Mark Z Jacobson Professor at Stanford University talks about the current shift to renewable energy in the USA

This Morning on Beyond Zero we're talking with Mark Z Jacobson, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University in the USA, where his research focuses on understanding physical, chemical and dynamical processes in the atmosphere in order to address problems such as climate change and urban air pollution.

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Scott Bilby: This Morning on Beyond Zero we're talking with Mark Z Jacobson, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University in the USA, where his research focuses on understanding physical, chemical and dynamical processes in the atmosphere in order to address problems such as climate change and urban air pollution.

He also evaluates the atmospheric effects of proposed solutions to climate change and air pollution, examines resource availability of renewable energies and studies optimal methods of combining renewables.

He's talking to us today about current wind power in the USA and its future potential. Welcome to the show professor Jacobson.

Mark Jacobson: Thank you very much.

Scott: Now Mark just before we talk to you, we'd like to play an extract from a statement made by one of your fellow Americans, President-elect Barack Obama. And he's talking about re-powering America with renewables. Do you mind if we just play that?

Mark: Sure.

Barack Obama: “The time for delay is over. The time for denial is over. We all believe what the scientists have been telling us for years now. That this is a matter of urgency and national security. And it has to be dealt with in a serious way.

That's what I intend my administration to do. I think what's exciting about that conversation is that it's not only a problem but it's also an opportunity. As I've already spoken about is, we've started to provide a framework for an economic recovery plan. We have the opportunity now to create jobs all across this country, in all 50 states, to re-power America, to re-design how we use energy, to think about how we're increasing efficiency, to make our economy stronger, to make us more safe, reduce our dependence on foreign oil and make us competitive for decades to come, even as we're saving the planet.

And so we're not going to miss this opportunity. My office is going to be working with a whole host of stakeholders on this issue, including vice-president Gore, businesses, Republicans, Democrats, consumers, everybody who has a stake in this issue and we all do. I want to bring together the kind of aggressive, bold approach that is going to make the future better for my children and all our children.

I'm grateful that vice-president Gore has shared the information that he has with us, and I'm looking forward to a busy next couple of years getting our arms around this issue.”

Scott: Now Mark, we’ve here just been listening, and I hope you've been hearing it, too - about Barack Obama talking about re-powering America and you're talking about wind power on quite a large scale, too. How does what Barack Obama is saying now fit in with what you're saying, and how exciting is that?

Mark: I think it's great. It’s a great change for our country and for the world, to have somebody in office now who is looking forward to changing the energy infrastructure to a cleaner energy economy, basically. I think so long as he gets good advice that we can make quite a difference in the future. I am a little bit concerned that he wants to talk to all stakeholders because part of the problem we have had in the past is that there have been too many people, too many different options to consider and there hasn't been enough focus on the good options versus the bad options.

Scott: You're currently at Palo Alto, is that where Stanford University is?

Mark: That's correct.

Scott: So you're halfway between the San Francisco Bay is it? … and you've got the massive Pacific Ocean on the other side of you…and you're pretty much the same distance north of the equator as Melbourne in Australia - where we're from - is south of the equator. Can you tell us how we can distribute wind power over large areas and whether you prefer on-shore or off-shore proposals?

Mark: Yes, wind power is slightly stronger off-shore in most places. But it's a little less expensive on-shore, so there's a little bit of a trade-off. We have mapped the world's winds. In fact, we've produced in 2005 what's still the only map of the world's winds at the height of modern wind turbines, so we have a quantification of how much wind energy there is worldwide, and it's a huge amount. In places where the wind is cost-competitive there is enough wind to power the entire world energy supply five to six times over and including in Australia and in the United States there is quite a bit of wind. In Australia there is a lot of wind off-shore, you have a lot of coastline in particular.

So, I think for off-shore right now the challenge is you need to put the wind turbines where the water is shallow enough. So if you can find shallow water then you can put the wind turbines in. But it's always a challenge because some people don't like to see wind turbines off-shore. I always think of it though as a trade-off: would you rather see a wind turbine or would you rather be exposed to coal emissions from a power plant? So, nobody wants to add anything to the scenery but when we consider the health and climate benefits of wind versus the other alternatives then it becomes clear that there is some sacrifice that is reasonable.

