So today, it's our great fortune and my pleasure to be hosting Dr. Jones-
Albertus. Becca is the acting deputy director of the solar energy technology
office, which is known to many of us as the SunShot program in Washington. That
office has been instrumental in trying to do a lot with small resources in
terms of bringing solar to a cost competitiveness with coal. And their...
their research impact, and particularly their impact on creating and informing
the community of US researchers and solar, has been absolutely tremendous.
So Becca has been with SunShot, that is said SETO, solar energy technology office,
for four years. Prior to that, she was in the private sector working on dilute
nitride materials for PV. And prior to that, she received her PhD in material
science from Berkeley and undergraduate from Princeton. I'll mention that—I want to
get on with the talk, but I will mention that papers like this—this is 2016
paper right—in Prague photovoltaics, Becca is the first author, are absolutely
essential. Anyone who wants to get involved in PV or remain relevant in PV
should read these papers to inform ourselves of how to really move the
needle on global carbon. So I find these very influential and they really help me
guide my own research, so I hope this is informative to everyone else as well.
Alright, thank you, Becca.
Thanks very much, Raf. It's my pleasure to be here talking with you all today. So
I'll be talking...I titled my talk The Potential for Solar, and I'm excited to
give a little bit of historical context about how much solar has grown and the
advances that have occurred really recently, as well as talking a little bit
about where things can go in the future. So before I dive in, I just wanted to
give an overview of solar technologies. I imagine that most of you in this room
are pretty familiar with photovoltaics. And these are semiconductor materials
that, you know, most commonly silicon, that directly convert light into electricity.
The cells shown here are integrated and strung together in modules which then
make up systems like you see on this rooftop. One of maybe the less
highlighted but exciting things about PV is that it maintains its efficiency at
any size, effectively. So you can have very very small systems that have the
same power efficient generation efficiency as very large systems, you
know, roughly speaking. And that's very different than most power generation
systems that are based on generators and turbines that need sufficient size in
order to be efficient. The other technology which may not be as well
known to all of you is concentrating solar thermal power and that's the
pictures shown here. So with concentrating solar thermal
power—CSP as we call it—you use mirrors called heliostats to concentrate all the
light onto a single receiver. In this case, the receiver is shown here. It's a
power tower, so you concentrate all the light onto this receiver where it's
turned into a heat and that heat can then be stored until it's needed. Then
it's used to run a conventional turbine generation system, so again, what...what's
...what's exciting about CSP is that it can inherently incorporate storage,
so you can inherently have solar electricity on-demand, not just when the
sun is shining. Today the large dominance of technology
that's been installed that's solar is PV. In the U.S., CSP is about 2% of installed
solar technology, but again, CSP allows for some higher value solar energy. As I
said, I see this as a really exciting time for solar. It's just been amazing
how much change has occurred over the last decade and even...even more recently
than the last decade. In the last 10 years, we've had a hundred-fold times
more solar generation installed in the U.S., going from less than one hundredth
of one percent of U.S. electricity to, for the first time last year, generating
more than one percent of U.S. electricity. Taking solar from a very
expensive niche technology to a viable electricity source that last year, for
the first time, was the largest share of new electricity generation capacity
added to the grid, for the first time. So 39% of all new power generation capacity
added last year was solar, was photovoltaics, with natural gas and wind
being the next largest shares. The solar industry has also been a tremendous
source of job creation and that has, you know, gone commensurately with the
increase in installations. So you see here over the same time period the growth in jobs
in the solar industry. There were two hundred sixty thousand jobs in the solar
industry last year, and solar has been growing at a rate that's 17 times faster
than the overall economy. More than half of these jobs—the ones in dark blue here—
are installation jobs, so actually installing the new PV systems, with the
next three largest shares being project development, sales and distribution, and
manufacturing across the supply chain.
Now as I said, one percent of U.S. electricity comes from solar, but there
are some states...parts of the country where those numbers are much higher, not
shown here. These numbers are from last year. Every time, essentially, I look at these
numbers they grow and the ones you see next year will be, in many cases,
significantly higher than here. So you have California, which last year got 13% of
its electricity from solar. A little over 1% of that from CSP, commercial and
residential systems, distributed PV like the picture of PV on the rooftop that I
had there next, and then this largest share from utility scale systems like
this topaz plant which is a 550 megawatt plant in California. You see we have
states—Hawaii, Vermont, Nevada— all over 7% electricity from PV and
growing. Worldwide the trends are fairly similar. This data is a year older from
2015, but solar generated about 1% of worldwide electricity in 2015.
