In mid-2023, Green Builder Media’s CEO Sara Gutterman reached out to me to see if I were interested in presenting at their annual Sustainability Symposium. It’s been running annually for close to a decade, and with COVID it transitioned to virtual and won’t be going back. That event occurred a couple of weeks ago, and I was privileged to present my optimistic perspective on the transformation between RMI CEO Jon Creyts and Jeremy Rifkin, author and advisor to governments on multiple continents.
This is why I annoy long-term efficiency boffins, because I consider efficiency to be a secondary question. Electrification is first, efficiency is used to make it cost beneficial and more economical. Over the past few years, Denmark regularly sees over 100% from wind energy alone, and Germany is now approaching 60% renewables on its grid. Denmark and Germany have among the most reliable grids in the world, 13 minutes of outages per customer per year. This is not actually that hard to do. It’s a transformation. We are transforming our grids and our generation, but we’re doing it very effectively.
But what will work? Pumped hydro is going to be the dominant one for energy storage on grids, just as it is today, just as it’s been since 1907 when the first one was built. This is a highly commoditized solution. It’s great for coal country. I’m fascinated that the discourse in the United States does not include turning coal workers in coal country to building pumped hydro more. It’s just an obvious thing using very strongly overlapping skills and domain knowledge.
Cell-based batteries are really hot right now, lithium-ion especially, but they have limits. They are cost effective for 4 to 8 hours. They’re great for putting sunshine from the afternoon into the evening, but we need longer duration than that. This diagram is from GEIDCO, which is the global energy interconnection development cooperation organization. It’s a UN organization, but it was kicked off by China in 2015 or 2016. To consider how seriously China takes this, the premier of China was at the launch. The executive chairman of GEIDCO is the single person at the top of all grid planning and development and deployment in China, and the person responsible for the development of the Asian Supergrid.
Everybody in Vegas was depressed because of the looming end of the investment tax credit. And I was wandering around thinking, why is everybody so down-faced? Because I’d been in Singapore and I was paying attention to China’s wind energy development, to Latin America’s wind energy development, where I spent time in São Paulo talking wind overlapping with hydro in that great country, and also looking at Australia, and everywhere else wind was booming.