written 4 December 2022
published 11 December 2022
Last week I described the climate situation. Doing nothing will shortly crash the global economy, and effective action to avoid that crash must be swift and massive. We must complete decarbonization our economy within 20 years, electrifying everything, and begin significant carbon removal for decades after that. This will require about 1-1/2 times additional electrical power, and will be constrained by the limited grid capacity. What might such a solution look like in Ukiah?
Ukiah presently consumes a daily average of about 300MWh, peaking about 50 percent higher in the summer. Almost none of that power is produced within the city limits.
A survey done by the Renewable Energy Development Institute in Willits showed only 25 percent of homes in Ukiah had suitable roof top solar exposure. Currently, less than 2 percent of Ukiah homes have roof top solar. Residential power is at least 1/3 of our consumption load. If every home with good exposure installed roof top solar, it would increase production by about 1/10. A Google Map survey of parking lots and business roof tops within the City limits indicates room to install 30MW of solar array (assuming 50 percent coverage), which would increase power production another 2/5.
Imagine what this might look like. Every parking lot would be shaded from the increasing summer heat, preserving the life of our vehicles while providing local power resilience. Modern solar panels are warranted for 25 years, and will still be producing power for 50 years, without any inflationary increase.
Businesses and homes would be providing some of their own power needs, increasing resilience in increasingly uncertain times. All the City essential services, like sewer, water, and emergency communications, as well as emergency cooling centers, health care facilities, and grocery stores, could be made power resilient. Having some power in an emergency is infinitely better than being in the dark. The City might even expand to include land dedicated to power production, further increasing power resilience.
Full build out of solar options within City limits, would produce about 1/3 of the new power needed. The remaining 2/3, about equal to our current power consumption, would have to be shipped in, but this runs into the transmission limitations of the grid.
Right now, any power consumed must be delivered exactly as it is needed, transmitted over the grid to the Ukiah substation, and then over the local distribution system to the individual homes and businesses. On average, our power system handles about 12.5MW an hour. At peak times, that hourly rate can be three times higher, approaching the limit of system capacity. However, if we had capacity to store power locally for use during peak loads, the system could easily handle shipping twice our current average rate. Ukiah would need to store about 300MWh of power every day. The good news is that kind of hardware now exists, is getting cheaper every year, and is being installed all across the country.
Grid scale renewable power is becoming more available every year. Within California, plans for large scale wind development off shore of Eureka are well along, with a potential for 36GWh when fully developed. Off shore wind is estimated to produce 30-50 percent of the time, not tied to solar variation. The Sonoma Clean Power Geyserville GeoZone geothermal project will produce 12GWh in just the first phase of development, with a higher capacity factor, operating around the clock. In the US, 46GW of utility scale solar were installed in 2022, half of all new power plants.
Part of Ukiah's challenge is to produce as much power locally as possible, and build the storage capacity to allow the existing grid to ship in the rest of what is needed. The other part of the challenge is to reduce demand, and facilitate shifting to electric transportation and heat pump technologies. An early 1900's picture of downtown New York showed 90 percent horses and 10 percent cars. Just a decade later the percentages were reversed. This rapid technology change was facilitated by wide spread access to affordable loans. A similar change could happen again.
Ukiah needs to develop a General Energy Plan, defining long term goals and time frames, prioritizing projects, and then aggressively implement the plan. The alternative is the collapse of everything we have come to expect of our society. Now is the time to act.