And again, with some countries in this case, having much higher penetrations.
In this case, Italy, Germany at about 8% being the...being the leaders. And solar
is projected to continue to grow, showing here baseline projections that are from
the National Renewable Energy Labs regional energy deployment system model.
And for 2030 these are a pretty good agreement with the Department of
Energy's Energy Information Administration, EIA's, projections as
well. And what you see for the orange bars here which your solar, is that in
sort of the baseline case, baseline expectation, solar is expected to grow to
about 5% of U.S. electricity in 2030 and then roughly 15%. EIA's projections are a
little lower, about 12%, by 2050. But again,
significantly greater amounts of U.S. electricity growing over the next few
decades. And at the same time, projections have historically underestimated
PV's growth. These are U.S. projections from EIA's
annual Energy Outlook and the black dots are the actual installations in the
U.S. and then the lines here are the projections for solar installations for
subsequent...subsequent years. And basically the trend you see is that the
actual black dots in general, you know, are consistently above the lines where
they're projected. Same has been true worldwide looking at the IEA's World
Energy Outlook, where the historical..the actual projections in black continue to
exceed historical projections. So why has solar growth been been growing so
rapidly? One of the big factors is it's been rapidly declining in cost.
So again U.S. installations growing—we're seeing deployment or...sorry costs, here's
for system cost,s falling by about a factor of four at the same time that
these installations are growing so rapidly. Now that was in system price, I'm
going to say a few more things about cost, but switched to a different metric—
the levelized cost of electricity. When talking about costs of solar electricity,
I really prefer the LCOE metric to system costs or other cost metrics and
that's because it's a lifecycle cost. It includes the cost of installing the
system, the cost of operating...the operations maintenance costs of the
system, tax implications through the actual taxes paid and depreciation,
expense, as well as the cost of the financing, the cost of the capital, which
is a significant factor in overall cost, in addition to any residual value or
decommissioning cost. So it's the full costs over the life cycle divided by the
power production over the lifetime. So not just how much power is produced when
the system is installed, but it accounts for how much degradation the system
experiences over time, so more reliable systems produce more power over the
lifetime—that's a lower life cycle cost. This is also influenced significantly
by where these systems are installed. The actual kilowatt hours per kilowatt, so
that's...that's actually like the climate, how much sun is there, what's the
temperature of the region. So now moving to LCOE and just talking more about cost
reduction, very recently we announced through the Department of Energy the
accomplishment of a big metric for us. So in 2011, the Department of Energy
announced the SunShot initiative. At that time, the big challenge for solar was
that it was too expensive. It was about a factor of four more expensive than
conventional electricity sources. So for solar to become really a viable
electricity source, its cost had to fall. And the SunShot initiative was launched
to drive those cost reductions forward. The goal was by 2020 to achieve, for
utility scale systems, the large systems, six cents a kilowatt hour. We announced
in September that that goal was achieved this year. So again, these...these factor of
more than four cost reductions happening even faster than was..what was seen to be
a very aggressive goal when the SunShot initiative was was announced. Now the SunShot
initiative also had goals for the other sectors—residential and commercial
systems. And in red here, you see again the costs...levelized cost of energy in
2010 in those sectors. And green is the bars in 2017, so costs have fallen
dramatically in these sectors as well, but we haven't achieved the SunShot 2020
goals yet in those sectors. And the blue bars, they still need further cost
reduction, particularly in the soft cost— the customer acquisition, the
installation, the interconnection, the permitting costs—those still need to
fall further to reach the 2020 goals. So cost reduction was a major factor in
this increase in deployment we've seen. Policy and incentives have been the
other major factor. As you see on this map, just showing the large number of
states in the U.S. that have renewable portfolio standards that are
driving additional investment in renewables. We also have the federal
investment tax credit, which is a 30 percent tax credit, so effectively a 30
percent reduction in the upfront system costs, not in the full LCOE, but in the
upfront system cost of a PV system. Both of those have also been, you know, very
important factors in driving the rapid growth we've seen in solar installations.
So as I said before when the SunShot initiative was launched in 2011, the big
challenge was cost. How do we get solar cost down? Today, solar's become a viable
electricity source. It's 1% of our electricity generation and the challenges are
changing. Now the challenge is there's... our grid integration. How do we get solar
power, which is a variable power source, which is being installed on the
distribution side of the grid, how do we integrate that well into the electricity
grid and maintain a reliable resilient grid? As well as, how do we deal with...I'll
talk more about the declining value of PV. As more PV's installed its value
decreases. And it turns out that continuing to focus on cost reduction is
an important strategy for that, but this is no longer the only focus and it's
no longer the only challenge and opportunity with solar.
