Is Having 100% Renewable Energy for a Country Feasible?

Check out this answer from Consensus:

The feasibility of achieving 100% renewable energy for a country is supported by extensive research across various regions. While there are challenges related to energy storage and grid management, technological advancements and strategic planning can address these issues. The transition to renewable energy systems offers significant economic, environmental, and social benefits, making it a viable and desirable goal for countries worldwide.

The transition to 100% renewable energy systems has been a topic of significant research and debate over the past few decades. With the growing concerns over climate change and the need for sustainable development, many countries are exploring the feasibility of completely shifting to renewable energy sources. This article examines the feasibility of achieving 100% renewable energy for a country, drawing on insights from various research studies.

Historical Context and Evolution

Research on 100% renewable energy systems began in the mid-1970s, driven by the oil crises of that era. Since the mid-2000s, this field has rapidly expanded, with numerous studies concluding that a global shift to 100% renewable energy is feasible and cost-effective. Advanced modeling techniques have enabled researchers to chart realistic transition pathways, emphasizing solar and wind energy as central components of future energy systems1.

Regional Feasibility Studies

Middle East and North Africa (MENA)

A study focusing on the MENA region explored the feasibility of a 100% renewable electricity system by 2030. The research highlighted that solar photovoltaics (PV) and wind energy could cover more than 90% of the region’s energy needs. The study also emphasized the importance of energy storage and grid interconnections to manage the variability of renewable energy sources2.

Denmark

In Denmark, a detailed energy system analysis for the years 2030 and 2050 demonstrated that a 100% renewable energy system is physically possible. The study proposed a mix of biomass, wind, wave, and solar power, with a significant emphasis on energy storage and flexible system design to balance supply and demand4.

Germany and Europe

Germany’s ambitious targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions have led to extensive research on 100% renewable electricity systems. Studies have shown that it is possible to achieve a reliable and secure energy supply through a combination of renewable sources and expanded storage capacities. This shift marks a significant paradigm change in energy policies6.

Jordan

Jordan’s energy crises in the past two decades have prompted the country to explore renewable energy solutions. A study found that a 100% renewable electricity system, primarily based on solar and wind energy, is economically feasible and could eliminate import dependency and carbon dioxide emissions by 20507.

Economic and Social Implications

The transition to 100% renewable energy systems is not only technically feasible but also economically beneficial. Research indicates that such systems can lead to significant energy savings, create employment opportunities, and provide universal access to low-cost energy. The economic viability of renewable energy systems is further supported by the decreasing costs of technologies like solar PV and energy storage3 5.

Technological Challenges and Solutions

One of the primary challenges in achieving 100% renewable energy is managing the intermittency of sources like solar and wind. Solutions such as energy storage, grid interconnections, and power-to-gas technologies are crucial for ensuring a stable energy supply. For instance, in the Nordic countries, power-to-gas technology has been identified as a key component in balancing the energy system and providing synthetic gas for transport and industrial sectors9.

 

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Is having 100% renewable energy for a country feasible?

Mark Jacobson has answered Near Certain

An expert from Stanford University in Energy Systems, Renewable Energy, Atmospheric Science, Climatology

Transitioning countries to 100% clean, renewable energy in all energy sectors (electricity, transportation, heating/cooling, industry, agriculture/forestry/fishing) is not only possible, but is also happening worldwide, although there is still a long way to go. Not only are the shares of electric transportation and wind-water-solar electricity on the grid increasing worldwide, but businesses, cities, states, and countries are increasingly proposing or committing to 100% clean, renewable energy in one or more sectors. The technical and economic feasibility of transitioning the world, states, and countries to 100% wind, water, and solar has been documented by our group in a series of studies, starting in 2009, continuing most recently with roadmaps for 139 individual countries and 53 towns and cities. This body of work, carried out by over 85 authors and 35 peer-reviewers, is further supported by an additional 30 peer-reviewed studies that find it is possible to match demand with supply with 100% or near-100% renewable energy systems.

The Heard et al article does nothing to challenge either this conclusion or the facts on the ground. Their paper, which was recently contradicted in detail by the peer-reviewed review articles of Brown et al. (2018) and Diesendorf and Elliston (2018), uses biased and hand-waving judgment to opine what is “convincing” and “unrealistic.”

