Beyond Zero talks to Professor John Blackburn about a Solar and Wind powered North Carolina

Professor John Blackburn has worked out a plan for running most of North Carolina on 50% wind and 50% solar.  Along with existing biomass and hydro power around 96% of energy can be delivered renewable.

Matching Utility Loads with Solar and Wind Power in North Carolina delivered with gas or via grid interconnection into the rest of the USA.

Beyond Zero talks to Professor John Blackburn about a Solar and Wind powered North Carolina

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Transcript

Scott Bilby: Hello. Welcome to Beyond Zero, a show covering issues relating to climate change, including the latest news, science and solutions. Beyond Zero is produced in the studios of 3CR Melbourne, broadcast Australia wide on the Community Radio Network and syndicated internationally. This show is produced by Beyond Zero Emissions, an Australian based climate change campaign centre. It’s our understanding that human caused global warming has already exceeded safe limits and that we must act immediately to reduce our levels of greenhouse gas emissions to zero and below.

My name is Scott Bilby, and with me in the studio is Matthew Wright.

Matthew Wright: Hello Scott.

Scott Bilby: Today on Beyond Zero, we’re speaking with John Blackburn, Professor of Economics and former chancellor at Duke University, North Carolina. He’s written a number of books on renewable energy and he’s the author of a new report that we’re very excited about called Matching Utility Loads with Solar and Wind Power in North Carolina, dealing with intermittent electricity sources. Hello John, and thanks for joining us today.

John Blackburn: You’re welcome.

Scott Bilby: It’s great to have the opportunity to speak to you because we’re really interested in hearing what you can say about North Carolina going to renewable energy. Now, we’d like to start off just by talking to you a little bit about how you got interested in renewable energy, because I was reading somewhere that you were the chancellor at Duke and you then returned to the Department of Economics at Duke in the mid 70s, during the time of the energy crisis. Was that when you first developed an interest in renewable energy?

John Blackburn: Yes it was. That’s a long time ago and I did retire early and leave Duke and move to Florida in 1980, and recently returned to North Carolina five years ago and been interested in renewable energy since the late 1970s as well as energy efficiency and conservation.

Scott Bilby: And can you – actually, quickly – just tell us where North Carolina is, and then I’d like to know what it was that spurred your interest in renewable energy, ‘cause I suspect it might have been something to do with a nuclear plant.

John Blackburn: Yes it had a lot to do [laughs] with nuclear plants actually. North Carolina’s on the east coast of the United States, about halfway between Florida and New York City. It’s a state of about nine million people, about three per cent of the US population and economy. It has mountains in the western part of the state and therefore hydroelectric power and [indistinct 02:36] storage facilities, also – almost uniquely among states in the southeast, a decent wind power resource. Further south from here, and especially in Florida, there’s not really on land(?) any wind power to speak of, but North Carolina does have some, and of course, almost every place has solar energy. So, when I moved back to North Carolina four, five years ago, I set about sketching out a renewable energy scenario for the state, and came immediately to the conclusion that wind and solar were the largest resources, and that raises the question of their intermittency.

As to how I got interested in renewable energy, in the 1970s everyone seemed to think that the future was nuclear power. People did realise that fossil fuels would run out at some point, and could not forever be a source of electricity. A few people actually then were becoming aware of the greenhouse effect and the possibility of global warming. I think I first heard about that in the late 70s or early 80s. So, it was apparent that we were to have a nuclear future at some point or, I thought maybe better, a renewable energy future, and set about working on those issues. Looking first at increasing energy efficiency, reducing energy consumption to do the same things we’re doing already, and then meeting the remaining demand with renewable sources.

Some years ago I did work out a renewable energy scenario for Florida, or an almost renewable energy scenario [laughs] for Florida. And that led me to do the same thing as soon as we moved back to North Carolina.

Matthew Wright: And Duke University, that you’re involved with – a well regarded university – what areas do they specialise in, in terms of their strengths?

John Blackburn: Oh, Duke University is a typical comprehensive American university. It has undergraduate students, graduate programs in all of the arts and sciences; a medical school, a law school, a business school and, more recently, a School of the Environment. So, it’s an interesting place to work. There are many people interested in these same topics. But my departmental affiliation is economics, and since returning, though I’ve long been retired, I have offered a couple of times a seminar in economics and energy because the undergraduates really didn’t know much about it, and certainly weren’t aware of the choices that we’re having now to make as a society.