So saying more about great integration challenges, I'll put up the schematic
here. So historically our electricity grid has looked something like this.
We have generation systems on the left. They flow through transmission lines to
substation out onto the distribution system. Power flows in one direction. With
solar, we have solar on the generation transmission side, but we also see
solar on the distribution system. Solar is not the only distributed energy
resource, but it is the most significant one to date. And with lots of generation
on the distribution system, when it reaches high enough...high enough
penetrations, you can actually have cases where you have power flowing in two
directions and not just one. This creates new sets of challenges for the grid. For
example, ensuring that the systems that are designed to regulate voltage and
frequency on the grid aren't experiencing reliability issues due to
operating more readily. There are challenges in how does solar begin to
support grid reliability itself through voltage frequency, power quality
regulation? As solar becomes a more significant power source on the grid,
there's also the need to manage and integrate it and deal with its
variability. So we've always had load that has high amounts of variability, but
having variability on the power generation side is something that is
being brought from wind and solar. There's also a need for new standards
for how these devices integrate and operate and what they're allowed to do
with the grid. So just some of the challenges...go to a
similar schematic, but that illustrates in addition as we're moving to what we
call a modernized grid, the Department of Energy has a large initiative called the
Grid Modernization Initiative, which is looking at how we take our our grid and
move to a modernized structure. We need to pay attention with solar in making
this integrating into a secure grid with communication and data, you know, at the
forefront, and in addition one that operates and works within an evolving
energy marketplace. So as solar becomes a larger share of our power generation one
challenge is can we make it available on demand? As I said before, you know, as a
variable power generation source, there are certainly challenges. And what's
shown here in blue is sort of a typical or exemp...an example load
profile, what electricity generation typically might need to meet. In orange
is the example of the well known duck curve. So you see solar generation that happens
during daytime hours and what it does to the net load, this is basically the load
of minus the solar generation, is it means that you can have a very low dip,
especially in sort of morning midday times, when the load isn't quite as high
and solar generation can be quite high, and then as you get toward evening and
solar generation is falling, you go back to that normal load curve, but with a
much steeper ramp than you have in the usual case. So through storage or
shifting of load, there are opportunities to better match solar generation and
demand and take what is represented by this red arm, instead of having this fall
down so far, take this area of generation in red and shift it over to the evening
hours where it's needed. Or conversely, you could imagine shifting some of the
load from these hours into these...these hours here. But effectively, how do we
better match the supply of solar electricity with the demand and need for...
need for solar? And I guess I'll say the challenges with the duck curve for
those of you who aren't familiar with it, are that as this net load falls lower
and lower, it can reach the levels of sort of minimum generation and contracts
that exist for sort of base load generation. And what that means, it's
really just an economic issue, it means you'll end up throwing away some of that
solar power. It's called curtailment. At low levels,
when curtailment happens, just in, you know, certain days in March—like has
been the main case of the duck curve to date, there's not a huge economic impact
on solar. But as you get higher and higher penetrations of solar, electricity
curtailment can have an important economic impact. And then from the grid
operators' perspective, managing an even steeper growth of load ramping is an
additional challenge. But there are also important opportunities from the grid
integration side with solar electricity, and in particular, putting solar on the
distribution system offers opportunities for
resilience that we're just starting to look at. When you have solar in the
distribution system, if you have a case where there's a loss of electricity,
where there's a blackout, it is possible for solar and other distributed energy
resources to restart areas of the grid, for those areas to begin to work
together and supply power while overall power generation is being restored.
So there's some really exciting opportunities on the resilience side
that are possible by having solar and other distributed energy resources on
the distribution grid. We have a project that's just kicking off at Lawrence
Livermore National Lab through the Grid Modernization Initiative, that's looking
specifically at how to use solar and storage and other distributed resources
to be able to provide power during blackouts and help restart the grid.
