This is the second half of Dan Kammen's plenary address before the Copenhagen Climate Congress (March 11, 2009) where he argues that improvements in the energy grid are critical to facilitate the rapid expansion of renewable energies.
IPCC Coordinating Lead Author Dan Kammen addressing the
Copenhagen Climate Congress. March 11, 2009, part 2. see part 1
Some points and excerpts from second half:
Obama's plan is like California's plan :
"This however is the plan endorsed by President Obama, it is essentially the same as the California plan, it calls for that return to 1990 levels by about 2020, and then this deep dive down to the IPPC, the 80% or so reduction levels by 2050."
Green Jobs Dividend is Temporary:
"Some of the new mechanisms that are being used by a number of politicians and business leaders to argue for it, is one of the features that is transitory but important in the short term and that is that there is a jobs dividend by investing green. That jobs dividend will decline over time, but in the beginning, it's a powerful political force, and it can generate jobs in some key areas."
Grid Improvement Key for Rapid Adoption of Renewables:
"Our laboratory has produced a model of the grid in the Western United States, that has essentially every power plant and every transmission line. and we build new transmission and storage... And I want to highlight just the result that you see by looking at the map of California. If one were to be the energy czar, as many people in California think they are unfortunately, and you were to build optimally based on lowest cost reaching various climate targets, what we know here is something critically important: without building some critical new transmission infrastructure, .... you actually can't get to your targets.
We need to enable with infrastructure, technologies required to build out new wind, new geothermal, new solar thermal, etc. In fact with a relatively moderate amount of new transmission build, we find that clean energy targets, more than 50% actually, are possible in California's future...
And in fact there's an interesting lesson, what I've plotted here is the fraction of new energy that comes from various sources as a function of the price of carbon. It goes from no price of carbon to a price of carbon of two hundred dollars a ton.
A remarkable piece of the story is that in a place like California or in Southern Europe and a variety of areas endowed with a great deal of renewables, the price of carbon is important to enable things, but the price of carbon has very little impact unless you build that infrastructure. Look at how flat that distribution is, it's critical that you build out the capacity that truly gets you to a point where even a modest price of carbon helps to tip the balance. And we'll argue later on about what mechanism is best to get there, and what price of carbon, but what this says is there are a number of places that can go exceedingly far, even with a low price of carbon, if in fact they enable it."
System Approach is critical:
"So it's the system's science, the system's economics, the system's engineering that's critical, in fact, more critical than, I would argue, the micro detail of some of the policies."
