- A new report estimates how much energy infrastructure North Carolina would need to satisfy a recent state law requiring carbon neutrality by 2050
- The report charts two paths: a Renewable Scenario and a Nuclear Scenario
- The new solar facilities needed under the Renewable Scenario would take up more land than the state’s 13 biggest cities combined and would require a whopping 12,500 miles of new transmission lines to be built out to them, the costs of which would be passed on to consumers
A new report from the Center for Food, Power, and Life at the John Locke Foundation takes stock of North Carolina’s energy infrastructure and estimates how much infrastructure the state will need in the coming years under a recently passed state law (House Bill 951) requiring carbon neutrality in electricity generation by 2050. It does so by examining two different paths toward that goal: either through renewable facilities or through nuclear power.
As the report makes clear, complying with this law “will require the largest expansion of electric infrastructure since electrification began in the early 1920s.” Barring a change in the law, which path we take will make a huge difference in the coming decades in the cost and reliability of our electricity. What would be the implications for North Carolina families, businesses, schools, and industries if we took the path demanded by the governor and his environmentalist allies and cronies?
Gov. Roy Cooper’s goal from the outset was to force North Carolina’s electricity grid off coal and natural gas, keep it away from nuclear (the only zero-emissions resource capable of baseload power provision), and convert it to intermittent renewable sources (solar and wind) with battery backup. It is an extremely irresponsible vision for powering society if the goal is to continue providing the reliable, affordable energy that electricity consumers expect. When legislators passed HB 951 in 2021, they at least added specific safeguards to protect grid reliability and keep the costs of this transition as low as possible. (The least-cost guardrail is unfortunately limited, a problem the General Assembly should address as soon as possible.)
“Lighting the Path” gives the governor’s goal full consideration in its Renewable Scenario section. Among other things, it assesses how much new solar production North Carolina would need and discusses the implications. What did it find?
An Enormous Increase in Solar Capacity — Overbuilding to Account for Intermittency
Closing all of the state’s reliable coal and natural gas plants and replacing them with intermittent resources would require significant amounts of overbuilding. The only way to approximate reliability is with ridiculous redundancy. So, shutting down all 21,343 megawatts (MW) of coal and natural gas capacity in North Carolina would require, in the Renewable Scenario, adding 339,406 MW of solar, wind, and battery capacity.
In this scenario, solar capacity would increase from 6,070 MW in 2022 to 127,347 MW in 2050 — an increase of 21 times the current amount.
The report explains:
The massive growth in capacity is needed because North Carolina has a winter-peaking system, with the highest electricity demand occurring during nighttime hours when it is coldest. This demand profile necessitates a large buildout of four-hour battery storage and wind because solar does not operate during the periods of the highest electricity demand.
Just how much new solar capacity would the Renewable Scenario require? It would be nearly double the amount of solar currently installed in the entire United States.
Loss of a Tremendous Amount of Land
Regardless of the hyperfocus on emissions, they are not the only environmental concern regarding power generation (nor are environmental concerns the only ones — reliability and cost take precedence). What about land use, for example? The footprint of a renewable facility is far, far larger than that of a natural gas, coal, or nuclear facility.
The report estimates that the amount of new solar capacity needed under the Renewable Scenario would be nearly 850,000 acres of land — roughly 7 percent of the arable land in the state. How much land is 850,000 acres? It’s more than 1,328 square miles. How big is that? Put it this way: It would take up more area than the state’s 13 biggest cities combined. Charlotte, Fayetteville, Raleigh, Winston-Salem, Greensboro, Durham, Concord, Cary, High Point, Wilmington, Gastonia, Jacksonville, and Asheville put together would be smaller than all the land the new solar facilities would require to satisfy the Renewable Scenario.
Solar facilities last about 25 years. What happens when the facilities close and that land is returned to other uses? State law lays out a process for decommissioning a solar facility and restoring the land “as nearly as practicable” to its former usefulness, including — importantly — agricultural use.
Decommissioning includes many steps, such as removing all equipment — the panels, the racking, the cables (above and below ground), fencing, transformers, inverters, and any associated battery arrays — and then recycling what can be recycled, sending the rest to landfills, and separating out the hazardous waste.
Unfortunately, even those steps may not restore the land to agricultural use. Research from North Carolina State University explained that restoration also includes mitigating any residual toxic heavy metals from the panels and facilities and rehabilitating the soil sterilized by the herbicides used to keep weeds and vegetation out. It would also include additional measures to restore the soil’s pH and nutrient levels.
Massive Expansion in Transmission Infrastructure to Reach Far-Flung Solar Facilities
Another problem is that there wouldn’t be one centralized solar megacity. Instead, the facilities would be scattered all across the state and generally away from the population centers where more power is consumed. For that reason, all those facilities would require extending transmission infrastructure out to each one of them.
The “Lighting the Path” report estimates that the Renewable Scenario (solar, wind, and batteries combined) “would require a 58 to 76 percent increase in transmission infrastructure” to accommodate higher penetrations of intermittent renewable energy. The report’s midpoint estimate was that North Carolina would need more than 12,500 miles of new transmission lines under the Renewable Scenario.
By contrast, the Nuclear Scenario would require only about 1,348 miles of new transmission lines (a 7 percent increase). Being that nuclear is highly reliable and vastly more efficient in land use, new nuclear generation would need less than half of the amount of land currently taken by intermittent solar facilities.
Summary
Overbuilding large, sprawling, and inherently unreliable solar facilities would necessitate building extensive transmission lines to connect them all. North Carolina law would roll those costs into customers’ electricity bills, while sticking them with less reliable electricity service. Especially because electricity is a basic human necessity, the implications for North Carolina consumers would be dire.
Future research briefs will examine other findings in the “Lighting the Path” report.
The post Without Nuclear, a Carbon-Neutral Grid Needs an Unthinkable Amount of Solar first appeared on John Locke Foundation.