Another opportunity is with concentrating solar power, as I talked
about before, concentrating solar power inherently incorporates storage or can
inherently incorporate storage to allow for solar on-demand. It's also possible
with the same components for a concentrating solar system to create
plants that operate more like peakers. Plants shown here when you have, for the
same sized power block, for a 50 megawatt generator, if you have a larger...or sorry
a smaller solar field and smaller storage units you can have more of a
peaker plant configuration. If you keep the power block the same and you scale
up the size of the solar field and the size that the storage units, you can move
to intermediate or baseload plants. So basically with the same technology
components, you can have flexibility in the kind of power plant that's built
depending on what the grid needs.
And then talking a little bit about declining value that I mentioned earlier,
so as we see the penetration of PV on the grid increase, there's a decline in
the value of PV. So this is another challenge to work on. This plot here is
showing this—it's actually showing it from the sort of an effective cost
perspective. So what this is showing is... is you, for a case study of California,
and this is Paul Denholm's work at NREL, for a case study of California looking
at as you put more solar on the grid, this is the total amount of
California's load that is met by solar energy, so as you put more solar on the
grid, how does the effective cost of that solar change due to curtailment, due to
solar energy that can't be used because there's too much of it at a time when
it's not needed? Another way to look at that is it's sort of the energy
value of solar is going down. So the blue line is the overall cost for all the
solar on the grid, but what's more important in terms of where's...where you
find an economic limit is the marginal cost. So for every bit of solar that's
added, what is that marginal cost? You see that
in this case, at about 20 percent solar on the grid, you see the marginal cost
going...going steadily up, suggesting that it would not be economically viable to
add more solar onto the grid. This is for what I'll call an inflexible grid, where
flexibility is the ability of the grid to rapidly adapt to changing supply and
load demands. So this is looking at sort of maybe the structure of the grid we
have today. There's lots of ways, and this is probably too small to read, but
there's lots of ways that the...to increase the flexibility of the grid and
this kind of outlines them. Froman operation perspective, there's things
like better forecasting of when you'll have renewable energy generation, having
more flexibility reserves. There's also allowing for the use
of variable renewables of wind and solar to provide grid services such that there
may not be as high a need from sort of a minimum generation from other
generators, so that more renewables can be used. There is flexibility in when
load is provided. Here this focuses mostly on demand response.
I'm personally also very interested in exploring the overall ability of load to
be shifted across not just demand response, but across general usage of
electricity load. And if there's any of you in the audience who have done any
work on that, I'd love to connect with you afterwards. More flexible generation,
so if other electricity generators are able to ramp their production up and
down more rapidly, then that makes it easier to adjust to rapid changes in
supply and demand. There's also transmission expansion. So
if the region's over which we balance energy supply and demand become larger,
then again that can accommodate a more flexible grid. You know, for example, if
you're able to generate...take your excess solar generation in Arizona and ship it,
you know, far across to an area that doesn't have sun at that moment, then you
have a natural way to utilize that excess solar power. And last here is
storage. I'll talk more about storage later. Storage is probably the biggest
lever on overall flexibility, but today it's one of the most expensive. And just
to show...this is again, the same marginal cost for adding additional solar to the
grid. This orange curve is the one I showed before for the somewhat
inflexible case. As you make the grid more flexible, you see this just push
further out. So now instead of finding an economic limit at 18 to 20 percent,
you're out closer to 30 percent and with even additional flexibility which is
here represented by a significant build-out of CSP
plants with thermal energy storage, you see the curve push even further. So that...
that's looking at the value of the energy power from solar has both an
energy value and in most markets also a capacity value ,which is an additional
value due to typically solar's good match at low penetrations to times of
peak load. This study here from Andrew Mills and
Ryan Wiser at Lawrence Berkeley Lab is from 2012 so it's a little bit old, but
the trend is basically the capacity credit, the value for PV installed to the
grid, due to its ability to reduce the overall peak demand, goes down as...
steadily down as PV penetration increases. And you know, it's different
for different scenarios, but anywhere from 5 percent to 15 to 20 percent there's no
longer any value, a capacity value, for additional PV generation. To explain...to
explain what that means or how that comes from, I'll show these example load
profiles here. And in gray here, this is... this is load without solar, peak load
demands. So you see that in terms of determining how much capacity you need
to meet peak load demands, grid operators will look at this peak here, you see, in
green. Now the lines here are increasing amounts of solar energy on
the grid going from 2% in blue to 14% PV. And for this example, you see that as you
add more solar, where that peak steadily decreases until the point, in this case,
where you get to 10 percent where there's no decrease in where that peak point is
between 10 and 14 percent. So in this case, the capacity value goes down and it
is at 0 above 10 percent PV on the grid. So above 10 percent, the peak...where the
peak load position is, no longer changes as you add
more solar and the capacity value declines. So the opportunity here to sort
of combat declining value of PV as generation increases is to continue to
reduce costs. And last year, about a year ago, we announced new cost targets for
2030 for PV systems. Cost targets are three cents a kilowatt hour for
utility-scale PV, four cents for commercial systems, and five cents for
residential PV systems by 2030. So this is a 50% reduction compared to the 2020
cost targets, so for utility-scale PV it's a 50%
reduction from where we are today. For the commercial and residential sectors,
it's about a factor of three reduction from green where we...where we are today.
