written 8 Aug 2021
published 15 Aug 2021
I recently suggested that listening to people who tell you to drink bleach, or avoid a vaccination, or pretend that climate change is a debatable matter, is suicidally foolish.
Last week another California town burned to the ground. The wind shifted the smoke from the 6 biggest fires in the west, tinting our sunlight orange, adding that "campfire" aroma to the air. Drought is radically impacting tourism on the Mendocino coast. Parts of the Amazon Basin are emitting carbon rather than sequestering it: dying rather than growing. The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current, of which the Gulf Stream is a part, is driven by sinking, cold, salty water coming out of the Arctic, but is slowing alarmingly due to the massive freshwater infusion as Greenland melts. The climate emergency is already here, and we have little time to change things, assuming that is even possible. The emerging goal is 50% emissions reduction by 2030, 100 months from now.
On August 3rd, the Mendocino Board of Supervisors voted 5-0 to allocate funds to help decarbonize county facilities, for which they should be congratulated. However, the $2 million committed must be understood to be a token, a modest commitment, in the face of what is required. The rest of this article begins an exploration of what it will take to achieve the 50% goal.
Electricity, transportation, and heating, the three largest portions of the energy sector, are roughly equal in size. Ukiah, about 1/5 of the county population, consumes an average of 300 megawatt hours (MWhrs) of electricity every day. We can guesstimate that the rest of the county, serviced mostly by Sonoma Clean Power (SCP), consumes about 1200MWhr/day. SCP advertises their power is 93% non-carbon sourced, leaving 7% brown power, and Ukiah has 26% brown power in our production portfolio. To make our county electricity completely emission free, we need another 165MWhr/day of renewable power.
Because our electricity sector is close to being emission free, accomplishing a 50% emissions reduction will require significant changes in the transportation and heating portions of our energy usage. To power that shift, we will need another 1600MWhr/day of renewable energy, in addition to the above 165MWhr/day, for a project total of about 1800MWhr/day. Furthermore, we will need an equal amount of storage to spread the power throughout the day. While some of this new power production can be located out of the county, the current grid is already hitting limits carrying the load we now consume. To avoid very expensive, and time consuming, grid upgrades, it will be advantageous to have most of the new power production located within Mendocino county.
Assuming each watt of array produces an average of 4 watts per day, installation costs of $3/watt for the arrays, and storage costs of $0.50/Whr, the total comes to about $2B, or $250M per year for 8 years.
That is a lot of money! The good news is this level of investment does not have to come from within the county, just as we did not pay for the installation of the existing grid. The financial world has begun to recognize that extreme weather events are economically devastating, and avoiding them is a prudent investment. The beauty of renewable energy is the hardware is a fixed expense, while the energy is completely free, making renewables a good, solid, long term investment.
America currently pays $1T per year for fossil fuels, and our share in Mendocino county is about $250M per year, which will be reduced by 50% over the 8 years. In addition, the estimated total fiscal wealth of America is at least $250T, with the Mendocino county share coming to about $60B. That is what is at risk financially, let alone the value we place on our people and all the other living beings with whom we share this lovely planet.
What is missing is the social and political will to make this fundamental change in our economy. The people who are making good profit off the existing structure have tried to stall this change. But the change is inevitable, because fossil fuels are finite, and the disruption of the ecosystem has now reached a tipping point in public awareness. We have a simple choice: make the effort to change, or watch our entire society collapse under increasing climate disruption.