Scott Bilby: We’re speaking with John Blackburn, Professor of Economics, and former chancellor at Duke University, North Carolina. He’s written a number of books on renewable energy, and he’s the author of a new report that we’re very excited about called Matching Utility Loads with Solar and Wind Power in North Carolina, dealing with intermittent electricity sources. And talks about how renewables can provide 96 per cent of North Carolina’s power, most of it from wind and solar. Now John, we want to talk about the report you’ve written, and it’s only just come out recently. And you say that even though the wind does not blow, nor the sun shine all the time, careful management, readily available storage and other renewable sources can produce nearly all of the electricity North Carolina consumes. So can you just run us through the basics of that report and, because in Australia here and around the world, we’re hearing more and more reports coming out talking about how we can go to 100 per cent renewables. So we want to know how something very similar to that is going work for North Carolina.

John Blackburn: Oh, I think so. I think there are parallels. When I started looking at the renewable resources of North Carolina, about half our state is forested and one can look at the net annual growth of forests, and that will provide some elements of renewable energy. But you can’t get very far doing electricity and heat and industrial fuel – as one must – and liquid fuel, with just looking at biomass resources: forestry, forest yields(?), crop waste and the like. And just looking at the potentials, it is wind and solar as the large sources of electricity. We have hydroelectricity, as I mentioned, but it at the moment provides only about four per cent of the state’s electricity. It’s nonetheless very important for a reason I’ll come back to. So, we’re really talking wind and solar for the major sources of renewable electricity.

Now, the utilities here, and I guess half the country will say, well wind is fine, but it’s intermittent so we can’t count on it. Or, solar is fine, but, you know, it’s intermittent, we can’t count on it so we’ll have to build nuclear plants, is the sort of reasoning one hears. And I got rather tired of hearing that so I thought, well, let’s get some data, get some numbers and go find out. So I was able, with a research assistant, to measure potential sun electricity through some sample months of the year, and then measure wind speeds at several locations and get some idea of the variation and the quantity of wind power that could be produced.

I have to say, my study did not measure actual electrical output at actual wind installations because there are no data. North Carolina is one of the few states in the US with a wind resource which is not already developed yet(?). But I got quite good proxies for what the electrical output would be for wind and for solar installations, and just plotted them hour by hour for four-monthly(?) periods: one month each in spring, fall, summer, winter, and then just put them side by side. Wind and solar, hour by hour to see what the pattern looked like. And sure enough, they provide a varying flow of energy, but not one which is unmanageable. And that’s where storage becomes very important. Our hydro system here in North Carolina doesn’t run all the time, it runs at hours of peak demand. The utilities now have big nuclear and coal plants, and they tend to run most of the time. So to accommodate the hourly fluctuations in load and the daily peaks of the utilities in part use the hydro system. They run it when they need extra power. And for the same reason, they have built huge pumped storage facilities which happen to be in South Carolina, but the same utilities, Duke Energy and Progress Energy, serve both states. So, in effect, it’s available to North Carolina.

And again, they built these because nuclear power requires enormous amounts of storage. It runs steadily all the time, but electricity demand isn’t that way, it’s high during the day time, low at night - especially high in the summer with air conditioning. So to have nuclear plants, you need storage. Therefore I’m amused by the arguments of people here that to have wind and solar plants you need storage. Well, yes [laughs].

And so we have already some pumped storage, and then we have other means of dealing with hourly variations. Utilities have so-called load control: that is they can pay their customers to shut off some of their equipment for a half hour or an hour and defer, basically, defer electricity demand to a later period. And then later on, probably within the decade, we’ll have lots of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles and when they are linked to a grid of two million batteries with 16 kilowatt hours of storage each, basically provides a huge storage capability. So that you could charge them when there’s lots of electricity and then perhaps even with arrangements with the owners pull some back when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing. So one: the problem is overstated in the first place, and two: we have already in place or very soon prospectively enough storage pretty much to even out those fluctuations in wind and solar and get them to match the electric utility load profiles. 

That’s what this study did and there are a few graphs in there –  which your radio audience won’t have, of course – but they show pictures day by day through the months and hour by hour through some of the days so you can see how all these pieces fit together to do, as it turns out, about three-quarters of the electricity demand with wind and solar, even though individually they vary.

Scott Bilby: And during the winter months – I’m assuming there’s not as much solar there – and so, are you still producing 75 per cent of your electricity needs from renewables. Is the wind during winter stronger or something?

John Blackburn: Yes, exactly. But you’re quite right, the sun is about twice as strong in the summer as in the winter, but coincidentally, [laughs] at least in North Carolina, and offshore over most of the east coast of the US, the winds are stronger in the winter and weaker in the summer. So seasonally they are complements, as well as day and night, they are complementary. But that’s a good question, and one that I’m sure the researchers on these topics in Australia are considering that. But I believe it’s true that your wind resource and your solar resource are your largest renewable resources.

