California’s official policy to combat climate change is to achieve “carbon neutrality” by 2045. There are many ways to get from here to there. As the state legislature and agencies navigate these options, they should take into account a few cautionary statistics.
California currently consumes about 7,000 TBTUs (trillion Basic Thermal Units) of raw energy inputs per year. As recently as 2022, 50 percent of that energy came from oil, and 30 percent from natural gas. About two-thirds of that raw fuel input is wasted in the form of friction, transmission loss, or dissipated heat, with one-third realized in the form of energy services (motion, lights, heating, cooling, computing, communicating, and so forth).
The opportunity presented by electrification rests on the fact that, for example, 90 percent or more of the electricity used to charge batteries can be released in discharge, and 90 percent or more of the electricity used to power electric motors can be converted into actual horsepower. In general, devices that consume electricity, such as electric vehicles and appliances (cooktops, heaters, and air conditioners) are more efficient than their combustion-powered counterparts.
If electricity can also be produced more efficiently, then it becomes possible to flip the ratio of wasted energy to energy services—that is, instead of seeing two-thirds of raw fuel inputs wasted and only one-third turned into energy services, two-thirds would be utilized and only one-third wasted. If this could be accomplished, California’s total required energy might drop from 7,000 TBTUs to 4,000 TBTUs or even less. But how does that compare with the amounts of electricity Californians currently use?
Here’s where the first challenge arises. If California derived all 4,000 TBTUs from electricity, that would equate to 1.2 million gigawatt-hours used. Last year, Californians consumed not quite 300,000 gigawatt-hours and produced only two-thirds of them in-state. Complete electrification would see California’s electricity consumption quadruple.
There are many ways to boost electricity production in California, including solar, wind, nuclear, geothermal, small hydro, and biomass. But hiding in plain sight is a solution that would permit Californians to gain immediate access to cheap and abundant electricity: keep the state’s natural gas power plants open and run them at capacity.
California’s natural gas power plants produced 96,000 gigawatt-hours last year, adding up to nearly 50 percent of in-state electricity generation. But those power plants operated at just 26 percent of capacity. If they were to capture and sequester 100 percent of their carbon-dioxide emissions, that would reduce their efficiency by about 10 percent. Taking that into account, and allowing for some downtime, it is reasonable to assume these plants could operate at 80 percent efficiency. To be sure, carbon sequestration is an emerging technology that adds about 10 percent to the cost to build a natural gas power plant. But for those policymakers who consider CO2 to be a dangerous pollutant, retrofitting existing natural gas power plants to bury their emissions underground is a cost-effective strategy.
If so, instead of generating 96,000 gigawatt-hours per year, they could generate 295,000 gigawatt-hours. Just this one change would bring California’s total in-state power generation up to more than 400,000 gigawatt-hours per year. According to studies conducted by the U.S. Department of Energy, these retrofits could be done at a cost of about $40 billion. Moreover, a recent Stanford study estimated that there is enough underground carbon-storage capacity in California to accommodate 100 percent of the state’s natural gas power plant emissions (at full capacity) for the next 500 years.
Once upon a time, the prestigious World Watch magazine consistently referred to natural gas as the great “transitional fuel.” It would benefit California’s leadership to return to that commonsense perspective, because it would enable the state’s great electrification experiment to continue without a supply-side disruption.
The next big challenge is delivering all this new electricity. An average home draws on 1.25 kilowatt-hours per hour. By comparison, to charge an EV with a 44-kilowatt-hour battery (200 mile range, 4.5 miles per kWh) in 15 minutes would require three kilowatt-hours per minute. That means that the transmission lines delivering power to that vehicle must be equipped to move electrons at a rate 150 times greater than required for the average home. Even a slower in-home charger, requiring five hours to charge instead of 15 minutes, would need a flow of electricity eight times greater than what residential power lines are currently designed to deliver. Owners prefer to charge their EVs at home. Imagine if, instead of a 4 percent market penetration of EVs, they accounted for 40 percent or more of all vehicles in the state. California’s electricity grid is not designed to accommodate all those vehicles charging at once.
The alternative to in-home charging is to build publicly accessible quick-charge stations. The California Air Resources Board intends to increase the number of public quick-charge stations from the current 93,000 to more than 1 million by 2030, and more than 2 million by 2035. Upgrading the grid to deliver electricity to 2 million public charging stations, at even higher voltages, may be preferable to upgrading the last-mile connections to California’s 14 million homes, but it is still a daunting challenge.
Upgrading every transmission line in the state to handle surges of this magnitude as EVs charge (and discharge) into California’s power grid is a challenge that rivals and perhaps exceeds the necessity to generate more electricity.
If there is anywhere in the world where these obstacles can be met and overcome, it’s here in California. Let’s hope that common sense will prevail as we choose which projects and priorities will drive us into the future.
Photo by PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images