What New Net-Zero Studies Tell Us About Electricity Decarbonization
FEB 22, 2021
There is a view among some in the environmental community that “any solution that doesn’t show up in the next 10–20 years is essentially no solution at all.” They suggest that we have all the technologies we need to decarbonize today, and that all we lack is the political will to do so. Clean energy technologies like wind and solar have fallen dramatically in price in recent years, and will likely provide the bulk of new clean energy for the US over the next decade or two.
At the same time, however, these technologies cannot effectively decarbonize the entire economy — or even the power sector — alone. New state-of-the-art energy system models suggest that the current decade is a critical time in which we need to both accelerate the deployment of existing clean energy technologies and heavily invest in RD&D for maturing and improving a range of technologies that will be needed longer-term — such as advanced nuclear, gas with carbon capture and storage, enhanced geothermal, blue/green hydrogen, and direct air capture.
A slew of new net-zero studies have been published in recent months, including Princeton's Net Zero America (NZA) project, the Vibrant Clean Energy Zero By Fifty scenario, and by a team of researchers led by Jim Williams at USF. All three of these take a deep-dive into how the US could reach net-zero emissions by 2050, down to the level of where each new generating facility might be located, where new transmission lines would be built, and how electricity generation sources can meet hourly grid demand in different regions of the country. Each study contains multiple scenarios looking at the sensitivity to future technology prices, land use constraints, and other factors. But for simplicity, we focus in this comparison on their marker scenarios: E+ for NZA, the default Zero By Fifty scenario from Vibrant, and the central scenario from Williams et al. Both NZA and Williams et al. use a combination of the EnergyPATHWAYS (EP) and RIO models to generate their scenarios, while Vibrant uses their WIS:dom model.
While the models differ in important ways, they all paint a broadly similar picture. Wind and solar expand rapidly in the next three decades. US coal use falls off a cliff, reaching zero by 2030 or 2035. At the same time, natural gas use stays rather flat — or even increases modestly — between 2020 and 2030, as it serves a key role in filling in the gaps in variable renewable generation. Gas capacity actually increases in two of the three decarbonization models through 2050, though capacity factors — how often the gas plants are run — fall rapidly, and gas increasingly becomes a blend of hydrogen and methane closer to 2050.
The figure below shows the current 2020 US electricity generation mix, as well as the projected generation mix in 2030, 2040, and 2050 across each of the three models.
https://thebreakthrough.imgix.net/Net-zero-fig-1.png
Annual US electricity generation (in TWh) in the initial year of each decade. 2020 values from the February 2021 EIA Short Term Energy Outlook. 2030, 2040, and 2050 values from the respective Vibrant, NZA, and Williams et al. scenarios examined.
A few things immediately stand out:
First, there are fairly sizable differences in future electricity demand; in all cases, it is well above 2020 levels, with 2050 generation roughly twice current levels in Vibrant’s model, 2.5x current levels in NZA, and more than three times current levels in Williams et al. These differences in overall demand presumably arise from differing assumptions around economy-wide electrification rates, demand, and future energy efficiency. The degree to which other sectors of the economy can be effectively electrified will also impact the shape of demand curves and the types of generation that are best-suited to meet demand; both NZA (E-) and Williams et al. (Delayed Electrification) examine scenarios where electrification is more difficult to achieve.
Second, future generation looks quite different between the Vibrant WIS:dom model and the EP/RIO-based results from NZA and Williams et al. While variable renewables — wind and solar — supply the majority of generation in all three, Vibrant’s model sees a big expansion of nuclear — in the form of small and modular reactors and molten salt reactors — starting in the mid-2030s. Both NZA and Williams et al. expect offshore wind to play a major role in the 2040s, while the Vibrant model has relatively modest offshore wind generation.
Finally, while NZA and Williams et al. have some remaining gas generation in 2050 (some with CCS, some blended with H2 and offset by direct air capture), Vibrant has only a small amount of gas with CCS. As mentioned earlier, both NZA and Williams et al. have variations of their model with different assumptions around future technology prices, constraints, and land availability. In some scenarios, nuclear and CCS play a relatively larger role, while other scenarios have an even larger role for variable renewables.
Variable renewable energy provides between 51% and 91% of total electricity generation by 2050 across the three models — though in all cases a sizable chunk of clean firm generation remains needed (as well a massive expansion of transmission capacity, battery storage, and other complementary technologies). The figure below shows how the three models expect generation from firm and variable sources to evolve over time.
https://thebreakthrough.imgix.net/Net-zero-fig-2.png