Can The Empire State Go Green? New Study Says New York State Can Be 100% Renewable By 2050

[kristopher]

Can The Empire State Go Green? New Study Says New York State Can Be 100% Renewable By 2050
By Jeff Spross on Mar 14, 2013

Written by Mark Z. Jacobson and Mark A. Delucchi — who helped produce a similar plan for the world as a whole in 2009 — along with several other coworkers, the report suggests that New York State’s end-use power could be supplied by a mix of various forms of solar, wind power, and water-based and geothermal sources. That goal could be met as early as 2030, and all conventional fossil fuel generation would be phased out no later than 2050.

On the demand-side of the ledger, because renewables generally deliver power more efficiently — electric cars lose far less energy to waste heat than standard combustion engines, for example — the state’s end-use demand would be cut by roughly 37 percent. Efficiency updates would to buildings, infrastructure, etc. would make up the rest of the gap. By the report’s analysis, this would all cut the United State’s climate costs by about $3.2 billion a year by 2050.

The major points of the plan are:

Replace all fossil fuel electricity with solar, wind, and other renewables. This would include mostly offshore wind and some onshore, together supplying about half the state’s energy needs. Standard solar arrays and concentrated solar power systems, plus wide deployment of residential rooftop solar (a goal already getting a boost from third-party leasing, among other things) as well as commercial and governmental rooftop solar, would deliver another 38 percent of the state’s energy. A mix of hydroelectric, wave, tidal, and geothermal would fill in the rest. The offshore wind would arguably be the most dramatic project, requiring an area of ocean surface equivalent to about 4.6 percent of New York State’s land area.

Replace all combustion-driven transportation with electricity and hydrogen. Standard passenger cars would go electric, while most larger road vehicles, non-road machines, ships, and trains would be driven by hydrogen fuel cells and hydrogen combustion. Electricity and ground sources would provide heating and air conditioning, and electricity and hydrogen combustion would power industrial processes.

Efficiency retrofits to reduce energy demand. Residential, commercial, institutional, and government buildings would be updated with improved insulation, lighting, and heat and filtration systems. Solar power would be more broadly used for lighting, water heating, and passive seasonal heating and cooling. Future infrastructure would be framed towards encouraging public transit use and telecommuting.

More at http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/03/14/1716851/can-the-empire-state-go-green-new-study-says-new-york-state-can-be-100-renewable-by-2050/

[kristopher]

2. Seriously? Did you forget that sometimes dark humor comes across as woo on the web?

If you are serious then you need much stronger evidence that that correlation. There are lots of grants for renewable projects, you know.

[pscot]

3. Dark deeds indeed

Conspiracy threadjacking.

[kristopher]

4. Dark days do indeed drive dark deeds

But that one was out there, wasn't it?

That said, the OP is the kind of news that probably does make the the entrenched players in the energy industry squirm.

[limpyhobbler]

5. k&r

Good plan.

Better hurry though

Bombshell: Recent Warming Is 'Amazing And Atypical' And Poised To Destroy Stable Climate That Enabled Civilization

[One_Life_To_Give]

6. Hydrogen Storage?

One concern for me is storing Hydrogen. We don't have an infrastructure for it and not sure about our technology for avoiding leaks. As well as currently it is manufactured from Natural Gas because it's cheaper. The purported efficiency gains are suspect IMO. Based on wishfull thinking about how populations will react which often is not the same as actuality.

May work on paper but we may need to hit alot higher numbers on paper to produce 100% in actuality.

[kristopher]

9. How is hydrogen to be manufactured and used?

How much infrastructure is required for using hydrogen as a way to store solar or wind energy for stationary use?

Your last sentence isn't comprehensible.

About the author
http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/

[One_Life_To_Give]

13. Mobile use is the problem

Replace all combustion-driven transportation with electricity and hydrogen.

Every Tug in the Port of NewYork, those pushing barges up and down the Hudson to ships on Lake Erie. Then there will be the Fire Trucks, over the road trucks, airplanes etc. That is alot of Hydrogen to transport, store and refuel. And more importantly a different culture and environment from a International Fuel Cells or NASA. Maintaining coupling and fittings to prevent escape of significant percentages of Hydrogen may be a problem. As evidenced by the recent cruise ship fire attributed to leaking fuel lines of liquid fuel. For all the talk of the Hydrogen economy dating back to the "Too Cheap to Meter" days. I have yet to see a system that is ready for widespread use.

My thought process on the last sentence surrounds the efficiency gains and projected demand growth. I can't tell from the article how optimistic the assumptions may be. A 20-40% buffer in energy production/consumption should be added IMO to ensure the actual goal is met.

[Heywood J]

7. "because renewables generally deliver power more efficiently — electric cars lose far less energy

waste heat than standard combustion engines, for example —

What? That's a logical breakdown. Even if A and B are both true, that does not mean that A implies or causes B (correlation does not imply causation). Any conclusion drawn from that assumption is necessarily flawed.