And as I talk about these costs, I want to point out that as I...as I mentioned
earlier, LCOE, the levelized cost of energy, depends on the climate, depends on
where the system's installed. The same system installed in a really sunny area
will generate more power. That generation is in the denominator of LCOE, so the
overall cost per kilowatt hour goes down. Same system installed in a less sunny
area will by the same factor, be more expensive per kilowatt hour that's
generated. And at DOE, we are focused on enabling solar energy for all Americans
across, you know, the U.S. and so we use average climate for our cost targets. So
the three cents a kilowatt hour we calculate is for average climate which
we represent by Kansas City, Missouri. That same system installed in really
sunny Arizona or California would be almost two cents a kilowatt hour.
Similarly in Seattle, one of our least sunny regions, it would be four cents a
kilowatt hour. And one of the reasons this is important is if you're thinking
about costs that you hear reported for solar, typically when folks are talking
about really low costs of solar and PPAs that are being
signed at four cents a kilowatt-hour, that's almost always for very sunny
regions and it's also typically including the...if it's in the U.S., the
investment tax credit. So that will cause you...you know, you could hear numbers
today of four or five cents a kilowatt-hour, but those numbers reported
in that way aren't comparable to the targets I'm talking about. And you know,
how much does this matter? How much would cutting costs 50% matter? So to get a
sense of that, use again projections from NREL's regional energy deployment
system. And this shows this business as usual case, where again, you know, solar is
expected to be about 5 percent of generation in 2030. With cost being half
that in 2030 instead, so halving the cost, you get more than double the solar
deployment. In this case, you know, lower solar costs again come they..they
counteract the decline in value. At three cents a kilowatt-hour solar also would
be cheaper than many existing...operating many existing power plants. So it could
actually be cheaper to install and use solar energy than to run some existing
generators, which could lead to an overall reduction in electricity prices,
making electricity more affordable. So I'm going to talk about a pathway, how
would we, you know, moving to the technology side, how would we get from
where we are today to three cents a kilowatt- hour? Is that practical, like what would
that look like? So to walk you through this waterfall, and to get from the six cents
cost to the three cent target, here's one example pathway. Of course there are
others, but this illustrates what it would take. In this case, you'd be looking
for module prices to fall to about 25 cents a watt. This bucket here
about 0.4 cents, might be too small because it's based on sort of reported
prices on the market today, which may not be what we
call sustainable, so it may actually be a little bit larger. What we're targeting
when we target reductions in the module costs or we're targeting what we call sustainable
reductions, which allows for enough profit for module manufacturers and in
the supply chain for them to continue to grow capacity. So it's not what they're
selling in cases of oversupply on the market, but it's what they would be
selling at with enough sustainable profit to continue to grow their
businesses. So ways in which we can get there, you know, one key way is improving
the efficiency of systems without increasing cost or while decreasing costs.
Next bucket here, larger bucket, is lowering the balance of system hardware
and soft cost, so this is everything from the inverter, the wiring, the racking of the
system, to the installation and our connection and permitting costs.
Improving the overall system efficiency does help with this bucket as well. And
things like speeding up, standardizing installation and interconnection
processes can help this as well. Third buckets, also a large bucket in
this scenario, and this is an area of particular interest to us at the
Department of Energy's solar office right now, is improving the reliability
of the systems. It's a big lever. If you take systems from 30 year lifetimes to 50
year lifetimes, you reduce degradation rates to 0.2 percent a year from a half to
0.75 percent a year, that can be a big big lever for cost reduction. And I'll
show that in a different way on the...on the next slide. So better understand...
ability to understand what causes degradation and also better ability to
predict that, so that as structures and devices change, we can immediately
understand how that impacts their reliability. Last is lowering of
operations and maintenance costs. It's an important bucket in this case too. And here,
employing automation and better data analytics to better predict what
maintenance is needed and more quickly diagnose issues improves
characterization tools help as well here.
