Biden Wants the U.S. to Stop Contributing to Climate Change by 2050. Here’s What that Would Actually Take.

December 17, 2020

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by Chris Mooney (Washington Post) ... And all of it is powered by an array of solar and sometimes distant wind installations, which route electricity across the country thanks to a gargantuan network of power lines that triples the scale of the United States’ current transmission infrastructure. You see them — the panels, the turbines, the lines — everywhere you drive, everywhere you go.

By 2050, in President-elect Joe Biden’s vision of the country — even more ambitious than what the Obama administration proposed — the United States would no longer be putting greenhouse gases into the air. And for that to happen, it is likely that our world would have to look a lot like what was just described.

That is the gist of what an extremely detailed study from energy experts at Princeton University describes in 344 exacting slides outlining what it would take for the United States to be “net zero” in 30 years — meaning any remaining greenhouse gas emissions would be offset by subtractions through forests, agriculture or perhaps directly sucking carbon from the air.

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In the next 10 years alone, the report says, we would need to add 50 million electric vehicles, quadruple the size of wind and solar in the United States, and expand the transmission infrastructure by 60 percent. It would certainly take a concerted effort — and legislation that, right now, it is hard to imagine Congress signing onto.

“If you took it as a given that you were going to get to net zero by 2050, this is the full onboard, all-hands-on-deck kind of thing that you would need to do,” said Susan Tierney, a senior adviser at the Analysis Group and an energy expert who advised on the report. “And it’s overwhelming.”

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Furthermore, the Princeton study goes into great detail about how, by 2050, moving those electrons around would require a massive build-out of electric transmission lines, a rough tripling of the existing infrastructure.

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In such a scenario, Tierney said, “the electric system is going to be much more visible and everywhere — more power lines, more solar panels, more wind turbines on the landscape.”

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Generally, this is where the energy models start to assume that we will have technological innovations later in the century that will fix these problems, such as the ability to withdraw a lot of carbon from fossil energy plants or directly from the air and bury it in the ground; the use of hydrogen fuels to a substantial extent; and the growth of a very large bioenergy industry that does not currently exist. These are all technologies that we fundamentally know can work and that exist at a small scale already, but they are in their infancy.

So according to Jenkins (Jesse Jenkins, assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering) and the Princeton modelers, what basically has to happen is large investment in these prospects now, to have them available at a reasonable cost later — even though it is not known precisely how they will be used, or in what combination, just yet.

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There could be all kinds of “friction” that energy system modelers say they’re not able to include in their scenarios, she said: Legal issues. Permitting issues. Changes in consumer behavior, or resistance to changes. People wanting to keep their gas burners on their stoves, for instance, or not wanting to buy an electric car.

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Getting it all approved could hit significant, often local, hurdles. READ MORE

Big but affordable effort needed for America to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, Princeton study shows (Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment/Princeton University; includes VIDEO)

Net-Zero America: Potential Pathways, Infrastructure and Impacts (Princeton University)

Mediocrity Is The Enemy Of The Solution (Clean Technica)

Big but affordable effort needed for America to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, study shows (Princeton University/Phys.Org)

Where Does Big Oil Fit Into Biden’s Plan For Net-Zero Emissions By 2050? (Forbes)

Excerpts from Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment / Princeton University: The new "Net-Zero America" research outlines five distinct technological pathways for the United States to decarbonize its entire economy. The research is the first study to quantify and map with this degree of specificity, the infrastructure that needs to be built and the investment required to run the country without emitting more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than are removed from it each year. It’s also the first to pinpoint how jobs and health will be affected in each state at a highly granular level, sometimes down to the county.

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The scenarios that the new research details include a “high electrification” or E+ scenario, which involves aggressively electrifying buildings and transportation, so that 100% of cars are electric by 2050. The “less high electrification” or E- scenario, electrifies at a slower rate and uses more liquid and gaseous fuels for longer. Another scenario, noted as E- B+, allows much more biomass to be used in the energy system, which, unlike the other four scenarios, would require converting some land currently used for food agriculture to grow energy crops. The E+ RE+ pathway is an "all-renewables" scenario and also is the most technologically restrictive. It assumes no new nuclear plants would be built, disallows below-ground storage of carbon dioxide, and eliminates all fossil fuel use by 2050. It relies instead on massive and rapid deployment of wind and solar and greater production of hydrogen to meet carbon goals. The E+ RE- scenario, by comparison, relies on “limited renewables,” constraining the annual construction of wind turbines and solar power plants to be no faster than the fastest rates achieved by the country in the past, but removes other restrictions. This scenario depends more heavily on the expansion of power plants with carbon capture and nuclear power.

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“The current power grid took 150 years to build. Now, to get to net-zero emissions by 2050, we have to build that amount of transmission again in the next 15 years and then build that much more again in the 15 years after that. It's a huge amount of change,” said Jenkins (Jesse Jenkins, assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering).

A critical issue for driving this clean-energy agenda is where new solar panel and wind turbine manufacturing facilities are built, and where the solar and wind farms themselves are sited, along with biofuel production plants. The research provides city and regional maps that show where it is least costly to build these facilities and where they integrate into the energy system most efficiently. But this does not account for the social and human aspects of where to construct new infrastructure.

“Individuals and communities across the country are going be affected by net-zero transitions in different ways. All Americans will be crucial partners in this transition, and we must be sensitive to the needs and values of communities when planning and implementing the very significant infrastructure and other developments needed to get to net-zero,” said Greig (Chris Greig, the Theodora D. '78 & William H. Walton III '74 Senior Research Scientist at the Andlinger Center).

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Funding for the research was provided by BP through the Carbon Mitigation Initiative at Princeton’s High Meadows Environmental Institute, ExxonMobil through Princeton E-ffiliates Partnership at the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, with in-kind support from the University of Queensland. READ MORE