The efficiency of an electric motor powered by an abstract source has nothing to do with the efficiency of turning an energy source into abstract electricity. By that logic, an electric car fueled by a coal-burning generating station would also be great.

the state’s end-use demand would be cut by roughly 37 percent

Adding hundreds of thousands of electric vehicles to the grid will cut the state's electricity demands how?

From where will the money come to convert or replace every car, bus, truck, farm equipment, train, and airplane? New York State is in a hell of a budget hole now and presumably for the near to moderate future. How will a flight from JFK to LAX be powered by compressed hydrogen or batteries? Even with subsidies, electric vehicles cost something like $30,000 and will eventually require expensive battery pack replacements. Most individuals certainly don't have the money to replace that much functioning equipment or subsidize the cost of new equipment to increase adoption. Where will these hundreds of thousands of batteries for the all-electric fleets come from? Will they function as well as exploding laptop and cell-phone batteries? What province in China will be strip-mined for the lithium or nickel and cadmium to build them? I guess it's considered green if somewhere else is strip-mined to build it.

Future infrastructure would be framed towards encouraging public transit use and telecommuting.

I am sure that will be of sound comfort and benefit to the people working in jobs that involve physical products and/or living outside of the cities of New York, Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, and Albany. Outside of NYC, the population density drops off dramatically.

This would include mostly offshore wind and some onshore, together supplying about half the state’s energy needs.

Half the electrical needs of New York State would be met by wind power? Will some unknown force increase the capacity factor of wind by 2050 or is the plan to carpet the state with turbines? I remember calculating out the number of turbines required to meet the energy demand of the United States - it was staggering. I'll have to see if I can find the post again. What's the plan for dealing with lawsuits by residents upset with turbines, claiming adverse effects? How does that affect cost and schedule for this rather ambitious plan? Where will these turbines be built, considering the powerhouses of turbine building are Denmark, Germany and China?

Standard solar arrays and concentrated solar power systems, plus wide deployment of residential rooftop solar(<...> as well as commercial and governmental rooftop solar, would deliver another 38 percent of the state’s energy.

Betting on rooftop solar panels for 38% of the state's energy needs in a place often covered in snow for months out of the year and where we have a substantial number of overcast days outside of winter? Where will this 38% of capacity come from during the winter when electricity demand is high, or during another Hurricane Sandy? How does this work for tall buildings in NYC, where rooftop area is low compared to the volume of the building and where space is often rented?

A mix of hydroelectric, wave, tidal, and geothermal would fill in the rest.

What would installing wave and tidal power systems to shipping, boating, tourism, and the marine ecology of the state? Have the authors conducted studies on the impacts of installing these? What are the legalities and neighborly implications of installing these on an international waterway like Lake Ontario or Lake Erie? Sounds like it's someone else's problem.

More interestingly, they decided not to include biofuels either, due to their inefficiency in comparison to electricity for transportation, the high land-use required to grow either corn or cellulosic feedstocks in comparison to land-use of wind, and because the agricultural production of biofuel crops offsets a lot of the carbon reduction and creates other pollution.

Or they decided it would look greener to shove the pollution off to countries instead of growing fuel crops on otherwise unsuitable farmland here (e.g. ditchweed) or diverting existing high-fructose corn syrup from food products into the tank (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2,5-Dimethylfuran).

According to Stacy Clark at HuffPost, Jacobson estimated the total cost for the project at $600 billion — no small ask. However, Jacobson and his co-authors also estimate the project would create 4.5 million jobs during construction, and maintain 58,000 permanent jobs thereafter.

Oh, only $600 billion for one state with an existing $15 billion budget deficit? Let me get out my checkbook! Screw Medicare and Social Security, this sounds like a plan.

If we had $600 billion that we didn't know what to do with, we could just pay $133,333 each directly to 4.5 million people instead of filtering it through corporations. How many lives would that improve?

By the report’s analysis, this would all cut the United State’s climate costs by about $3.2 billion a year by 2050.

Or, we could save $3.2 billion a year for 187 years and call it even.

Using rough metric’s economists have developed for estimating the financial value of a human life,

Nothing says "humanity first" like selling your plan by putting a price tag on human life. It was ghoulish when done to justify not recalling a car and it's ghoulish now.



[hr]
Don't get me wrong - I'm of the opinion that we can't continue to burn coal and oil forever. I'm not, however, so open-minded that my critical thinking skills have fallen out. How much is known about who funded this or stands to gain? No one does anything without being paid in some way. I also note that most of the authors aren't actually in New York State.

A seventeen page report by someone whose interests are unknown isn't a justification for considering a $600 billion expenditure during the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. If you want to spend money, the Province of Quebec has a large supply of hydroelectricity they want to sell. I didn't notice that conspicuous option anywhere, including the full paper.

[kristopher]

8. Typical denier garbage

Whether it is climate denial or denial of the technologies we need to deal with climate change it is always the same - pure uninformed bull with a patina of 'green' concern trying to sound like they know what they are talking about.

