A net-free future requires a portfolio of new carbon-free technologies, panelists say

Published on September 22, 2021 by Kim Riley


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Investor-owned utilities (IOUs) are committed to achieving net-zero or zero greenhouse gas emissions by mid-century and are developing, investing in, and integrating new technologies to reach their emissions-reductions goals, including next-generation nuclear power, carbon capture and long-duration battery storage, among others.

Such technologies also will help them build a low-carbon economy, according to panelists during the “Carbon-Free Technologies Needed for a Net-Free Future” session, which on Tuesday opened the National Clean Energy Week 2021 Policy Makers Symposium being held online Sept. 21-23.

Work in the power sector to bring these emerging technologies to market is solidly underway.

Currently, carbon emissions from the U.S. power sector are at their lowest level in 40 years and will continue to decline, said panel moderator Emily Fisher, general counsel and senior vice president of clean energy at the Edison Electric Institute (EEI), which represents all IOUs in the United States.

“As of the end of 2020, the electric sector as a whole had reduced emissions by 40 percent over 2005 levels,” Fisher said, “and 40 percent of all electricity delivered to customers last year came from zero-emitting resources, including nuclear energy and solar hydropower.”

Fisher said such reductions have been achieved using a range of tools, chief among them the retirement of more than a third of the sector’s coal-based generating fleet, the increased use of natural gas, and the growing use of renewable resources to generate electricity.

“In my mind I always think about this as the decade of deploying even more renewable energy and, of course, storage,” said Fisher, who led the panel’s discussion around where electric companies are in their clean energy journeys and what technologies are needed to achieve deep reductions in emissions.

Thus far, for instance, more than 30 EEI member companies have committed to achieving zero or net-zero emissions and renewable generation will play a significant role in achieving these goals, Fisher said. 

“The sector has grown in leaps and bounds in its ability to integrate even greater levels of variable renewable resources and keep the electricity reliable for customers,” added Fisher. “But to achieve zero or net-zero goals, we will continue to need what we call dispatchable carbon-free resources or technologies.”

Dispatchable means that such resources and technologies may be called on whenever they are needed for reliability purposes, she explained. “They are available 24/7,” she said.

Xcel Energy, the gas and electric utility headquartered in Minneapolis serving eight states in the Midwest, is on that path.

Currently, Xcel is more than halfway to its goal of 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2050 and in March filed a resource proposal in Colorado to add more than 5 gigawatts (GW) of renewable energy in the state that will accelerate coal plant retirements, said Jeff Lyng, director of energy and environmental policy at Xcel Energy.

The company’s Colorado plan is part of Xcel’s overall plan announced in December 2018 to reduce GHG emissions 80 percent by 2030, with aspirations to be carbon-free by 2050, said Lyng, adding that the company also has committed to power 1.5 million electric vehicles on its system by 2030.

“The transportation sector is a clear example of how the power sector — the power grid — will be a pathway to a low-carbon economy,” he said.

Xcel’s Colorado resource plan, which was filed in March, will nearly double the amount of wind, solar and battery storage on its system, and calls for a full coal exit by 2040. The carbon reductions would be closer to 85 percent, said Lyng.  

This summer, Xcel also filed a resource plan in Minnesota to add almost 6 GW of wind, solar and battery storage to its system, extend the license for one of its nuclear units, and transition the company out of coal in the Midwest by 2030, likewise achieving an 85 percent reduction in CO2, he said.

“While we are implementing those plans, I think it’s really important in this conversation to discuss the parallel processing of carbon-free technologies — the need for urgency to develop those technologies as we’re transitioning to greater amounts of renewable energy on the system,” added Lyng. 

Such a process will take time and focus, Lyng said. “I think we really have to keep it in the important-and-urgent quadrant, if you will, because we’ll need these technologies in the 2030s to achieve those carbon-free aspirations,” he said. 

Lyng, along with EEI’s Fisher and panelists Armond Cohen, executive director at the Clean Air Task Force, and David Hart, senior fellow at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), outlined their efforts toward such goals via participation in the Carbon-Free Technology Initiative (CFTI).

The CFTI is focused on implementing federal policies that can help ensure the commercial availability of affordable, carbon-free, 24/7 power technology options by the early 2030s to help the power industry meet net-zero carbon reduction commitments. 

Organizations that have joined EEI and its member companies, ITIF, and the Clean Air Task Force to form and advance the initiative are the Bipartisan Policy Center, the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, ClearPath Action, the Great Plains Institute, the Nuclear Energy Institute, and Third Way.

The initiative, said Cohen, is the result of a simultaneous realization in the power industry and among advocates of carbon mitigation that decarbonizing the grid will most likely require a combination of the very cheap solar and wind emerging on the markets and “some sort of firming, always-on, always-available, zero-carbon capacity.”

Specifically, the initiative is focused on policy recommendations to advance six key technology areas: advanced wind and solar energy systems; long-duration storage and advanced demand efficiency; advanced, dispatchable, and renewable super hot rock deep geothermal; zero-carbon fuels, such as hydrogen; advanced nuclear energy (both fission and fusion); and carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS), explained Cohen.

“These are the closest to potential maturity,” he said, adding that it’s more beneficial to focus on a range of technologies rather than just one by taking a portfolio approach to technology development. “We don’t know which will take off; one or all six,” said Cohen.

Hart pointed out that while renewables can get the power sector a long way toward achieving a carbon-free future, it can’t get the industry “all the way there.”

“There’s a gap getting to zero and we need to start now to develop solutions like CCUS,” Hart said, pointing out that it’s critical for the federal government to step in because the task isn’t financially feasible for all companies.

“We have the ability to spread the risk of these projects,” said Lyng, who suggested, for instance, that federal dollars could require a state or industry match.

The CFTI also recommends a tripling of total spending at the U.S. Department of Energy for research, development, and demonstration in power sector technologies in the next five years. And the panelists all agreed that the public and private sectors must work together to get such technologies to scale. That includes state and local governments, too, they said.

“We need a full pipeline of policies that will transition these technologies from the public to the private sector,” Hart said.

While each of the emerging technologies show promise — from solving seasonal storage challenges to supporting the nation’s most carbon-intensive industries — the panelists also agreed that there’s a lot of work to do before any of the technologies are commercially available.

Ultimately, the market will decide what’s commercially viable, Lyng said.