In several recent pieces, I’ve discussed why the current push to all-electric is a flawed approach toward addressing the climate crisis. I’ve discussed cost and the actual environmental benefits (or lack thereof) —but there is another massive factor in why the emphasis on a rapid shift to all-electric is bound to fail: the electrical grid itself.
Think about it: if all of a sudden everything goes all-electric, the amount of electricity needed to power all those electric vehicles and appliances would skyrocket. Electricity consumption would go through the roof. And the fact is, we currently simply do not have the capacity to produce that much electricity.
As the International Energy Agency reports, “To achieve countries’ national energy and climate goals, the world’s electricity use needs to grow 20% faster in the next decade than it did in the previous one. Electricity demand needs to grow even more rapidly in a global pathway to net zero emissions by 2050, which is consistent with limiting the rise in global temperatures to 1.5 °C.” Reaching these goals means “adding or refurbishing a total of over 80 million kilometres of grids by 2040, the equivalent of the entire existing global grid.” And yet, “While investment in renewables has been increasing rapidly – nearly doubling since 2010 – global investment in grids has barely changed, remaining static at around USD 300 billion per year.”
Meanwhile, the shift to renewable energy also requires an overhaul of the grid system. As the IEA report states, “The acceleration of renewable energy deployment calls for modernizing distribution grids and establishing new transmission corridors to connect renewable resources – such as solar PV projects in the desert and offshore wind turbines out at sea – that are far from demand centers like cities and industrial areas.”
The modernization of electrical grids is also necessary to accommodate Distributed Energy Resources (DERs)—small-scale energy resources like rooftop solar panels, battery storage, and a range of other technologies and products utilized by individual consumers. Along with the benefits I discussed in my last piece, generating your own electricity can help reduce strain on the electricity grid. If individual consumers put in solar panels to charge their EVs and power their heat pumps, they help reduce the amount of electricity the grid needs to supply to meet the demand. As a paper by GridLab and Gridworks for Utah Clean Energy reports, DER’s “greatest capability is the ability to generate energy locally, closer to end users compared to traditional generators. This can reduce demand for costly, large-scale utility infrastructure, such as high voltage transmission lines.”
However, the increase in DERs also necessitates upgrading our electrical grids. “The rising volume of DER on distribution grids has caused many problems for grid operators,” writes Josh Wong for Power Grid International. “The challenges include back feeds, voltage control, hidden loads, as well as balancing and inertia issues, particularly at the distribution level. These complex systems cannot be managed, controlled, and protected using traditional processes. … The transition from a distribution network operation (DNO) to a distribution system operation (DSO) grid orchestration philosophy, how the grid must be optimized at the distribution level rather than the historical transmission level, is an essential component of the reinvention of the electric grid.”
The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) and Office of Electricity (OE) does have efforts underway to address the issue of reinventing the electricity grid. “DOE is expanding a flexible approach to accelerate the transition to a modern grid edge and respond to rapidly evolving technology demands,” they state on their website. “Increased engagement with industry, policy makers, regulators, and technology developers enables DOE to better shape our assistance and outreach. Through that engagement, DOE is focusing on research that creates replicable solutions and generates new data, tools, and analysis that are responsive to evolving challenges and regional priorities.”
But these efforts are not keeping pace with the Department of Energy’s hardline push for America to go all-electric. Is there enough electricity on the grid to charge all of these electric vehicles? Is there enough electricity on the grid to power all these heat pumps on top of the EVs? A big problem with the government subsidization of heat pumps I’ve been discussing in my recent pieces is it forces the transition to all-electric to occur much more quickly than if it happened organically. This does not leave time for the grid to be updated in all the ways discussed above.
Pushing consumers into going all-electric through mandates and subsidies is not the answer to shifting our reliance on fossil fuels. It creates more problems than it solves—which only hinders the all-important effort to combat the climate crisis.