Matthew Wright: Now, if our listeners start to log on to repoweramerica.org, and they go down to ‘what the experts are saying’, they'll find a reference to you. And you're talking about 33% to 37% of the United States as energy from wind. As you're aware, Australia is a similar size to the United States and has a very good wind power resource. So, what is the potential to have that sort of contribution in somewhere like Australia which has very low demand for energy relative to the United States?

Mark: First I'd like to say that wind is great but we also want to combine wind with other clean renewables. And I'd like to list those clean renewables and they include solar of course. But there are two types of solar. An important one is concentrated solar power, which is focusing mirrors on a fluid to drive a turbine. And the other is photovoltaic, the kind of stuff you usually see on rooftops.
But also geothermal power and wave and tidal power, which are emerging technologies, and then hydro-electric to some extent.

So, it's actually advantageous to combine particularly wind and solar because... I mean in Australia there's plenty of wind. You can power the entire country with wind if you just look at the raw quantity.
But the thing that utilities don't like is the fact that the wind doesn't always blow when you want it to and doesn't necessarily blow when the power demand is high.

So, in order to resolve that problem - there are many ways to resolve that problem - one way is to combine wind with solar power for example. Since wind often peaks at night and solar often peaks during the day, and you can combine the two to match the power demand which usually peaks in the afternoon on most days, a lot better, but also then supply a lot of your night-time energy. Especially when you convert to new energy technologies for vehicles. For example electric vehicles, and even hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles which would produce their power by electricity. Because once you have these new electricity demands, you can supply them at night when the wind is often fast.

Now, wind is actually fast during the day along the shore, so when I said it was fast at night that's often inland you often get fast winds at in a lot of parts of the United Sates. But off-shore, along the coast, you actually get your winds in the afternoon, it peaks in the afternoon.

So, it's really a management issue, trying to manage the combination of wind and solar and these other renewables, to optimize them to meet your demand. We've done some studies to find that you can do this, not only by combining these different renewables together but, even when you put wind in different locations, connected through the electric power grid, you can smooth out the supply. So although the wind doesn't always blow in one location at the right time, when you look over a larger and larger area, the net electricity from wind actually is more smooth, and combining with solar you can really do a lot of matching with the demand, which is really beneficial.

Scott: And there's also some interesting options with storage. We're gonna be speaking soon with a company in Australia called Lloyd Energy Storage. They've got these large, high-purity graphite blocks that store large amounts of heat, which means the wind may be blowing at night but they can just store that energy as heat and then release it back at a time onto the grid when the demand is higher and the price is higher.

Mark: Yes, there are different methods of storing it. It’s stored in materials, sometimes you can store it into what's called pumped hydro where you pump water up during the night and let it flow down during the day and generate electricity. But I'd even say these are all the last options you want because there are some efficiency losses when you store – but they will be beneficial, but there are many other ways you can also do this to address this problem without even storage. Storage is one thing that would help even further.

Matthew: We've been talking to a number of renewable experts in Australia and the sort of mix that they're talking about, if you go to something like 30% wind, is to actually take advantage of solar thermal's ability to store heat as thermal energy before it's converted and apparently that's a lot more efficient. So, what you do is you take advantage of wind power being the lowest cost renewable energy source, and you store as much of that as you can get away with, so that's where your 37% comes in, and then for any shortfall once you overlay the wind power variability with the solar variability that you just talked about, you can then use these thermal storage options direct with solar. Have you heard much about this?

Mark: Yes, in California we have several concentrated solar plants, but not ones that have the thermal storage, although those are on the drawing board. That's a great idea because you can store with these concentrated solar with storage, you can store generally up to eight or more hours of electric power. So you can use it to fill in gaps at night or just when the wind is not blowing, or even when the sun stops shining because clouds go overhead. It's just another method of load balancing, so to speak.

Scott: Now, the world is quite excited by the fact that Barack Obama will soon be taking the presidency, and we hope it's going to usher in a new era. Especially all of us who are advocates for renewable power. In what sort of time frame, if you've got the sort of backing that you need, can the United States get to that level of approximately 30% of wind penetration by?

