Over the past century and a half electricity has emerged as a popular and versatile energy carrier. Today, electricity is exploited not only for its diverse end uses such as lighting, motion, refrigeration, communication and computation, but also as a primary carrier of energy. Electricity is one of two backbones of the modern energy system (liquid transportation fuels are the other), carrying high density energy over short and long distances for diverse uses. In 2009, electricity consumed the largest share of the United States’ primary energy, 38 percent, with transportation a close second at 37 percent. These two sectors also accounted for the largest shares of U.S. carbon emissions, 38 percent for electricity and 33 percent for transportation.

By far most electricity is generated by combustion of fossil fuels to turn steam or gas turbines. This is the least efficient step in the energy chain, converting only 36 percent of the chemical energy in the fuel to electric energy, when averaged over the present gas and coal generation mix. It also produces all the carbon emissions of the electricity chain. Beyond production, electricity is a remarkably clean and efficient carrier. Conversion from rotary motion of the turbine and generator to electricity, the delivery of electricity through the power grid, and the conversion to motion in motors for use in industry, transportation and refrigeration can be more than 90 percent efficient. None of these steps produces greenhouse gas emissions. It is the post-production versatility, cleanliness, and efficiency of electricity that make it a prime energy carrier for the future. Electricity generation, based on relatively plentiful domestic coal and gas, is free of immediate fuel security concerns. The advent of electric cars promises to increase electricity demand and reduce dependency on foreign oil, while the growth of renewable wind and solar generation reduces carbon emissions. The primary sustainability challenges for electricity as an energy carrier are at the production step: efficiency and emission of carbon dioxide and toxins.

The Electricity Grid: Capacity and Reliability

Beyond production, electricity faces challenges of capacity, reliability, and implementing storage and transmission required to accommodate the remoteness and variability of renewables. The largest capacity challenges are in urban areas, where 79 percent of the United States and 50 percent of the world population live. The high population density of urban areas requires a correspondingly high energy and electric power density. In the United States, 33 percent of electric power is used in the top 22 metro areas, and electricity demand is projected to grow 31 percent by 2035. This creates an “urban power bottleneck” where underground cables become saturated, hampering economic growth and the efficiencies of scale in transportation, energy use and greenhouse gas emission that come with high population density. Saturation of existing cable infrastructure requires installation of substantial new capacity, an expensive proposition for digging new underground cable tunnels.

The reliability of the electricity grid presents a second challenge. The United States’ grid has grown continuously from origins in the early 20th Century; much of its infrastructure is based on technology and design philosophy dating from the 1950s and 1960s, when the major challenge was extending electrification to new rural and urban areas. Outside urban areas, the grid is mainly above ground, exposing it to weather and temperature extremes that cause most power outages. The response to outages is frustratingly slow and traditional – utilities are often first alerted to outages by telephoned customer complaints, and response requires sending crews to identify and repair damage, much the same as we did 50 years ago. The United States’ grid reliability is significantly lower than for newer grids in Europe and Japan, where the typical customer experiences ten to 20 times less outage time than in the United States. Reliability is especially important in the digital age, when an interruption of even a fraction of a cycle can shut down a digitally controlled data center or fabrication line, requiring hours or days to restart.

Reliability issues can be addressed by implementing a smart grid with two-way communication between utility companies and customers that continuously monitors power delivery, the operational state of the delivery system, and implements demand response measures adjusting power delivered to individual customers in accordance with a previously established unique customer protocol. Such a system requires installing digital sensors that monitor power flows in the delivery system, digital decision and control technology and digital communication capability like that already standard for communication via the Internet. For customers with on-site solar generation capability, the smart grid would monitor and control selling excess power from the customer to the utility.

Integrating Renewable Electricity on the Grid

Accommodating renewable electricity generation by wind and solar plants is among the most urgent challenges facing the grid. Leadership in promoting renewable electricity has moved from the federal to the state governments, many of which have legislated Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS) that require 20 percent of state electricity generation to be renewable by 2020. 30 states and the District of Columbia have such requirements, the most aggressive being California with 33 percent renewable electricity required by 2020 and New York with 30 percent by 2015. To put this legal requirement in perspective, wind and solar now account for about 1.6 percent of U.S. electricity production; approximately a factor of ten short of the RPS requirements. (Crabtree & Misewich, 2010).

Renewable Variability

The grid faces major challenges to accommodate the variability of wind and solar electricity. Without significant storage capacity, the grid must precisely balance generation to demand in real time. At present, the variability of demand controls the balancing process: demand varies by as much as a factor of two from night to day as people go through their daily routines. This predictable variability is accommodated by switching reserve generation sources in and out in response to demand variations. With renewable generation, variation can be up to 70 percent for solar electricity due to passing clouds and 100 percent for wind due to calm days, much larger than the variability of demand. At the present level of 1.6 percent wind and solar penetration, the relatively small variation in generation can be accommodated by switching in and out conventional resources to make up for wind and solar fluctuations. At the 20 percent penetration required by state Renewable Portfolio Standards, accommodating the variation in generation requires a significant increase in the conventional reserve capacity. At high penetration levels, each addition of wind or solar capacity requires a nearly equal addition of conventional capacity to provide generation when the renewables are quiescent. This double installation to insure reliability increases the cost of renewable electricity and reduces its effectiveness in lowering greenhouse gas emissions.

A major complication of renewable variation is its unpredictability. Unlike demand variability, which is reliably high in the afternoon and low at night, renewable generation depends on weather and does not follow any pattern. Anticipating weather-driven wind and solar generation variability requires more sophisticated forecasts with higher accuracy and greater confidence levels than are now available. Because today’s forecasts often miss the actual performance target, additional conventional reserves must be held at the ready to cover the risk of inaccuracies, adding another increase to the cost of renewable electricity. Storage of renewable electricity offers a viable route to meeting the variable generation challenge.

How to Transmit Electricity Over Long Distances

The final challenge for accommodating renewables is long distance transmission. Although long distance delivery is possible where special high voltage transmission lines have been located, the capacity and number of such lines is limited. The situation is much like automobile transportation before the interstate highway system was built in the 1950s. It was possible to drive coast to coast, but the driving time was long and uncertain and the route indirect. To use renewable electricity resources effectively, we must create a kind of interstate highway system for electricity.

Attribution: Theis, T. & Tomkin, J. (Eds.). (2015). Sustainability: A comprehensive foundation. Retrieved from http://cnx.org/contents/1741effd-9cda-4b2b-a91e-003e6f587263@43.5. Available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. (CC BY 4.0). Modified from original by Kamala Doršner.