The 25 by ’25 Renewable Energy Initiative for New Hampshire – Can We Do It? – Part 2

In my last post, I wrote that about 15% of our in-state energy use in 2010 came from renewable energy resources and that we are making progress towards reaching the goal of getting 25% of our energy needs from renewable energy by 2025 – the 25 x '25 goal. However, I also showed that our progress towards this goal has been on the back of reduced overall energy consumption rather than increased amounts of renewable energy.
 

This week I want to take a look at what it will take for us to achieve the 25 x '25 goal. We can achieve it in one of three ways. We can:

 

A) Increase the amount of renewable energy we generate and consume in-state.
B) Decrease our in-state energy consumption so that the existing base of  renewable energy becomes a larger fraction of our total energy supply.     
C) Simultaneously increase the amount of renewable energy we generate and reduce our overall statewide consumption of energy.

Before considering these options, it is worth taking a look at the direct use of energy in the state. Below are two pie charts. The one on the left shows the split for in-state energy usage - the net energy usage described in my previous post. I have simplified the available data by rolling residential, commercial and industrial use into a single category of "Buildings". As can be seen, the allocation for in-state direct energy use is 37% electricity, 36% transportation and 27% buildings. The second pie chart to the right shows the renewable energy components of these three main sectors in green. Relatively small proportions of the transportation sector and building sectors utilize renewable energy, 5 and 7%, respectively. However, for in-state electricity production (and as noted in my last post - grabbing all the green electrons for ourselves), we can see that a significant fraction, 29%, comes from renewable resources.

 

Let's take a look at Option A – increasing the amount of renewable energy. My previous post calculated that our in-state energy consumption (using 2010 data from the Energy information Agency) was 295 trillion BTUs. If we assume that our in-state energy consumption remains steady at this level, we would need to increase the renewable energy amount to 74 trillion BTUs. We are presently at 43 trillion BTUs from renewables so we would need to increase this amount by 31 trillion BTUs. We could do this by increasing renewable usage in each of the three main sectors but it is unlikely that this will happen in the transportation sector. We are already at 10% corn ethanol in our gasoline and this is unlikely to increase in the near future. Wood pellet-fueled transportation is unlikely to ever be practical. We could achieve the 31 trillion BTUs of new renewable energy by converting 60% of the present oil-fired building heat in the state to biomass in the form of wood pellets. My concern would be the sustainability of this approach. Can NH forests support this amount of biomass utilization? I suspect a statewide switchover to biomass heating is unlikely to happen in the next 12 years. Instead we will continue the slow substitution of oil furnaces by wood pellet burners that is presently underway. As long as oil prices continue to be high, this changeover will continue, homeowner by homeowner.

The only area where we could see a substantial increase in the amount of renewable energy is in the generation of electricity. However the additional 31 trillion BTUs would be equivalent to 135 25 MW wind plants, like the one in Lempster, or 80 15 MW wood-burning plants, like the one in Bethlehem, or 780 10 MW solar photovoltaic farms, each of which would require 100 acres of cleared land. This level of investment and approval of projects seems highly unlikely if not downright impossible. Based on last week's news of the rejection of the Antrim wind project by the NH Site Evaluation Committee, it is clear that the folks of New Hampshire do not want this level of impact on their environment.
 

In the "what's he been smoking" category of ideas, consider this one. If the Northern Pass project goes through, we could claim all those green hydroelectric electrons from Hydro Quebec for ourselves for our renewable energy accounting purposes. Even though the energy is intended for the rest of New England, they are nice juicy green electrons, they are coming through New Hampshire and they are being converted from DC to AC in Franklin, NH. Is it so unreasonable to claim those green Canadian electrons for our renewable energy goals? In that case, we could meet our renewable goal as the Northern Pass project should bring in the equivalent of 32 trillion BTU of energy, if not more.

Crazy ideas aside, that brings us to Option B - decreasing our in-state energy consumption. To achieve this, we will need to tackle the topic of energy waste. As noted in previous blogs, we waste an inordinate amount of energy. In the pie charts below I again show the in-state split of energy in the three main categories of transportation, electricity and buildings: to the right I show the proportions of energy losses, in grey, for each of the three categories.

 

Overall, our energy losses are 60% of total in-state energy use (the sum of the grey slices above) and this would appear to be a fine place to direct our efforts. However, as noted in a previous post, we need to be realistic about these losses. We can never totally eliminate them due to the nature of energy, materials, electricity and the laws of physics. Nevertheless, there is a lot we can do to reduce our energy losses. Examples abound and I cannot do justice to them in this blog, but they include reducing transportation losses through higher MPG vehicles, improving the efficiency of building heating and HVAC systems, as well as improving the efficiency of electricity generation and transmission operations through new, higher efficiency power plants, equipment upgrades and even the utilization of wasted byproduct heat in district heating applications. Of course, we cannot overlook the fact that energy usage can be reduced by better insulation of our buildings, which, in turn, reduces the buildings slice.
 

It is clear that there is lot we can do in the reduction of waste and energy usage category and we should continue our efforts in these areas but we need to be rather sober minded about where this gets us. To achieve the 25% by 2025 renewable energy goal we would need to reduce in-state energy consumption by 174 trillion BTU, assuming little change in the present level of renewables, or by 60% (!) of our present usage. To put this into context, bear in mind that we have only reduced our energy consumption by 9% over the 2005 to 2010 six-year period. Frankly and pragmatically speaking, a 60% reduction in our energy usage is unlikely to happen in the next 12 years.
 

Perhaps we can consider Option C, which involves a combination of increased amounts of renewable energy and reductions in energy consumption and losses. In many respects this is the road we are presently on, with the slow introduction (and even slower approval) of wind projects and the gradual substitution of wood for oil in building heating applications as well as the usage reductions I noted in my previous blog. However, even a 20% increase in renewable energy will require us to reduce energy consumption by 50% to reach 25% renewable energy by 2025. It will take enormous amounts of money, political will, bipartisan agreement, coordinated effort, and goodwill - as well as an updated State energy plan to achieve this. All of these factors are in short supply – the State energy plan is dated "2002". My opinion is that the 25 by '25 goal has little chance of being achieved. I simply don't see it happening. Maybe we need to rethink our goal - perhaps we can achieve 25% by 2050 or 20% by 2035.
 

Or am I wrong? What do you think? And what about those green Canadian electrons - should we count them?

Until next time, remember to turn off those lights when you leave the room.

Mike Mooiman

Franklin Pierce University

mooimanm@franklinpierce.edu

2/17/13

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