But as I said before, there are a number of pathways to get to these targets and
I'll illustrate the number of pathways here just from a module
technology perspective. So in this plot, it's looking at module price on the
y-axis and module efficiency on the x-axis and different reliability cases
on the curves I'll show. Everything else in this scenario is held constant. So in
this case, if you just look at the trade-offs between module price and
efficiency for a system that is a 50 or a lifetime 0.2 percent per year
degradation rate, you see that you can hit the SunShot 2030 cost targets with a
module that's 25% efficient that costs 30 cents a watt. If you have a more
efficient module, it can cost more. In this case 35% efficient, it can cost an
extra five cents a watt. Conversely, if it's less efficient, if
it's more like sort of the average efficiency on the market today of 17% well,
it has to be cheaper, it has to be 20 cents a watt. Illustrating the importance
of reliability, here's the same curve for a system that is more like the lifetimes
and degradation rates assumed today—30 years, half a percent per year
performance degradation. Here, looking at the 25 percent module now instead of 30
cents a watt, if all of the change is borne by the module price, it now has to
be 13 cents a watt, so it has to be substantially cheaper for this lower
lifetime case. And if you look at even lower yet still not that low
lifetimes, in this case, 20-year lifetime, one percent per year, it becomes very
difficult to achieve these cost targets. Here you've, you know, if your module were
free, it would have to be 27% efficient. If it was 40%
efficient, it could only cost about six cents. This is holding everything else
constant. Lots of folks who get interested in new materials and new
system possibilities that could be a lot cheaper, might not last as long, are also
looking at possibilities that would reduce installation costs and some of
the other costs. Changing some of the other costs, if this kind of a system
enabled that, would push this curve out like this, but I think one of the
messages I want to drive home on terms of how important reliability is it's going to be
very hard to achieve the substantial cost reduction targets without systems
that are at least as long-lived as today, without getting to 30 year lifetimes...25
to 30 year lifetimes. We also have cost targets for residential PV systems as I
showed. This is just the waterfall here. Again, similar buckets, but what you see
here is a much much larger bucket than any seen on the previous slide and this
is for the soft costs. As I mentioned before, the commercial and residential
systems have a much larger soft cost component. Just blowing this up to get
this kind of a reduction would require major reductions in customer acquisition
costs, permitting interconnection taxes, installation labor, the supply chain
costs, as well as the profit and overhead costs of the installers and developers
themselves. The other bucket that's on here that wasn't on the other waterfall
is lower finance rates. The cost of capital, the financing of the system, is
actually a major lever in the overall levelized cost of energy. And if
residential systems were able to obtain lower financing rates, if they could be
tied into mortgages, things like that, that could also be a big cost reduction
lever. Similarly, we have cost targets for CSP systems. CSP systems are utility
scale systems and you'll notice that the 2030 cost target here is 5 cents
compared to for PV, the utility scale system is 3 cents.
The higher costs target is possible because CSP systems have a higher value
due to their incorporation of energy storage, so they can be competitive at
comparatively higher costs. For getting costs down with CSP systems, here's some
example buckets. A big fraction of the cost of a CSP system is the mirrors,
the heliostats, a solar field, we have a number of different terms used, but
finding cheaper ways to collect the sunlight and concentrate it is an area
of critical need. rRducing the cost of the power block and improving the
efficiency of the power cycle are other other large buckets. CSP technology is...a
great opportunity for that is to incorporate supercritical CO2 power
cycles that are currently under development. These power cycles are of
great interest not only for CSP, but also nuclear and fossil energies. And they
offer opportunity for higher efficiencies, as well as higher
efficiencies at smaller size, so you don't have to have as large of a plant
to reach efficiencies and lower costs. Also, we need to see the remaining parts
of the system, the thermal energy storage, the receiver, and the operations and
maintenance come down. So the next section I'd like to talk about is, I'm
gonna call here the solar storage synergy, and if you remember this plot I
showed earlier on grid flexibility, one of the biggest levers, probably the
biggest lever for increasing the flexibility of the grid, which in turn
enables greater solar deployment, is storage. However today, storage costs are
really too high to see large-scale deployment of storage, but one form of
storage, battery costs are falling dramatically. And so we've looked at what
would happen if these large cost reductions in battery storage or other
forms of storage, but batteries are the example here, continued. So here's
the projections of solar deployment, the percent of U.S. electricity from solar in
the low-cost solar case of hitting the SunShot 2030 goals where we get to 3
cents a kilowatt hour for PV in 2030 and 2 cents a kilowatt hour PV in 2050. If we
throw a low-cost storage on top, where low-cost storage in this case is getting to
a system install cost of $100 a kilowatt hour in 2040, that's about a factor of 4
reduction in storage costs by 2040, what you see of course is that there's
dramatically greater solar deployment.
