Federal carbon pricing policy seen key to helping states, utilities reach 100 pct clean energy
INDIANAPOLIS – A national policy on carbon pricing is viewed as one key element that could help states, cities and utilities reach their 100 percent clean energy goals in the future, a panel of energy experts said this week.
At the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners 2019 Policy Summit, speakers debated what comes next for the energy grid and markets as many states set aggressive targets for renewable and carbon-free energy resources procurement while retiring coal-fired power plants.
In a panel discussion, representatives from environmental groups and a major energy company were asked to choose one thing they would change to help the nation reach 100 percent clean energy.
“Obviously federal carbon policy – we are all going to agree on that,” said W. Mason Emnett, vice president of Competitive Market Policy at Exelon Corp.
John Moore, a director at the National Resources Defense Council’s Climate & Clean Energy Program, said a national carbon price and international carbon price also would be his No. 1 choice.
Clean Air Task Force Executive Director Armond Cohen agreed that a national policy that drives carbon is the obvious and best solution. But he added that a significant investment in innovation around new technologies such as high temperature steam and hot rock geothermal energy are also needed.
“I’d like to see a lot of more upstream carbon capture for high temperature production which gives you all kinds of options in the transport sector and industrial heat as well as low balance on the electric sector and nuclear,” Cohen said. “There is some promising stuff out there. But you know there is going to need to be some serious federal dollars put into that and to make that real so innovation capitalization would be my big ask.”
Emnett told the audience that the discussion of 100 percent clean versus 100 percent renewable energy becomes very important when considering how to manage the energy system decades in the future. While market signals right now are indicating the need to move forward on clean energy initiatives, he said, important considerations need to be made regarding how to manage variability of wind and solar resources using storage, and how nuclear energy factors in.
“That can change as flexibility becomes more important and more revenue starts to flow signaling the need for flexibility,” Emnett said. “But as we’re thinking about how to technically achieve the 100 percent clean energy, what it means at certain levels of penetration – at least from Exelon’s perspective – we almost have a temporal filter that we’re observing the situation of what happens in the next few years to then get to where we are say in the 2030s and the 2040s as the renewables are ramping up under any scenario.”
Emnett said one issue that needs to be addressed is how to handle nuclear resources that face challenges now. To the extent nuclear plants retire, how does the energy sector incorporate the amount of renewables needed to replace the lost nuclear energy. He said that issue “increases this technological and market design challenge that we have. So that’s something we think is important to keep in mind. Don’t make the problem harder before we start to solve the problem.”
Cohen said the majority of the system could indeed run on renewables, but that once seasonal variations become a factor, it gets very expensive very fast.
The cost to achieve 100 percent clean energy goals is not something any of the panelists thought would be an insignificant factor, although the idea was floated that advanced renewables could be relatively cheap. The technological hurdles are where things could start to become expensive.
“We talked about carbon capture, I’d like to see a lot more upstream carbon capture for high temperature production which gives you all kinds of options in the transport sector and industrial heat as well as load balance on the electric sector and nuclear,” Cohen said. “There is some promising stuff out there. But you know there is going to need to be some serious federal dollars put into that and to make that real.”