Mark: I think it really depends on willpower, because as I mentioned at the beginning a lot of the problem in the past, even though there's been a desire to do something good, is that there are so many quote ‘stakeholders’ in the game, there a lot of different energy sources that want to be a part, but it turns out that many of these energy sources are not so good and they get a lot of attention. And some of these are the bigger ones. Coal, for example, even with carbon capture, is one of these that really has marginal benefits. Biofuels are really marginal, or even sometimes negative benefits. Even nuclear is not quite so good than these other technologies. But they have more financing and more lobbyists, so they actually go out to the forefront and drive the discussion whereas things like wind and solar and geothermal and tidal wave, which are completely under-represented, really have very little say.

So, if the administration really focuses on the things that are good, and doesn't get distracted by things that are less good, or bad, then it doesn't take long to ramp up a huge renewable energy infrastructure. For example in World War II the United States produced over 300,000 airplanes in a period of seven years with most of them in the last 3 years of the war. To power the entire U.S. vehicle fleet on wind for example, if we converted all our cars to electric cars which is another conversion, but just ignore that for a second, to power those electric cars with wind we need 73,000 to 145,000 large 5 MW wind turbines. That's around 100,000 wind turbines that are large, less than the number of airplanes we produced in World war II.

So, we need to convert our infrastructure to do this thing on a large scale. If we decide that's what we want to do, and if other countries decide that's what they want to do, they could do it. I mean, they could really push for it. But the practical problem is there are so many competing interests that it makes something done on a large scale really difficult unless there is an emergency or unless there's just some catastrophe looming. And that's what my fear is, that what will happen is, things will plod along slowly because it is hard to change.

Matthew: That's interesting what you said about the 70,000 wind turbines. If you compare that to the giant umbilical cord that feeds the United States with its oil habits today to inefficiently power that huge mass transportation system you've got based on internal combustion engines, that 70,000 wind turbines isn't really that much industrial plant, is it?

Mark: No, it's not. In fact, if you actually did a calculation, if you put all those wind turbines – they're basically a tube touching the ground – (they would take out) the actual amount of land area to power the entire U.S. vehicle fleet, is less than 3 square kilometres - the physical land touching the ground. Of course you need spacing between these turbines, but just to give you an idea how much space that is compared to, let's say corn ethanol for doing the same thing, you'd need about 0.5%, or half of one per cent, of United States land, or even ocean area if you put it over the ocean, to power all these vehicles you need that for spacing of these turbines, half a per cent. But to do the same thing with corn ethanol, or even cellulosic ethanol, which is kind of the next generation of ethanol, you'd require thirty times more land than to do the same thing with wind. That thirty times more land is actual, physical footprint in the case of the ethanol, the corn ethanol or cellulosic ethanol. Whereas that's just spacing, as open spaces, for the wind except for that 3 sq. km touching the ground.
So it's not a lot. Again, you have to put your mind to it.

Of course, to do that for vehicles you have to generate the vehicles as well. And there are right now 70 electric cars from a new company Tesla on the road actually right now. So we do have electric cars, although they're not being mass-produced at prices that are affordable to most people.

Station announcement.

Matthew: Those drive trains, not only is there Tesla, but I understand that General Motors after they got told off by the senate over there, had to drive their model GM Volt into Washington to plead for their bailout money. So, there is the Toyota Prius plug-in and the GM Volt plug-in and these are the sort of transitional vehicles we need. Is that right?

Mark: Yeah, that's definitely a step in the right direction of course. I think the problem with GM is they've got one Volt going but they’re also simultaneously selling these large SUV vehicles and many other gasoline and even some diesel vehicles. So the problem is if they decided, ‘OK, we're only going to sell electric cars or plug-in hybrid cars,’ - plug-in hybrids are basically electric that you can plug in but they're gasoline and electric but you can plug in to use the electric engine more - if they focus on those primarily instead of just as a gimmick, then I think we can make some progress with the vehicle. The problem is that simultaneously they're also going to be selling lots of these other vehicles that are still not very efficient and they are gasoline or diesel.

Scott: Mark, when I watch news that comes in syndicated from the U.S. they have their sponsors at the start and they mention Vestas (wind turbine manufacturer) and stuff like that and I was just wondering, because in Australia the average Australian hears almost nothing about wind power and I was wondering in the U.S. if they're more prominent; if people are seeing adverts for wind power and stuff like that?

