By Rich Heidorn Jr.

PHILADELPHIA — Jesse Jenkins, an assistant professor at Princeton University, opened the Raab Roundtable in the PJM Footprint on Wednesday with a sobering look at the dramatic changes needed to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

“We have to get to zero [net emissions] as rapidly as possible,” Jenkins, of Princeton’s Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, said during the roundtable on electrifying the building and transportation sectors. “How quickly we get there determines the overall amount of warming that we incur. And really, every 10th of a degree matters … every year of delay does matter and does mean increasing impacts on our climate, on our vulnerable populations, on our cities and on our economies.”

Electrification and decarbonization of the generation supply are essential to meeting the net zero target by 2050, Jenkins said. “If you want to get down to zero emissions, you want to contain the overall budget, the electric sector is the most cost-effective place to start rapidly cutting emissions.”

It means eliminating coal and natural gas (responsible for 60% of current electric production), unless carbon capture becomes viable, and keeping half of the existing nuclear fleet operating through mid-century.

The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory developed three scenarios for the growth in electric demand from electrification, ranging from a 50% increase by 2050 under the lowest case to 125% in the highest.

“Depending on the pace of electrification, we have to double overall electric supplies from carbon-free sources sometime in the next five to 10 years,” Jenkins said. “Sometime between 2035 and 2040, we have to build the equivalent of all U.S. electric generation from new carbon-free sources to be on track. And then, if we’re on a rapid electrification pace, we need to do that all again by 2050.

“We’ve built the entire U.S. grid we have today in about 150 years. We have to do all of that in the next 30 [years]. So, this is a huge lift. It’s a tremendous transformation of our electric sources and an increasing role of electricity as a central part of our energy demand across sectors that as of today don’t really rely much on electrification, like transportation and various industrial processes.”

About 20 to 30 GW of new clean energy generation needs to be built per year — each 1 GW the equivalent of a large nuclear power plant.

That’s four to six times faster than the peak year of U.S. wind and solar additions (5.3 GW in 2016). But Jenkins said there is some precedent: France and Sweden each added nuclear power at a pace (scaled for U.S. population growth) of more than 26 GW annually in the 1970s and ’80s.

Fortunately, the cost of wind has dropped 69% since 2009 while solar and storage costs are down 88% and 85%, respectively.

But Jenkins said relying on only wind, solar and batteries would be like trying to play basketball with only point guards.

“What we need to fill out the rest of the team is something that substitutes for our natural gas- and coal-fired power plants in the firm generation that they provide today,” he said referring to geothermal, biomass, biogas, nuclear, and coal or gas with carbon sequestration.

“What we need is to really be pushing these technologies forward so that over the next 10 years, we are bringing them to market in a way that’s cost-effective and can complete the overall team,” Jenkins said.

How Many Bites of the Apple?

Ryan Jones, co-founder of consulting firm Evolved Energy Research, continued the discussion with a slide illustrating how often elements of the energy infrastructure will be replaced by 2050: “the number of bites of the apple, so to speak, that we get by mid-century.”

“Something like an appliance, we might have two or three replacements. For your heating system in a home, it might be one or two replacements. For a vehicle that lasts an average of 15 years, we may just get only one replacement between now and 2050.”

Jenkins asked Jones how to build the electric transmission that will be needed.

“I think the federal government has to play some role,” Jones said.

“I was afraid you’d say that,” Jenkins responded.

“I think the ability to site long-distance transmission involves the federal government inevitably,” Jones continued. “I think what we’ve seen, especially in the Northeast, is … state level and regional fights about transmission: the path it takes; what state boundaries it crosses. Who benefits? And I think if we have to fight [for] each of these lines one at a time, we’re never going to reach the type of transition that we’re talking about.”

Jones said the rates of electrification that give the best chance of reaching a zero-carbon energy system are “extremely aggressive” with 50% of new vehicle sales electric in 2030 and half of new building heating systems using heat pumps by the same year.

Perceptions, Slow Turnover Limit Building Electrification

Rick Nortz, senior manager of utility and efficiency programs for Mitsubishi Electric, said heat pumps are up to the challenge but face an image problem. “Most people don’t believe they work in cold temperatures,” he said because earlier generations of electric heat were inefficient. The current technology is two to four times more efficient than electric baseboard heat and can produce 100% of output down to 5 degrees Fahrenheit.

Sue Coakley, executive director of Northeast Energy Efficiency Partnerships, said advanced heat pumps are cost-competitive with home gas space heating on a fuel cost basis ($/MMBTU) in PJM. In New Jersey and Michigan, which have low gas rates and comparatively high electric rates, advanced heat pumps require a higher level of efficiency (a coefficient of performance of 3.0) to compete with gas heating.

Building electrification “isn’t a technological problem, but it is fundamentally a policy issue,” said Val Jensen, senior vice president of strategy and policy for Exelon. “And we have no clear sense of how to close that gap between the technical potential for electrification of buildings and … the so-called expected case.”

Buildings can last 100 years, and heating and cooling equipment are good for 15 to 20 years, limiting the opportunities for new technology, Jensen said.

Officials in Brookline, Mass., staked out their policy position recently by banning fossil fuel furnaces in new buildings, allowing gas use only for cooking. Massachusetts could follow with a similar statewide ban, Nortz said.

Jensen said that although decarbonization is central to Exelon’s long-term strategy, it and other utilities that own gas companies are facing “a deeply existential question.” They must continue investing in aging gas infrastructure to ensure safety while knowing that their assets could decline in value if more jurisdictions impose restrictions on gas usage.

Jensen also noted that, under old rules that encouraged conservation, Illinois and some other jurisdictions prohibit utilities from promoting additional electric use.

D.C., which is among the cities that has pledged to become carbon-neutral goal by 2050, recently enacted a law setting “building energy performance standards” for existing structures larger than 50,000 square feet. The law will require those buildings to meet a median energy use intensity target that will get tougher over time. Buildings that fail will be subject to fines.

The district also is expected to introduce “net-zero ready” building codes for new construction next year, to be followed by net-zero energy codes by 2026. The difference: The first set of codes won’t have an on-site renewable generation requirement but will have all the stringent energy efficiency measures.