Renewable Rap Battle: A scathing critique of Mark Jacobson’s 100% renewable grid proposal
Some policy recommendations attain notoriety because they’re simple, and because they appeal to the hopes of people who support them. The thankless work of a “critic”, dating back to ancient Greece where the word was derived (κριτικός), is to judge if these policies make sense. Modern day energy critics separate innovations from illusions, and steer us towards actionable, achievable solutions.
In 2015, Stanford’s Mark Jacobson and three other researchers published a paper on a low-cost solution to the US grid which would rely 100% on wind, hydro and solar power by 2050. Their 2015 paper is an updated version of an article they first published in Scientific American in 2009 12 . You may have read about their all-renewable US grid idea, or their recent work applying the same concept to 139 countries. Many media outlets and energy blogs cite Jacobson’s proposal as a vision of a possible renewable energy future, if only we just would reach for it.
In 2017, the battle began. A large team of scientists and researchers from US universities, think tanks and research labs published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 13 which (there is no other way to put this) savaged the Jacobson proposal. It’s worth reviewing some of the arguments in their rebuttal, since they illustrate the challenges and complexity of designing real-world energy solutions. While 21 researchers participated in the PNAS paper, for simplicity, we refer to it here as the “Clack rebuttal”. Here’s their overarching conclusion on Jacobson’s proposal:
“The authors claim to have shown that their proposed system would be low cost and that there are no economic barriers to the implementation of their vision. However, the modeling errors described, the speculative nature of the terawatt-scale storage technologies envisioned, the theoretical nature of the solutions proposed to handle critical stability aspects of the system, and a number of unsupported assumptions, including a cost of capital that is one-third to onehalf lower than that used in practice in the real world, undermine that claim.”
Affiliations of the 21 authors participating in the Clack rebuttal
Carnegie Institution for Science (Department of Global Ecology)
Carnegie Mellon University (Department of Engineering and Public Policy; Tepper School of Business)
Columbia University (Center for Global Energy Policy)
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory
Stanford University (Department of Energy Resources Engineering; Management Science and Engineering Department; Precourt Energy Efficiency Center)
UC Berkeley (Energy and Resources Group; Goldman School of Public Policy; Renewable Energy Laboratory)
UC Irvine (Department of Earth System Science)
UC San Diego (Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering; School of Global Policy and Strategy)
Univ. of Colorado (Inst. for Research in Environmental Sciences; Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute)
University of Vermont (Electrical Engineering and Complex Systems Center)
Uppsala University (Department of Physics and Astronomy)
Brookings Institution and the Council on Foreign Relations
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