ENERGY 2040 by Deepak Divan & Suresh Sharma

Author:Deepak Divan & Suresh Sharma
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783031494178
Publisher: Springer Nature Switzerland

Will a Decarbonized Energy System Be More Electrified?

There are many who continue to question that renewables could ever scale to replace fossil fuels as a primary source of energy. Renewables in 2019 represented only 6.4% of the total energy generated in the USA—a 16X growth seems impossible. On the other hand, as Fig. 1.​1 shows, of the 93.6 Quads of fossil or nuclear energy used (both using thermal energy conversion principles), only 26.1 Quads or 27.8% of the energy was converted into actual end use. Fully 72% of the energy generated from thermal processes was rejected as heat. Put another way, for every dollar we spent on extracting, processing, and delivering energy, we threw 72 cents away! With renewable generation and electrical processes, energy conversion efficiencies are high, often between 90% and 99%, and little of the generated energy is wasted. As we replace wasteful processes that were developed hundreds of years back, with more efficient processes that run on electricity, we suspect there will be a move toward increased electrification—first for transportation, then for basic industrial processes, and finally at a societal level.

As a result, we feel that the fossil fuel sector will taper down and see a diminishing role in our future energy mix, while electrification and the associated power grid and the pathways to deliver this energy will form a key part of the infrastructure that ties many of these elements together, and therefore is likely to play an even more important role than it does today. PV and wind generation, energy storage, and electrified transportation are all fast-moving, relatively unregulated and highly competitive industry sectors, all seeing falling prices and explosive growth across the globe.

As EV populations increase at a 60% year-over-year rate, they will expect to receive as much energy as they need, wherever and whenever they connect to the grid! Similarly, PV solar and wind generation, which are also growing at explosive rates and can provide inexpensive energy but only when it is available, also expect to connect to the grid and, like magic, have their generated energy delivered to their customers in a manner that maximizes their own revenues. Also, we cannot forget the millions of existing residential, commercial, and industrial electricity customers, who all expect to continue to receive electricity, with even lower rates than they currently pay (because solar is now cheaper, right?), and with at least comparable levels of reliability and even higher resiliency than they enjoy today. Finally, we expect to see customers with new loads emerging, driven by a wave of increasing electrification, who will also expect to have access to electricity, wherever and whenever they want it. But can the grid evolve at the pace needed to be what each and every one of us wants it to be?

While prices of utility scale PV and wind energy are now below conventional dispatchable resources on an energy delivered ($/kWh) basis, that may be too narrow a metric as we look forward. Because fossil fuels are burnt at the

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