Mark: In the last three years… I would say it was the same maybe five or six years ago in the U.S. where people thought wind power was just a small potato thing and it was like a gee-wiz kind of thing but didn't know much about it. But there's been a lot more development in the last three or four years. In fact, in the last two years wind power has been the second-largest new electric power source in the U.S. behind natural gas. It's grown significantly, but in particular in certain places like in Texas, California is growing too but not as fast as in Texas, in the Great Plains area, so there's a lot more talk about wind power and there's a lot more wind power available in the U.S. than there was.
So as a result people are more aware of it and it's a stronger force to be reckoned with at this point. Although it's still a very small portion of the total electric power mix. It's still only in the order of 1% of the U.S electric power mix.

Scott: There are two big identities in the United States, one from the left, one from the right. Al Gore from the left talking up wind power and renewables, and on the right we’ve got T. Boon Pickens, is it?... he's talking up wind power, he's invested a lot of money in it. Can you tell us a little bit about T. Boon, what your thoughts are on him and how prominent he is in the U.S.?

Mark: He came on to the scene in the last couple of years with regard to wind power. He's invested a lot in wind power. That part has been great but simultaneously he owns a lot of natural gas interests and is pushing natural gas as well. It's better than coal certainly but it still has a lot of problems associated with it.

But he has brought a lot of visibility to the wind, the struggle with wind, and he's putting a lot of money into investing in wind, so from that point of view it’s been great having the right vision in respect to that. He actually also recognises that natural gas is just an interim thing. He doesn't claim that this is something that will solve our problems. He's just being practical about it. I think overall it's been a benefit to have him on the scene because he has pushed wind quite a bit. He does get a lot of visibility talking about it.

Matthew: So natural gas is really just a good interim opportunity to just maintain energy security during the transition, until we're 100% renewable.

Mark: I'm not quite so convinced that it's necessary. But that's what his argument is. It's certainly not going to help with climate change, except to the extent that it displaces coal. I mean coal is, if you look at the pecking order, coal is probably the worst and then natural gas is close behind that, it's a little better than coal. From an electric power point of view it's better, but it's still a contributor to global warming and also there are pollution problems.

Matthew: Just before we wrap up, Al Gore has been the other person who's been onto wind. I believe he's now realized that carbon, caption and storage with coal is a false start, and he's been calling it ‘oxymoronic’, that was the quote we heard on national public radio. What can you tell us about Al Gore's approach to this?

Mark: Al Gore's approach I really like. His approach has been to push more for wind and solar and geothermal primarily. And he's not even talking about nuclear anymore and he's not advocating coal either. So, there’s three - solar, wind and geothermal, and of course tidal wave if they come up more – are really the ones you want to focus on. That’s definitely in the right direction.

Plus he's really talking about a huge penetration and that's also important. A lot of what we call renewable portfolio standards – legislation that's been passed at many states and in the United States, where they're mandates for either ten of fifteen or twenty per cent renewable energy by a certain year – well, that's a good start but we really need 80% reductions of carbon. So we need 80% renewable energy and the only way we can get it is with a large-scale program and almost do a complete renovation and that's what he's advocating, so I strongly support what he's advocating.

Matthew: He actually relies on your fantastic wealth of knowledge for his repoweramerica.org website. We're wondering, have you actually met Al Gore?; have you been fortunate enough?

Mark: Yes, I've met him twice. The first time was when he came to our university to give a talk. The second time his group invited me and some other scientists to go give presentations in New York on a topic related to energy because he was trying to come up with this plan to re-power America. So he wanted to get people who were scientists in the field to give information on it. So I met him there as well.

And also he has this group called the Alliance for Climate Protection, which is actually a group local and right next to our university. It turns out that some students who work there are former students of our program, so we've had some feedback back and forth with that group and that's given them advice and provided us with some information that's been very mutually beneficial. So there is some interaction going on there and it's good to see the path they're taking is pretty similar in direction to the path that we think is a good one forward.

Scott: Mark, I'd like to thank you for the interview. It's been very enlightening not only to hear an expert's point of view but also to hear an expert's point of view on some very public names in the United States.

Mark: Well, thank you very much for having me on your show.

Scott: It was a pleasure. That was Mark Jacobson, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University in the USA. For more information you can visit the website at stanford.edu and you'll find some more information about Mark there.

Transcript by Jean Dind