This is, you know, somewhat of an arbitrary choice of scenario, but just
illustrating what a large lever for solar deployment at the same cost of
solar, you see substantially more deployment with low cost storage. This is
just illustrating what the assumed battery storage capital costs are for
this scenario. So the bold lines are from Wesley Cole at NREL's study, looking at
overall projections for energy storage cost, so those are mid-case projections
are the solid lines, and the dashed lines here is the low-cost scenario, where for
utility scale storage it's hitting $100 a kilowatt hour and 2040. That's for an 8
hour battery, whereas commercial and residential
assume 3 hour storage. So as I just mentioned, more storage leads to more
solar. Storage does this by providing a sink for curtailed solar, so rather than
just throwing away excess solar, you can charge the batteries and then use it at
times when power is needed. But I say this is the solar storage synergy, because
it actually goes in the other direction as well. As you put more solar on the
grid, there's more market opportunity for storage and I'll explain why on the next
slides. And in addition to that, actually coupling solar plus storage systems
together, offers some opportunity for cost reduction in some of the soft costs,
and possibly even in some of the hardware like the inverter. So instead of
deploying them independently when they're actually deployed together, you
may have cost reduction opportunities. But in terms of understanding why
increasing solar increases the market opportunity for storage, I'll come back
to this plot here where we see...here's the net load and how the net load
changes when you add more solar. Now just going to the case of no solar and the
case of solar with about 10% of PV, and what you see here is it's looking
effectively at capacity value. So to have about a two gigawatt reduction in peak
capacity, the capacity value for storage, in the case without solar, requires in
this particular illustration, requires about a five to six hour storage life
time. With solar, this load peak decreases, load peak narrows, so now it's two and a
half to three hours storage that are needed, which for the same overall peak
reduction. So for the same capacity value, you don't need a battery that can last
as long, which is an easier requirement on storage costs. And Paul Denholm from
NREL has looked at this across electricity markets and found this trend
holds broadly even across markets for which load shape can vary significantly.
So in all these cases, these bars here represent going from zero solar
penetration up to 20 percent, and after the initial, in some cases there's
an initial decrease, basically in all cases you see that as solar goes up, the
market for storage, in this case, it's four hour storage, the market for storage... market
size for storage goes up. And as part of getting to a conclusion, I want to talk
or just sort of end with a discussion of really what I see the tremendous
potential for solar. I've shown some of this already, but just to talk a little bit more
about what could be possible with aggressive innovation in solar and
synergistic technologies like storage, but that allow for a greater grid
flexibility. I'll be talking a little bit more about this deployment projection
modeling that we've been looking at and just before I do, these are models,
modeling tools at the National Renewable Energy Lab, at NREL, it's the regional
energy deployment system is the primary tool here. And this is an optimization
model that looks at what is the lowest cost way to basically meet electricity
needs, to balance supply and demand, maintain power quality across the U.S. and
it explicitly deals with renewable energy integration issues and
variability by having a large number of time slices over which it does its
balancing, and looks at transmission build-outs as well across 134 balancing
areas. What it does not do well is project deployment on the distribution
system. And so it's coupled with a model called D Gen that looks at adoption of
distributed solar. And these are the same projections I showed earlier. Based on
these models, baseline...again baseline sort of expectations here, low cost solar,
low cost solar, and this particular case of low cost storage, showing again by
2050 in these scenarios, low class solar alone could enable 30% of electricity
demand by 2050. With a more flexible grid, this number only goes up and in the case
of low cost storage, could be over 50%. Now of course, the one consistent thing
about projections is they're always wrong.
