Glimpse the future with me

Hello readers, it’s me, energy journalist Julian Spector.

What a week that was. We had the return from winter holidays, Election Week Episode II, and an armed insurrection against American Democracy, all in a few days. I feel weird greeting people with “Happy New Year” now because it feels out of date already.

As far as clean energy is concerned, the Senate flipping to the Democrats, just barely, is the big story, and allows for a richer set of prognostications about what happens with energy policy over the next two years. I’ll touch on that briefly today.

But then I want to tell you about a particularly exciting story I reported last week. The island of Kauai—the verdant and vertiginous island in Hawaii that you may recognize from Jurassic Park—is basically the future of energy in a microcosm, and it just took that journey to its logical conclusion. I often make the case that clean energy isn’t some far off, speculative thing—it’s here now, if you know where to look for it. It’s hard to think of a better example of that than Kauai, and I’ll tell you why.

Speaking of clean energy in the mountains, my personal dispatch this week details a surprise discovery of renewable power in a place I never expected: a long-abandoned mining camp in the mountains above Death Valley.

Georgia goes Blue, now what will Dems do?

The Democrats now control the narrowest of majorities in the Senate: 50 votes plus a tie-breaker from Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, who’s about to spend more time with her old colleagues than she probably bargained for.

Key takeaway: This makes climate and energy policy considerably more likely to pass, but falls short of guaranteeing that Joe Biden can act on his hugely ambitious campaign platform.

Biden can pass at least some measures through the budget reconciliation process, a maneuver for spending bills that only requires a simple majority, not the 60 votes needed to beat a filibuster. The problem here is that getting all 50 votes from his camp is far from given, and centrist Sen. Joe Manchin from coal state West Virginia is already flexing his new ability to make or break any spending deal.

It’s likelier now that significant clean energy spending makes it into a stimulus or infrastructure package. But passing Biden’s “100% clean electricity by 2035” target is a different matter. It’s not an obvious candidate for budget reconciliation, although some smart people think it could be finagled. If that route doesn’t work, it would need to pass the filibuster, which it definitely won’t do. And some centrists like Manchin are nervous about dumping the filibuster to allow majority rule; such resistance would constrain the options.

We’ll soon have more data on how Team Biden wants to play this. I’ll just flag the main wild card, which is Republican appetite for compromise. When Mitch McConnell controlled what made it to the Senate floor, he successfully blocked almost any energy policy. When he needed a deal to give his Georgia Senate candidates something to bring home ahead of the runoffs, the Senate passed its biggest energy policy in a decade.

Bright Ideas readers know that Red States love clean energy, and vastly outpace Blue States in adopting both wind and solar. Boosting clean energy would supercharge jobs and economic growth for those states. But there’s a big difference between throwing money at a thing people like, and legally committing to structural change and the elimination of fossil fuels from the power sector.

Time moves faster there

There is a place that’s already well on its way to eliminating fossil fuels from its power sector, and that’s Hawaii. The energy transition moves faster there. The state passed a clean electricity target years before the other states. The grid ran on imported fossil fuels, which were expensive enough that renewables became cheaper than the incumbent fuels earlier than on the mainland.

The island of Kauai in particular models a sped up version of what the rest of us may one day experience. I just wrote about a new project there that really drives this point home: it’s expected to get the island to 80 percent renewable electricity by the middle of this decade. It follows a three-step evolution:

1. Build a bunch of solar power, because it’s cheaper than any other day-time power plant.

2. When you can’t use any more solar power, build batteries to give you four or five hours of clean energy into the evening and nighttime.

3. When you max out on batteries, build something to store solar power and give you electricity all through the night.

Last week, Kauai chose pumped hydro storage for that last role. The island’s cooperative utility (owned by its customers, not Wall Street shareholders), will use solar power to pump water up the mountainside into existing reservoirs. At night, that water will flow back down the mountain and turn turbines to regenerate electricity. Here’s a very rough schematic of how these tools divvy up the workload throughout a 24 hour period:

Pumped hydro was actually the go-to technology for grid storage decades before batteries rose to prominence. But we haven’t seen new pumped hydro storage built on the mainland recently; it’s more expensive than batteries, has more environmental impact, and takes longer to build. But California authorities anticipate we’ll need more technology like this in the next five years, to handle the ever growing solar fleet. Other solar-heavy regions will eventually contemplate something similar.

Kauai serves as a reminder that you can’t build a clean energy paradise with just a bunch of solar panels. We need the right resources to meet demand at any time of day. Because solar has gotten ridiculously cheap, it makes sense to build it alongside storage (pumped hydro and batteries) to deliver clean energy when I t’s needed.

Ghosts of the Gold Rush

No electrical network? No sign of civilization within miles? No problem!

I recently encountered the potential energy of water on a different mountainside, closer to home.

“The state recognizes that outdoor activity is critical for mental health and physical health,” California authorities advise us. Heeding the state’s guidance, I recently climbed a mountain that hosted a considerable population in the 1870s due to a concentration of silver. The rocks kept miners coming back through the decades since, as visible in the mishmash of 19th century brick work, early 20th century heavy machinery, and mid-century appliances left behind in some of the cabins.

I also noticed electrical cables strung through the trees to some of the buildings. They led back to the source: a miniature water wheel (see photo above). The miners ran a pipe from one of the mountain springs, channeling it into a contraption that harnessed the force of gravity to generate electricity. Up above 5,000 feet, with no connection to modern amenities for miles in any direction, these miners not only drank fresh water but lit their homes while doing so.

This was, in effect, a zero carbon microgrid, though the people who erected it would not have bothered with such terminology. They were simply scouring their surroundings for the most advantageous source of energy to make their lives better. In hailing clean energy as a stirring, modern phenomenon, we can forget that it is, in fact, a much older tradition than our dependence on fossil fuels.

Speaking of which, the miners somehow lugged a motley assortment of automobiles up the precipitous cliffs; they lay abandoned and immobile. But the water still flowed.

Outta gas.