San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Cost to reach emission goals big unknown
By the middle of this century, Gov. Jerry Brown wants California to pull more greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere every year than it puts in.
That vision will almost certainly cost Californians. No one can say how much, however, because no one quite knows how we’ll achieve it.
California has years of experience ramping up its use of renewable power, plugging ever more solar plants and wind turbines into the grid.
But eliminating the state’s greenhouse gas emissions altogether by 2045 — the goal of an executive order Brown signed last week — will require decarbonizing sectors of the economy that California’s climate regulations have not yet addressed, such as
“That’s the most ambitious goal of anywhere in the world. It doesn’t mean we’re there yet.” Gov. Jerry Brown, on the carbon-negative goal he set with an executive order to eliminate the state’s greenhouse gas emissions by 2045
agriculture. It will require better, cheaper ways to store power, electrifying all cars on California roads and forcing airlines to switch to renewable jet fuel.
Then comes the truly hard part.
The technology exists for removing carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, from the air. Even the most optimistic forecasts project that doing so will be expensive.
And at least for now, there’s no business model for it. When utility companies buy electricity from a wind farm, it replaces electricity they would have otherwise bought from conventional power plants. Paying someone to suck carbon from the atmosphere, in contrast, would be an additive expense.
“Relative to what we’re doing today, somebody’s going to have to pay the bill,” said James Mulligan, who has written about carbon removal strategies for the World Resources Institute think tank. “Whether it’s the taxpayer, the (utility) ratepayer, or the shareholder or what have you — it’s got to come out of somebody’s pocket.”
Brown established the carbon-negative goal on the eve of last week’s Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco, which gathered government officials from around the world. He acknowledged during the event that the path would not necessarily be easy.
“That’s the most ambitious goal of anywhere in the world,” Brown said. “It doesn’t mean we’re there yet.”
How much will it cost? The California Air Resources Board, which runs most of the state’s climate goals, does not yet have a cost estimate for reaching carbon neutrality, said spokesman Stanley Young. Or for going negative.
Even the relatively straightforward task of getting all of the state’s electricity from carbon-free sources —a 2045 goal established in a bill that Brown signed into law last week — has an unknown price tag. Neither Pacific Gas and Electric Co. nor Southern California Edison, the state’s two largest electric utilities, have estimates.
PG&E spokeswoman Lynsey Paulo noted that it’s not just a matter of buying more renewable power. The company will need more large-scale energy storage, as well as upgrades to its electricity transmission and distribution systems to move energy from new renewable facilities.
“You can put us in the camp of, ‘We don’t know,’ ” Paulo said.
And yet, while reaching carbon neutrality and beyond poses costs, so does runaway climate change — although California, of course, can hardly solve a global problem alone.
“We do know the cost of not doing anything is going to be really expensive and potentially disastrous for our economy over time,” said Laura Wisland, a senior energy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “So we can’t do nothing.”
Companies such as Tesla are already plugging large batteries into the state’s grid, working with PG&E and the other utilities. And costs are falling. Bloomberg New Energy Finance estimates that the levelized cost of energy from utility-size batteries — a measure that includes the costs of installing and maintaining a facility over time — has plunged almost 80 percent since 2010 and will drop an additional 66 percent by 2030.
Tumbling prices for lithium-ion batteries should make electric cars more affordable. Whether all car buyers will find them desirable is a different matter.
Transportation remains the state’s single largest source of greenhouse gases, and emissions from the sector have risen in recent years even as the state’s overall emissions have fallen. Although sales of electric cars are rising, they still account for just 3.3 percent of new car registrations in the state, according to the California New Car Dealers Association.
The state’s agriculture industry produces about onefifth as many greenhouse gas emissions as the transportation sector, but it’s still significant — emitting more than 33 million metric tons per year. But farms aren’t included in California’s capand-trade system for cutting emissions in other parts of the economy. And it’s unclear how to capture emissions of methane — a potent greenhouse gas — from flatulent cows.
Then there’s the question of actually removing CO2 or other greenhouse gases once they’ve entered the atmosphere.
Expanding forests can do that, as can protecting existing ones from fires and other threats. But the population of California and the world is still growing, requiring more land to grow food, so opportunities to significantly increase forested land may be limited. In agriculture, planting cover crops at times of the year when the land would otherwise lie fallow can sequester some carbon, as well as improve the fertility of the soil. But again, it may not be a large-scale solution.