What is More Important, Building Renewables or Cutting Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Removing Existing CO2?

What if cutting greenhouse gas emissions (GHG), especially CO2, is not the same as increasing the share of electricity generated using renewables? Which would you pick? As an economist, such questions interest me. This kind of question interests me because we face a slew of problems and we have a limited amount of effort available to help solve them.  If we are able to cut CO2 emissions at a lower cost one way rather than some other way, why pick the more costly approach?

For many folks, there is no question of deciding between cutting GHG and installing more renewables. They are assumed to be one in the same.

Is there any evidence to suggest otherwise? Actually, there is.

Electricity planning analysis performed by the Northwest Power Planning Council (NWPPC) is but one such body of work. In their 7th Power Plan, which was released at the beginning of 2016, is a chapter that addresses this very issue. Here's another source.

What the NWPPC found is that cheaper and more effective policies than building more renewables exist.  The Brookings Institution released a paper back in 2014 that made similar arguments. The Brookings paper noted that “…renewable incentives…without a carbon price [results in] renewable energy [replacing] low-carbon gas plants rather than high-carbon coal plants.”

Google launched a project RE < C, which it eventually shut down. However, two engineers who worked on it came to the conclusion that even if we could get to zero carbon emisssions, that based on James Hansen's climate work, the planet would contnue warming for centuries to come. To arrest that continued warming, carbon must be removed from the atmosphere. You can read their piece here.

Of course, advocates for 100% renewables will argue that that excerpt proves the point – what is needed is to close all fossil fuel electricity generation. Yet, advocates of a 100% renewable path often also oppose new transmission lines, large solar arrays in the desert, and new wind farms in otherwise pristine mountainsides.

There’s a great deal of passion among those advocating for a renewables-only approach. I’m sympathetic to that movement. After graduating college and before starting graduate school I did volunteer research for a fellow at the Sierra Club’s office across the bay in San Francisco. My M.S. thesis, completed in 1979, examined the economics of active solar system for residential construction. My first project in the Pacific Northwest was performing the economic analysis of energy efficiency building odes, (they are now the energy components of the residential building codes in the four Northwest states).  The Northwest consists of Idaho, Oregon, Washington, and Montana west of the Divide.  Even so, I find that I’ve got to temper my enthusiasm for clean energy with reality.

It’s that tempering that leads me to reject studies such as that by Jacobson and his colleagues on substantive grounds.  The fact is that contrary to his work, it isn't economic right now to convert every current use of fossil fuels to a very restrictive set of renewables – only those powered by the wind, the water, and sun. No nuclear. No carbon capture and storage. Only a little more energy efficiency.

Why would environmental organizations, such as The Sierra Club, oppose the adoption of a carbon tax, such as they did in Washington state, if they believe that cutting CO2 emissions is essential?

Recently, Portland and Multnomah County adopted a resolution that promotes 100% renewables community-wide by 2050. Yet, it contains a passage that specifically excludes from consideration "... energy derived from... nuclear, biomass feedstocks sourced from state and federal lands... and incineration of municipal and medical waste." It makes no mention of carbon capture and storage (CCS) or other cheaper approaches to removing existing CO2.

The Portland resolution allows its goals to be met via renewable energy credits (RECs). RECs can be bought separate from the electricity generated by the renewable. As a result, it allows for the perverse result in which a community buys REC's and then can legally claim to be using 100% renewably generated electricity while the utility serving that community continues to operate fossil fuel burning power plants. Using RECs is not the same as reducing the operation of existing fossil fueled electricity generating plants or removing existing CO2 from the atmosphere.

James Hansen and other scientist have argued that, as one report puts it, using renewables "... would not be enough and efforts [are needed] to ... reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by about 12.5 per cent."  They argue that could be achieved by agricultural measures such as planting trees and improving soil fertility.