Blackouts like the ones that have hit Texas and California in recent years can be avoided at low cost with clean, interconnected, renewable power sources, say Stanford University researchers who studied grid stability under several scenarios in which wind, water, and solar—coupled with storage—would meet 100% of America’s electricity needs.
A team led by Mark Z. Jacobson, a Stanford University professor of civil and environmental engineering, evaluated the contention that renewable electricity can’t be trusted for consistent power. They found that all U.S. states and regions can maintain grid stability and avoid blackouts “despite variable and extreme weather,” while providing 100% of their energy with renewable Wind-Water-Solar (WWS) sources that emit zero pollution when they generate the electricity.
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The study found a “100% WWS system can avoid winter blackouts,” like the devastating one that occurred in Texas during 2021, and the kind of summer outages that have plagued California.
“It’s wrong to think of renewables as unreliable,” said Andrew Dessler, a Texas A&M University professor of atmospheric sciences who was not involved in the research. “Because you don’t think about renewables by themselves, you think of them as part of a system.”
He added that “a stable grid that features a lot of renewables will also feature a firm, dispatchable power that will pick up when the renewables go down.”
The Stanford team modelled a projected future scenario in 2050 and 2051, with more population and higher energy demand. In their simulations, all vehicles were electric or powered by hydrogen fuel cells. Electric heat pumps, water heaters, wind turbines, and solar panels replaced fossil-generated electricity, and the assessment of grid stability throughout the contiguous United States factored in energy consumption and typical weather patterns in each region. Energy supply had to equal energy demand every 30 seconds in the simulation, otherwise the model shut down, reports The Washington Post.
Results indicate that end-use energy demand would plummet by 57% across the U.S., with per capita annual energy costs reduced by 63% because of lower consumption and higher efficiency.
“Everything that we currently do using fossil fuels would be done using technology that is run through electricity,” said Anna-Katharina von Krauland, a study co-author and doctoral candidate in Jacobson’s lab. “The amount of energy that’s needed to perform activities, basically to turn on the light or to fuel industrial processes, would actually be decreased if you use more efficient energy supply.”
The shift would reduce energy requirements and consumer costs, bring millions of new jobs in renewables, and improve health by reducing pollution, the study found.
Grid interconnectivity is the key to a successful, reliable transition, the Stanford team concluded, offering opportunities to fill supply gaps in one region with surplus from another.
Linking complementary renewable power sources can also reduce the need for long-duration batteries for energy storage—a factor the Stanford researchers considered important, since ultra-long duration technology may still be a long way off.
“Pretty much across the board, we find that it would be less expensive, more reliable, and make better use of the energy if we were to expand on interconnection,” said von Krauland. But “even if every state were islanded by itself, it would still be feasible to implement 100% wind, water, and solar energy in every individual state.”
The study was released shortly after another cold spell in Texas, and a year after a deep freeze left households without power for five days and killed 700 people. Later assessments disproved political statements that the grid failure brought on by the cold snap was linked to unreliable renewable power sources, concluding they were mainly caused by failing natural gas plants. The new results add to that discussion by showing that a larger shift to renewables would be a practical way to address the Texas grid’s reliability issues, the Post says.
