(Part 1)

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Skeptics often point to a number of familiar criticisms: that high penetrations of renewables are not possible; that such a future requires major technological innovation; that it requires unreasonable amounts of energy storage to balance variable wind and solar; that it requires massive build-out of transmission infrastructure, biomass generation capacity, large-scale hydro, or all of the above; that it requires major investment that simply isn’t there; that it is uncompetitively costly (at least without large subsidies); that variable renewables will undermine the reliability of grid power.

Couple such skepticism with IEA’s recent report noting that renewables have yet to make a serious dent in the carbon intensity of the global energy system—on which fossil fuels seem to have a strangle hold—and it’d be easy to side with the skeptics, but they are wrong.

Renewables’ track record shows that they continue to outpace skeptics’ expectations. “People thought that maybe renewables would get to two percent. When they did that, people said maybe five percent. Then 10 percent,” says Hutch Hutchinson, managing director at RMI. “Renewables have been fighting and scratching the entire way. Now, there’s good analytical evidence that with some creativity and customary levels of reinvestment in our energy system, we can get to a high renewables future.”

Eric Martinot, author of REN21’s Renewables Global Futures Report 2013, said something strikingly similar during a recent visit to RMI’s offices. He noted that the World Bank and others typically have a view of renewables that’s either behind the times by a decade (their image of 2013 is what renewables actually looked like in 2003) or low by a factor of ten (they think there’s much less renewable capacity than there really is).

But if we look to a growing body of consensus among energy futures studies and to an increasing number of examples from around the world today, we’ll see that a high renewables future is both possible and capable of coming soon. Indeed, in some places it’s already here....

(Part 2)

High Renewables are a Reality Today
The futures studies (referenced in yesterday’s post) are not a guarantee of what will happen. They’re various visions of what could happen. But increasingly, these possible futures are shifting from the hypothetical to the real. Around the world, economies are shifting to ones grounded in high penetrations of renewables.

In one sense, this isn’t news. Historically, there has been no shortage of countries powered mostly—even entirely—by renewables. But these countries, ranging from Norway and Sweden to Paraguay and Venezuela, have depended on large amounts of hydro. Yet we’re now seeing examples of high renewables powered by wind and solar, too.

In Denmark, the Danish Energy Agency set a bold goal for the country’s power to be 100 percent renewable by 2050, including generating 50 percent of electricity from wind by 2020. The country is well on its way to realizing that vision. In 2011, renewables accounted for more than 40 percent of Denmark’s domestic electricity production; wind power accounted for 28 percent of electricity generation. Then last year, wind crossed the 30 percent threshold. This year an offshore wind farm is expected to add another 400 MW to the country’s already installed 4.2 GW of wind capacity. Earlier this year in March, wind generated nearly 4 GW of power for the grid, just 800 MW shy of the entire country’s electricity needs. Later that same month, wind output exceeded nationwide demand, even if only for a short period.

There’s been similar success on a much larger scale in Spain, where installed wind capacity is five times that of Denmark. On a day in April 2012, wind supplied 61 percent of Spain’s electricity demand.

Momentary high-percentage outputs from variable renewables and Denmark’s ramp-up of renewables—with wind’s longer-term contributions to the grid there—have been more than commendable. In Portugal, meanwhile, we’re seeing equally impressive numbers of renewables’ sustained contributions of power to the grid. For a few hours toward the end of 2011, renewables supplied 100 percent of Portugal’s electricity. But over the first quarter of this year—three full months of 2013—renewables supplied an impressive 70 percent of that country’s power. Hydro accounted for 37 percent of electricity; wind ranked second with 27 percent of generation....

Germany's Renewables Revolution
While the examples of Japan, China, and India show the promise of rapidly emerging energy economies built on efficiency and renewables, Germany—the world’s number four economy and Europe’s number one—has lately provided an impressive model of what a well-organized industrial society can achieve. To be sure, it’s not yet the world champion among countries with limited hydroelectricity: Denmark passed 40% renewable electricity in 2011 en route to a target of 100% by 2050, and Portugal, albeit with more hydropower, raised its renewable electricity fraction from 17% to 45% just during 2005–10 (while the U.S., though backed by a legacy of big hydro, crawled from 9% to 10%), reaching 70% in the rainy and windy first quarter of 2013. But these economies are not industrial giants like Germany, which remains the best disproof of claims that highly industrialized countries, let alone cold and cloudy ones, can do little with renewables.

Germany has doubled the renewable share of its total electricity consumption in the past six years to 23% in 2012...

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This house is built (or retrofitted) efficiently, with thick walls, good insulation, and triple-glazed windows, so it wastes very little energy. It is heated and cooled by a system with sensors and separate vents in each room, controlled by a smart thermometer like the Nest that learns the habits of the house’s inhabitants and maximizes efficiency around them.

On our house’s roof is an array of solar panels that, at the mid-afternoon peak, provides more power than the house needs. For supplemental generation, when the panels aren’t producing or grid power is unusually expensive, the house’s basement contains a small microturbine running on natural gas (or biogas, if you prefer).

Excess energy from the solar panels can be stored in a fuel cell like the Bloom box, or in an appliance-sized battery pack, or in the batteries of the electric car parked in the garage.

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All of this stuff — panels, batteries, heating and cooling system, appliances — is tied together by software that tracks consumption and monitors price signals from the utility. The software can ramp up generation, reduce or delay non-essential consumption, store more energy, or sell more energy to the grid, depending on which choice is more valuable at the moment. In the event of a blackout or other grid failure, the software can “island” the house from the grid, at least temporarily, by cranking up the microturbine, emptying the batteries or the fuel cell, and dialing down unnecessary consumption.