Matthew Wright: Absolutely, I mean Australia’s very lucky that it has a small population with a very large renewable energy potential for wind and solar, so I think it’s definitely the similar conclusion here in Australia is that wind and sun are the biggest resources we have by far. Now, you did say that you’re not actually using storage with your solar, so scenarios that have been looked at in Australia and even in the southwest of the United States have included solar thermal – like large scale solar thermal – with inbuilt thermal storage. Now, you’re basically just talking about direct solar and wind working together, and that correlation, and even without storage coupled with that, your model was able to show that 96 per cent of the annual delivered energy came reliably from that wind and solar combination.

John Blackburn: I think it was less than that. It was more like 76 per cent, if I’m remembering right. But then I had some hydroelectricity and some biomass combustion, or preferably co-generation and I ended up I think having to draw on other systems or from gas-fired turbines for about six per cent of the total. That is: I haven’t managed quite to get it to 100 per cent, but if you can run most of the system with wind, solar and other renewables, and have recourse only to a very small fraction from outside sources, I think that’s quite good. In Australia you are better situated than North Carolina for solar thermal electric generation which, as you said, can have storage right in the solar equipment. This takes direct sunlight, and North Carolina has many periods of partial sun, where there’s some cloud cover or some light cloud cover, and the photovoltaic solar electric equipment, which I’m assuming continues to make electricity through all of that. Just at varying amounts. 

You’re quite right that the southwest deserts in the US are prime locations because the sun is shining almost all the time during the day. And therefore these concentrating mirrors or concentrating parabolic troughs – they function only in direct sunlight – so they’re ready made for any part of the world that has lots of direct sunlight. To wit, much of Australia and southwest in the US; the Sahara Desert in North Africa. The reason they have storage built-in is they get it to very high temperatures and can take a working fluid of some specialty oils, for example, and heat them to 600, 700 degrees Centigrade and then have a storage tank so that the heated fluid can be stored and can continue to generate electricity oh, perhaps six hours beyond the daylight time. And that greatly reduces the intermittency of solar power as you pointed out.

Matthew Wright: OK. So North Carolina may not be suitable directly for solar thermal with storage but, given with your combination of wind, solar, hydro and pumped hydro and biomass, you’re up at 96 per cent. Could you speculate on how that final amount could be bridged? So, say it had reached 2025 or 2020 and you’d rolled this out and you’re only job left was to try and eliminate the last six per cent, where do you think you’d look?

John Blackburn: If we interconnect systems, then that problem goes away. If we had interconnections from North Carolina northward toward New York and New England and westward toward the American Midwest - we have enormous amounts of wind power in the Midwest and a somewhat different wind regime. So that when the wind is blowing less strongly here, it’s probably blowing more strongly somewhere else. So interconnections of the systems would, I think, reduce the need for backup fossil power to zero. And the Europeans, one of their scenarios for 100 per cent renewable future in Europe, one of the scenarios interconnects with North Africa, with solar thermal electric generation. And they devoted only a paragraph to this matter, because a Europe wide transmission connection with solar in much of Europe wind, and almost all of Europe and North Africa and hydro facilities in the Scandinavian countries in around the Alps and around the Pyrenees, their modeling shows that these areas all are interconnected, that they didn’t even do a study as elaborate as mine because it wasn’t necessary.

Matthew Wright: And what ratio of solar power and wind power were you talking about? Like what percentage was wind in your scenario, and what percentage of the delivered energy was from the sun?

John Blackburn: I actually, just for trial purposes, set them equal in North Carolina, and I haven’t really carried it very far but, safe to say, you could shift those ratios to 40/60 either way and not do much to my results. That needs to be done. I’m not super-competent at elaborate models. Came along a bit late for that. So mine was just putting numbers on spreadsheets, and [laughs] basically hand counting them. But it worked with 50/50 split between wind and solar and, my guess is it would work equally well at 60/40 or two-thirds one-third, and that we just kind of explore as we go along. The solar resource is actually bigger by far than the onshore wind resource in North Carolina. We have a huge offshore wind resource but the US has been very slow to develop its offshore installations. The one likeliest now to be built first is one in Massachusetts, which is at the northern end of our east coast.

Scott Bilby: Yeah, that’s a….

