A webinar last week to discuss strategies for meeting Maine’s renewable portfolio standards and emission-reduction targets presented a stark reminder of just how challenging decarbonizing the entire power sector and curtailing global climate change will be.

The Environmental & Energy Technology Council of Maine (E2Tech) on Wednesday invited four panelists to present their own strategy for meeting Maine’s ambitious goals: a 45% greenhouse gas emissions reduction below 1990 levels by 2030, and at least 80% by 2050; and 80% renewable energy by 2030 and 100% by 2050.

Though each speaker emphasized different methods, all would involve an unprecedented buildout in solar and wind energy and a paradigm shift in how electricity is valued on the wholesale and retail markets. It would also involve massive electrification of all sectors of the state’s economy.

“One of the things that became clear as we prepared [for the webinar] is that we are overlapping quite a bit in our findings,” said Jürgen Weiss, a principal with The Brattle Group. “I think that by itself is an interesting observation. We’ll quibble about the last 5% or maybe the last 10% in the details here and there, but the overall conclusions that we come to are strikingly similar actually.”

Richard Silkman, CEO of advising firm Competitive Energy Services, said that converting all end uses of energy to electricity in the state would more than triple the 12 TWh used annually to about 40 TWh, while peak demand would go from about 2 GW to about 10 GW.

Weiss used a previous Brattle study that analyzed New England’s trajectory to obtaining 80% renewables by 2050 to present a comparison to Silkman’s projections. The study showed that the region would need about 200 GW of total capacity, over six times more than it has currently.

“So if I want to scare anybody about how hard it will be to do it, I’ll frame it this way: We took 100 years to build the current electric system of something like 30 GW. Now we have 30 years to build an entirely new system of 200 GW,” Weiss said. “So that’s pretty scary.”

One of the biggest challenges for Maine and the rest of New England is that solar does not have as large a capacity factor as it does in other, sunnier parts of the U.S. New England’s demand also peaks in winter, when sunlight is less productive. That means the state will have to build an extraordinary amount of solar facilities to replace the large, retiring fossil fuel plants in the region, panelists said.

That presents its own challenges, said Richard Perez, senior research associate at the University of Albany’s Atmospheric Sciences Research Center. He focused his presentation on “ultra-high penetration PV,” as he said solar has the highest potential to meet global demand. “When we think of a ‘mix’ of solutions, for me the mix is solar,” he said. “Most of the other energy sources are byproducts of solar.”

The main challenge is converting solar from being a seasonal, intermittent resource to a firm, dispatchable one: “something that’s available 24/7/365, without downtime,” Perez said. A massive buildout of storage is one solution, he said, but “extremely expensive … even assuming very low future costs for storage.” Perez’s idea is to build more solar than is actually needed and purposefully curtail it, a model he calls “implicit storage.”

The problem is “nobody pays you to curtail,” making his solution “not dependent on technology; it’s more dependent on the policy and the rules of remuneration.”

The state will also have to evolve from its customer-driven model of renewable procurement. Perez related his own experience with making his New York home a net zero energy consumer: rooftop solar panels, an in-home battery and an electric vehicle. “None of those millions of customers [in his home city of Albany] could do what I did; they don’t have the space or maybe the financial position to do it. And the big industrial customers can not do that either.

“So if I [can] solve my problem and be proud about it, it’s far from solving what we need to do for [the] climate,” he said.

Another challenge is that Maine residents are also very protective of their state’s heavily forested land and scenic mountain views. Under Silkman’s analysis, onshore wind would also have to significantly increase, though not as much as solar, from 1 GW currently to 2.5 GW. That’s “problematic in Maine, I understand, given people’s love for mountaintops,” he said.

Perez noted grassroots, environmental opposition to PV development on the grounds of protecting land and trees. He said it would take 8,500 square miles to power the U.S. with 55% solar under his model of overbuilding. “So, it looks gigantic … until you put it in perspective and look at the ground distribution in the U.S.” That 8,500 square miles represents about 1% of farmland in the contiguous U.S., he said.

In Maine, assuming the same proportion of solar in the generation mix, facilities would only take up 37 square km — compared to the state’s nearly 56,000 square km of forest. “There’s so much space, in fact, you could even foresee doing away with wind” and using 100% solar, he said.

‘Fall Far Short’

The panelists’ projections and strategies made it clear that Maine and New England are behind on achieving their goals.

“At the current rates of deployment of renewables that are now on the horizon for the next decade, we’re going to fall far short of building these large capacities of renewable resources by 2050,” Weiss said. “We have to roughly increase the annual average deployment rate [by] four to eight times … about [3,000] to 6,000 MW per year” between now and 2050. “So that’s scary.”

Regarding emissions reductions, Silkman said that the state’s 2050 goal is still possible if it significantly ramps up its electrification and renewable buildout. “But it’s not going to happen in the 2020s, no matter what we do,” he said. “This decade’s gone. But we can start to see some serious reductions in the 2030s and 2040s.”

Kurt Adams, CEO of Summit Utilities, concluded his remarks by encouraging attendees. “Stay humble and work hard,” he said. “We’re changing the status quo. It’s very, very difficult. And it’s very difficult for a lot of reasons. So it just takes a lot of work and a lot of checking yourself and thinking about how you’re moving things forward, rejecting your ideas if they’re not being successful and picking the next one up and driving forward.”