They account for many many many many many factors in the baseline cases so as
I said, only guaranteed to be wrong. You know, it's looking at expected costs for
the whole suite of energy generation technologies, expected electricity demand,
and how that changes over time— a large number of factors, all of which
are subject to change. So in this case, we did a sensitivity analysis that looked
at a wide number of potential changes and came up with sort of a wide range of
possible outcomes, all for the same low cost solar, low cost storage case. The
general trends, however, remain clear that decreasing the cost of solar leads to
substantially more solar deployments, making the grid more flexible. Decreasing
the cost of storage leads to more solar deployment for the same solar costs. And
this is just a plot looking at the build-out of PV for these sets of
projections and so here we see projections to date, you know, where
we're in the less than ten...tens of gigawatts. You see, you know, a large
expected growth in solar deployments over the years around 2020. This is due
to cost continuing to fall while the investment tax credit makes solar
effectively even lower cost. And then you see some drop-off and then another build
out here expected when, as solar cost continue to decline and reach a level
at which solar becomes competitive even with generation from some existing
sources. And here's where you see, at this point, the value of solar is falling in
the case of an inflexible grid and you'll see these orange bars, that solar
deployment would fall, but in the case of a more flexible grid, low cost storage,
that solar deployment can stay...could stay at this higher rates. Again,
projections with all the usual caveats here. But one thing I do want to show
from these projections is that solar build out is not just occurring in a few
places in the country. When we get to low cost solar, low cost solar plus storage,
you see deployment across the country and
this is colored where darker colors mean that more of that state's electricity
demand is met by solar, lighter is less. In this case, goes from about three
percent to 60 percent depending on the state and here these numbers are even...
even higher. So solar, you know, you really do see solar deployment across
the country. And I'll end just talking a little bit more about the solar office at
DOE and some opportunities that might be of interest to some of you. So just
introducing what we do. As Raf said, we were commonly known as SunShot until
recently and, you know, with the accomplishment of the utility scale
solar goal and with cost reduction no longer being the only important factor
for solar, we're using more...our solar office name. And so what we do is we
support early-stage research and developments of solar technologies that
strengthen grid reliability, resilience, and security. We do this through
primarily through funding opportunities. We have what we call funding opportunity
announcements or FOAs that are competitive, that are open to
applications, certainly from MIT and generally to the general community.
They're open for applications. They fund different critical research areas which
we identify, but broadly, you know, aiming at continuing to lower electricity costs,
integrate solar energy into the grid, and enhance the use and storage of solar
electricity. We have what's being called science technology policy opportunities.
We have what's been for the last several years a great fellowship program in our
office that I wanted to talk about and would love to talk to any of you who
might be interested and please do spread the word. This is a...it's a fellowship
opportunity to come and work in our office.
It's both for recent graduates as well as folks who have been in the field for
awhile. Recent graduates at the undergraduates or PhD level, as well as
folks who have more experience. We also have a senior fellow equivalent program.
And you come, you work directly in our office and have the opportunity to
really be exposed to this broad, big picture, to think about what are the big
challenges in solar energy research, and then to work with our team to define and
design new funding strategies as well as to help manage our funding program. So
it's a great opportunity to get involved in, you know, looking at and shaping where
millions of dollars of research will go and new research directions. We've had
really fantastic folks come through this program. It's a...it's a two-year program,
and, you know, people have done all kinds of things afterwards. A lot of them
have stayed in our office and have grown into all kinds of different roles
and people have done a variety of other things as well. But I, you know, I'd be
delighted to talk with any of you who are interested or feel free to send me
an email. Our next application deadline is January 15th and the program is run
through Orise. There's a...there's a website here and again you can feel free
to follow up with me if you don't get that down and you're interested in more
info. We do have one funding opportunity open the moment and this is actually a
new area of funding for us—solar desalination. This funding opportunity,
it's a 15 million dollar funding opportunity and it's looking at
utilizing concentrating solar technology to desalinate water, so leveraging solar
thermal technology either to directly drive desalination processes or coupling
thermal desalination processes with solar thermal generation to utilize some
of the the waste heat of the soil thermal generation and more
cost-effectively generate clean water. So this is an exciting new area for us and
concept papers which are short, I believe five page descriptions of a proposal and
an idea, are due in about a month if you're interested. The way our funding cycles
work is we have a concept paper cycle and then concept papers are either
encouraged or discouraged to submit full applications. So you'll get some initial
feedback on that idea and then full applications can be submitted
whether you're encouraged or discouraged, you can submit a full...a full application
based on that feedback, but we provide that feedback to help folks know whether
or not it may be worth their time to develop...a develop a full proposal. So I
will end here. I just want to acknowledge we have a fantastic team at DOE that's
contributed to all the work I've talked about, as well as some really excellent
analysts at NREL whose work has been what I've been highlighting here. Wesley
Cole, Paul Denholm, Dave Feldman, Robert Margolis and Mike Woodhouse. Thank you
very much!
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