelling an energy science brain drain. Not only because research is held up. But because scientists have no idea why their work is disappearing. They, and the research they’re waiting to publish, are simply left dangling. “There’s no feedback,” said one national lab researcher. “It just goes into a black hole.” 

Illustration: Amelia Bates / Grist

Read the story at Grist or InvestigateWest

by pfairley

Scientific American: Solar And Wind Power Could Ignite A Hydrogen Energy Comeback

Hydrogen is flowing in pipes under the streets in Cappelle-la-Grande, helping to energize 100 homes in this northern France village. On a short side road adjacent to the town center, a new electrolyzer machine inside a small metal shed zaps water with electricity from wind and solar farms to create “renewable” hydrogen that is fed into the natural gas stream already flowing in the pipes. By displacing some of that fossil fuel, the hydrogen trims carbon emissions from the community’s furnaces, hot-water heaters and stove tops by up to 7 percent.

So begins my February 2020 feature article for Scientific American which explains why hydrogen energy — presumed dead after a round of hype and disillusion two decades ago — is roaring back. Renewable hydrogen is central to the European Commission’s vision for achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, for example, and a growing focus for the continent’s industrial giants. As of next year, all new turbines for power plants made in the European Union are supposed to ship ready to burn a hydrogen–natural gas blend, and the E.U.’s manufacturers claim the turbines will be certified for 100 percent hydrogen by 2030.

This time around it is the push to decarbonize the electric grid and heavy industry—rather than hope for fuel cell vehicles—that is driving interest in hydrogen. “Everyone in the energy-modeling community is thinking very seriously about deep decarbonization,” says Tom Brown, who leads an energy-system modeling group at Germany’s Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. Cities, states and nations are charting paths to reach nearly net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 or sooner, in large part by adopting low-carbon wind and solar electricity. Integrated energy models show that they’ll have a hard time keeping the lights on during periods of low wind and sunlight without hydrogen, and that hydrogen will pay for itself long before it solves that problem.

by pfairley

China’s Grid Architect Proposes a “Made in China” Upgrade to North America’s Power System

Transmission lines in the United States and Canada require approval from every state and province traversed, and that political fragmentation hinders deployment of long power links of the type connecting vast swaths of territory in regions such as China, India, and Brazil. As a result, few studies detail how technologies that efficiently move power over thousands of kilometers, such as ultrahigh-voltage direct current (UHV DC) systems, might perform in North America. Earlier this week, the Beijing-based Global Energy Interconnection Development and Cooperation Organization (GEIDCO) stepped in to fill that gap, outlining an ambitious upgrade for North America’s grids.

GEIDCO’s plan promises to greatly shrink North America’s carbon footprint, but its boldest prescriptions represent technical and economic optimizations that run counter to political interests and recent trends. “Thinking out of the box is how you solve complicated, difficult problems,” said former Southern California Edison CEO Ted Craver in response to the plan. But GEIDCO’s approach, he said, raises concerns about energy sovereignty that could prove difficult to settle. As Craver put it: “There’s theory and then there’s practice.”

The proposed North American transmission scheme was unveiled on Tuesday at an international transmission forum in Vancouver, Canada, by Liu Zhenya, the former State Grid Corp. of China chairman who launched GEIDCO in 2016. While at State Grid, Liu championed the development of the world’s first 800- and 1,100-kilovolt UHV DC lines and the first 1,000-kV, UHV AC transmission. State Grid has deployed them to create a brawny hybrid AC-DC electricity system that taps far-flung energy resources to power China’s densely-populated and industrialized seaboard.

Through GEIDCO, Liu is proselytizing for UHV deployment worldwide. At the Vancouver meeting, Liu warned of “unimaginable damage to mankind” if greenhouse gas emissions continued at their current pace. He argued that beefy grids moving power across and between continents are a prerequisite for accessing and sharing the world’s best wind, solar, and hydropower resources, and thus dialing-down fossil fuel consumption. Continue reading “China’s Grid Architect Proposes a “Made in China” Upgrade to North America’s Power System”

by pfairley

Teaching Wind Turbines Altruism to Rev-up Wind Farms

“Logic clearly dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.” So declares Spock, Star Trek’s Vulcan hero, as he sacrifices himself to save the Starship Enterprise and its crew in the 1982 film Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan. Today Stanford University researchers presented the clearest proof to date that self-sacrifice can also benefit wind farms. In their demonstration at an Alberta wind farm, one turbine sacrifices a fifth of its generating potential to enable better performance by neighboring turbines, boosting the group’s collective output.

And while Spock’s heroics necessitated a major plot twist to revive his character for the next Star Trek sequel, teaching turbines to behave altruistically requires just a small (but intelligent) tweak to their control systems. What they learn is how to share the wind. Continue reading “Teaching Wind Turbines Altruism to Rev-up Wind Farms”

by pfairley

The Hot Mess of Hawaii’s Renewable Power Push

My first contribution to award-winning Hakai Magazine, which covers coastal science, ecology and communities

Moloka‘i is a bastion of sanity and understatement at the center of the Hawaiian archipelago. Just 40 kilometers of open water away from O‘ahu, the island is a far cry from Honolulu’s hectic tiki bars and tourists, universities, cargo yards, and warships. On Moloka‘i, agriculture and subsistence hunting and fishing still sustain many of the 7,500 or so residents, and visitors are few. Those tourists who do make the hop over rank mailing a coconut home as their top experience.

On the surface, nothing about this bucolic place suggests it as the central hub around which a cleaner, high-tech electrical future might be built. Yet the island could serve as a model for Hawai‘i as the state navigates transitioning its entire power supply to renewable sources.

Honolulu-based Hawaiian Electric, the investor-owned utility that controls Moloka‘i’s grid, must meet a mandate from the state legislature to convert the five island grids it operates to 100 percent renewable energy by 2045. No utility on Earth knows for sure how to accomplish that yet. Pushing Moloka‘i there first and fast, Hawaiian Electric decided, would provide insight and inspiration.

Hawaiian Electric’s idea was to get Moloka’i off diesel generation by 2020. Alas, it is little closer to shutting down the diesels three years later. Can a small Hawaiian island and its utility get along well enough to teach the rest of the world how to get off fossil-fueled electricity?

Read the story or listen to the audio version at HakaiMagazine.com

by pfairley