Your logic isn't. You've conflated end use efficiency (the electric car wastes less than an internal combustion engine) with the way renewable sources don't have the thermal losses associated with centralized thermal generation. The comprehensive term used to look at this process is "well to wheels efficiency"; and a subset of that is "pump to wheels efficiency". You can look those up to get a handle on the issue but in short, we can calculate the amount we start with and all of the losses along the way and determine what works and what doesn't. Renewables and battery electric vehicles are, by far, the most energy efficient system for an automobile. Your logic doesn't even begin to frame the problem.

I could go on, but two things are obvious: 1) that you really don't know what you are talking about, and 2) you aren't interested in knowing what you are talking about. Your comments are irrelevant from start to finish including the dig you take at the paper's authors - they are leading, world renowned, highly respected researchers on this topic.

[Heywood J]

15. Have fun with that.

Waste your own money, not mine.

[kristopher]

16. No one is wasting anyone's money.

This is a study about a possible path for energy going forward. Most studies show that a transition to renewables is probably the most cost effective long term strategy for meeting societies energy needs.

[flamingdem]

10. Good read nt

[NNadir]

11. Bullshit. The soothsaying by the "renewables will save us" ignoramuses, all of whom dump...

...responsibility for their terrible lacks of education on future generations is <em>already</em> coming home to roost.

The generation that will live in 2050 will be most likely be living in dire poverty because of the failure to address climate change.

2012 was the second worst year ever observed for in increases in carbon dioxide in a single year, and all of weekly and monthly data for 2013 suggest it will be worse.

One of the reasons for this has to do with anti-nuke fear and ignorance. According to the EIA, Japan, for instance, is dumping record amounts of dangerous fossil fuel waste in the atmosphere: Japan’s fossil-fueled generation remains high because of continuing nuclear plant outages

Despite 50 years of ignorant, and delusion prattling by scientifically illiterate anti-nukes talking up the unsustainable wind and solar industries - which are nothing more than fig leafs for the dangerous fossil fuel industry - has done nothing meaningful to fight climate change.

They were engaging in this kind of ignorant soothsaying way back in 1970's referring to the year 2000, which was - for those who are not members of Greenpeace and can thus add, subtract, multiply and divide - 13 years ago.

Here for instance is the shit-for-brains mystic scientifically illiterate anti-nuke Amory Lovins writing in 1976:

Recent research suggests that a largely or wholly solar economy can be constructed in the United States with straightforward soft technologies that are now demonstrated and now economic or nearly economic."

Amory Lovins Foreign Affairs, Fall 1976 pp 65-96, "Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken" excerpt from page 83.

So after 37 years, where is this solar nirvana that the fraud and liar said was "now demonstrated and now economic." The entire solar industry on the entire planet cannot produce as much energy as four Chinese nuclear plants, that's where.

It's almost 37 years since the shit-for-brains poured out his intellectual vapidity on paper, to wide acclaim from semi-literate types who bet, among other things, the planetary atmosphere on his bizarre anti-nuke "solar will save us" rhetoric, and what have we here?

A prediction that 37 years hence the Empire State Building will be "renewable."

What a coincidence.

Listen: The collapse of the atmosphere in 2013 and the years immediately preceding lead to putting parts of the City of New York under water.

It's going to be worse in New York in 2013.

I fully hope that future generations, when they regard the effects of fear and ignorance and wishful thinking, will hold the wishful thinking soothsayers whose big mouths helped to destroy the planet.

[kristopher]

12. Poor, poor Nnads...

His dystopian dream of a glowing nuclear future for the world is crashing down around his ears and all he can do is lash out in anger and frustration. If only he were dictator of the universe his garbled interpretation of history, technology and society would at last be shared by those outside his circle of fellow nuclear industry acolytes.

Sorry Nnads, but nuclear has been its own worst enemy and no one is to blame for its failure to perform except the nuclear industry itself.

How to close the US nuclear industry: Do nothing
Peter A. Bradford Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 2013 69: 12
DOI: 10.1177/0096340213477996

The United States is on course to all but exit the commercial nuclear power industry even if the country awakens to the dangers of climate change and adopts measures to favor low-carbon energy sources. Nuclear power had been in economic decline for more than three decades when the Bush administration launched a program that aimed to spark a nuclear power renaissance through subsidies and a reformed reactor licensing process. But Wall Street was already leery of the historically high costs of nuclear power. An abundance of natural gas, lower energy demand induced by the 2008 recession, increased energy-efficiency measures, nuclearÕs rising cost estimates, and the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station further diminished prospects for private investment in new US nuclear plants. Without additional and significant governmental preferences for new nuclear construction, market forces will all but phase out the US nuclear fleet by midcentury.

The online version of this article can be found at:
http://bos.sagepub.com/content/69/2/12

[NickB79]

14. By 2050 you say?

Sweet! By then we'll be able to travel the streets of Manhatten by boat like Venice; think of all the energy THAT will save! See, nothing at all to worry about......

But in all seriousness:

By the report’s analysis, this would all cut the United State’s climate costs by about $3.2 billion a year by 2050.

That sounds like a very small amount; climate change already causes hundreds of billions a year in damage to the US. Is that number correct, a typo, or just badly written?

[kristopher]

17. Did you miss the part where this is limited to New York? nt