The Sept. 29 debate between President Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden didn’t draw rave reviews, but there was one bright spot, said Dan Shreve, Wood Mackenzie’s head of Global Wind Energy Research.

“Happily, climate change did get about 10 minutes of the debate last night, which is far more than what was seen in the last presidential election,” Shreve said during a presentation at Greentech Media’s annual Power and Renewables Summit last week. “So certainly, environmental concerns are top of mind for folks.”

By one account, the three debates in the 2016 presidential general election spent less than six minutes on climate change and other environmental issues. In 2000, by contrast, Al Gore and George W. Bush spent more than 14 minutes discussing the environment over three debates.

While Trump has dismissed concern over climate change and is promising to continue rolling back environmental regulations, Biden has proposed a $2 trillion plan to eliminate power sector carbon emissions by 2035 and make the U.S. the leader in electric vehicle production. (See Biden Offers $2 Trillion Climate Plan.)

“The stakes are exceptionally high” in this election, said Shreve, citing both the presidential race and the fight for control of the Senate.

The Biden plan would require 1,500 GW of new capacity — more than 1,100 GW of utility-scale solar, 243 GW of onshore wind and 142 GW of offshore wind — plus 410 GW of battery storage, an estimated $2.2 trillion in capital expenditures.

“There are some big changes in here, and that’s why we’re characterizing them as aspirational. The changes are so substantial and require so much collaboration — things that we haven’t had a great deal of here in the United States for some time,” Shreve said.

The $2.2 trillion doesn’t cover transmission and other infrastructure upgrades needed to support the additional renewables. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s 2018 interconnection seams study, which proposed three HVDC transmission connections between the Eastern and Western Interconnections, would cost about $250 billion, Shreve said.

The Climate Institute’s proposed North American Supergrid, which envisions 42,000 miles of new HVDC transmission, most of it underground, has a price tag of almost $500 billion, he added.

Winning legislative approval and finding funding isn’t the end of the battle, however.

“We’re running increasingly into wind and solar permitting issues,” Shreve said. “A great deal of NIMBY [not in my back yard] concerns being voiced through social media and a variety of different avenues. … This same thing happens when we start talking about transmission infrastructure” needed to deliver wind power to load centers.

Energy Vault, which stores renewable energy by raising and lowering 35-ton cement bricks, won a $110 million investment from Softbank. | Energy Vault

If emission-free resources supply 90% of the nation’s power needs, the remaining 10% could be filled by natural gas-fired generation, but that would require refining carbon-capture technologies that have yet to reach commercialization, Shreve said.

“There’s an enormous amount of R&D that has to happen and a tremendous amount of risk of those technologies [not] actually reaching some level of commercial success.”

Shreve said venture capital has been pouring into companies attempting to develop long-duration, high-energy-density storage applications that could be paired with wind, citing Gravitricity and Energy Vault, which received a $110 million investment from Softbank.

“They are still very early-stage technologies,” he cautioned.

National Grid CEO Discusses Electrification Challenges

In another session at the virtual conference, Badar Khan, president of National Grid US, said decarbonizing heating will be the biggest obstacle to addressing climate change. The utility serves 20 million people in Massachusetts, New York and Rhode Island.

“Home heating is going to be the hardest sector to decarbonize because the current technologies beyond natural gas are just much more expensive. The good news is that plenty of people are working on solutions,” he said, referring to geothermal heat pumps, biogas from landfills and wastewater treatment plants, and “green” hydrogen made from renewable power.

“Whether it’s the electrifying pathway or the biogas/hydrogen pathway, we’re going to need to see a lot of innovation and policy support and a lot of customer engagement,” Khan said.

‘Bullish’ on the Future

Todd Glass, a partner in energy and infrastructure for the Palo Alto law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, said he’s “bullish” on the future.

“Renewables are becoming cheaper and cheaper, and the marginal cost of energy is lower than we ever thought it would be, especially 10 to 15 years ago when we were starting to do these types of things. The second thing is that the technology in the controls and dynamic pricing … these technologies with [artificial intelligence] and other things like that are driving innovation at the grid edge in a way that delivers value to customers.”

Glass said he’d like to “restart the conversation” from the beginning of utility restructuring 20 years ago, saying customers want “the opportunity … to be green.”

While two-thirds of the U.S. load is in restructured states, “one-third of the load has zero choice. That means they get whatever their utility serves up,” he said. “That is so stuck in the past and so contrary to the customers’ interest. For too long … utilities and captured utility commissions have deigned to speak for what customers want. I think we need to focus on what the customers actually want and put their interests first.”

‘Huge Opportunity’

Dan Seif, vice president of market development for 7X Energy, a Texas-based utility-scale solar and storage developer, said load-serving entities in Texas — particularly those not subject to retail choice — should be contracting for storage.

He said ERCOT’s interconnection queue has 200 MW of storage and is likely to hit 1 GW within two years. “The real issue that’s keeping it from … exploding and realizing the size of the queue is contractability of ancillary services, particularly” responsive reserve service (RRS), he said.

Seif said RRS represents two-thirds of the ancillary services that load-serving entities must purchase. “There’s a huge opportunity that’s kind of obvious for load-serving entities,” he said. “They should buy a portion of their load exposure from storage projects or solar and storage projects. All the big guys — Reliant [Energy], EDF [Renewables], the big monopoly utilities … Austin Energy, [Lower Colorado River Authority], Brazos [Electric Power Cooperative] — no reason not to put that into your portfolio and enable some of these storage projects.

“I think a lot of them are thinking about it, but maybe everybody is kind of looking to the left and right and saying, ‘You first.’”

Seif said some financial traders are looking at storage for arbitrage opportunities. But the “natural buyers” are LSEs, “as long as they think they’re going to have a lot of load for a while. And the monopolies have no excuse — the customers have nowhere to go.”