John Blackburn: …..Europe is ahead of us in this regard, but the resource is so large at the moment the question in the US is whether to build transmission lines from the Midwest where one state alone has enough wind power to power the whole country, or to not build the transmission lines but go offshore on our east coast. Because the offshore wind resource is very large from North Carolina, north all the way up the Canadian Atlantic coast.

Scott Bilby: We’re speaking with John Blackburn, Professor of Economics and former chancellor at Duke University, North Carolina. He’s written a number of books on renewable energy and he’s the author of a new report that we’re very excited about called Matching Utility Loads with Solar and Wind Power in North Carolina, dealing with intermittent electricity sources, and talks about how renewables can provide 96 per cent of North Carolina’s power, most of it from wind and solar.

Matthew Wright: And, just about the seasonal variability, you talked about the six – you were left with six per cent fossil fuel needs – was that – I guess where you’re from there’s more winter wind resource but obviously less winter sun resource. Where are you topping up from fossil fuels? Is that for peaking power in the summer? Or is it, sort of, a general lower output during the winter that you have to bridge? Where seasonally are you not quite meeting the 100 per cent demand?

John Blackburn: Well first off, let me just say that we have to establish a level of solar capacity, you know, number of megawatts of photovoltaic capacity, and a number for wind capacity, megawatts of wind power installed, and then live with it all year long. You know we can’t just [laughs] arbitrarily vary it and have more solar capacity at one time and less at another. So when I laid out the patterns over the four months of – the spring turned out to be the, so to say, super abundant time. There was more than enough wind and solar power size to fit the whole year, more than enough in the spring. So we had very few days with any back-up needed. 

The fall turned out to be the one that had the days with the largest requirements, which surprised me because electricity consumption in the US is lower in the spring and fall than in the summer or winter. The reason being that in the summer people use air conditioning and in the winter about half the houses in North Carolina use electric heat. But I – I don’t have the table right in front of me – but there was some recourse to back up in all seasons. Very little in the spring, and somewhat more in the summer, in winter, and in terms of shortfalls, within days there were a few days in the fall that were particularly below par.

Scott Bilby: Now were speaking with Professor John Blackburn, and he’s the Professor Emeritus of Economics and former chancellor at Duke University and he’s just released a report called Matching Utility Loads with Solar and Wind Power in North Carolina, dealing with intermittent electricity sources, and talks about how renewables can provide 96 per cent of North Carolina’s power, most of it from wind and solar. You say that – you’ve written this report – you’re not an expert in the modeling, but have we seen, since it’s been released, are there plans to further model this, and what are the next steps with this report?

John Blackburn: Oh, this particular report is now being circulated, mainly in North Carolina with people concerned with energy policy, so that they can know not to be intimidated by this intermittency issue. Nationally there is a much larger effort than any single researcher could launch in the western part of the US - specifically to model wind and solar for the whole western part of the country. That report has not been published yet. I think it’s due out within a year or so. 

But in the mean time, quite independently, some people at Stanford University in California were playing with California data, wind and solar, and hydro and so on, and came to the [laughs] conclusion that wind and solar could produce about 70 per cent of California’s electricity. And those results, I think, are referenced in my footnotes. So this is in the air, people are doing this all over the world and I just happened to get on it in North Carolina and come up with these results, just within the past year. I think you’ll be seeing lots more analyses like this.

Scott Bilby:  Well, I guess that now that the technology’s proving itself around the world, both wind – especially places like Europe, and solar in Spain now – and then it's going to be appearing in south western USA, that it’s there and people just need to look – if people look in their own backyard they’ll see how they can use those measures to provide the electricity they need in their own states.

John Blackburn: Yes, yes. And this is – the world is going this way. It’s not generally realised, but wind power worldwide has been growing at a rate that would increase it by a factor of ten every decade. That is, wind power installed has grown a hundred-fold in 20 years. If it [laughs] does that ten more years, it will be a huge part of world generation. And there’s no indication that the pace is slowing down. As one country like Denmark slows down other countries pick it up.

And you’ve seen that China has just announced plans, oh within the past year, plans I believe for 120,000 megawatts of wind power. And they built ten per cent of that last year. One year. And they just started.

Scott Bilby: Yes, it’s very, very exciting news around the world. And China really is taking a big lead there. Professor John Blackburn, we’d like to thank you very much for speaking to us today.

John Blackburn: You’re certainly welcome, and I will be waiting with interest as more good news comes out of Australia.

Scott Bilby: Ah well, so are we [laughs]. Thank you very much.

John Blackburn: [Laughs]

Matthew Wright: And we’re doing our own report for Australia, so we’ll certainly share that with you.

John Blackburn: I would be delighted to see it.