The analysis is riddled with errors and arbitrary claims. For example, these authors claim a 2015 PNAS study our group performed used a 30-minute time step, when in fact it was a 30-second time step. They then criticized studies that did not include high-temporal resolution meteorological modeling over multiple years to account for extreme weather events without recognizing that the PNAS study did. They further criticized studies that reduced primary energy, yet didn’t realize that electrification of all energy sectors reduces primary energy an average of 23% due to the higher work output:energy input ratio of electricity over fossil fuels and that providing that electricity with wind, water, and solar power reduces demand another 12.6% due to eliminating energy used in mining, transporting, and refining fossil fuels. End-use energy efficiency improvements and reducing energy use may happen in addition to those reductions. The PNAS study is also supported under multiple additional conditions by a new study examining the ability of supply from 100% renewable systems to match demand in all sectors in 20 world regions. No study is perfect, and all studies should be evaluated rather than taken for granted. However, there is a difference between pointing out differences in opinion and where work can be improved and attempting to trash literature to advance an agenda. The Heard et al. paper does nothing to disprove the potential for the world to transition to 100% clean, renewable energy.

 

Is having 100% renewable energy for a country feasible?

Benjamin Heard has answered Extremely Unlikely

An expert from University of Adelaide in Energy Systems

An answer firstly demands a definition of feasible, which we provided in our paper ‘Burden of Proof‘, being ‘possible within physical and technical boundaries (as opposed to ‘viable’ in which we leave matters of cost, social consent etc’). It also needs a definition of renewables. Are large scale-hydro and biomass included in this grouping? If so, the feasibility hurdle is much more easily overcome; however the deleterious sustainability consequences may be extreme.

We created four criteria by which one can make an assessment of feasibility. We reviewed 24 studies and found all wanting in one or more areas of evidence. That doesn’t mean the studies are no good; it means the evidence for feasibility is lacking, and in many of the studies the lack of compelling evidence was profound.

The two studies for New Zealand, taken together, came closest to a strong body of evidence, though with remaining gaps. That would be an ~75 % hydroelectric supply with most of the balance from wind, in a relatively small country. So we must then ask, how transferable is this solution set? (Not very).

Major gaps in evidence related to i) using realistic demand projections ii) modelling to sub-hourly simulations iii) ensuring essential frequency control and other ancillary services where synchronous suppliers are removed from the supply portfolio iii) Power flow modelling to define the necessary expansion of transmission infrastructure. All told, it may be do-able, however the evidence for feasibility is lacking.

 

Is having 100% renewable energy for a country feasible?

Mark Delucchi has answered Near Certain

An expert from University of California, Berkeley in Energy Systems, Economics, Environmental Science

There is plenty of evidence that 100% renewable energy, or something very close (e.g., at least 95%), including hydropower but essentially no bioenergy, is technically feasible in the sense that it can be done with existing technology (or modest refinements thereto) and current or modestly adapted engineering and operational know-how. Put another way, it is virtually certain that (near) 100% renewable energy (excluding bioenergy) can be provided reliably without what might colloquially be called “technological breakthroughs”. There are plenty of studies of all of the relevant pieces, including ancillary services and power transmission.

It is true that there is no single 100% renewable study that has full detail on every single aspect of a complete energy system, but this is not required to demonstrate technical feasibility, because, as I just mentioned, there are plenty of studies on the individual pieces. What is not well known is what is the least-cost 100% renewable energy system looks like, where least-cost is properly defined as least *social* cost. More precisely, we don’t know the least-cost mix of technologies and strategies, including the mix of generation and end-use technologies, demand management including load shifting, the capacity and extent of large-scale transmission networks, centralized storage, de-centralized storage, V2G, hydrogen storage, thermal energy storage, and more.

We do, however, have plenty of studies to suggest that there are strategies that provide enormous social benefits compared with a business-as-usual (BAU) scenario. At the end of the day, the question of feasibility boils down to a few basic kinds of issues: how we model demand-side behavior in the face of radically different energy systems; how we quantify the costs and performance of existing or near-future energy technologies; and how we handle impacts that are not easily quantified in dollars (e.g., risks of nuclear power). Having looked at these questions from engineering and economic perspectives, I am reasonably confident that (near) 100% renewable energy is technically feasible and likely to be socially preferred to BAU scenarios, but I have no clear sense yet of what the least-cost reliable system looks like.

 

Is having 100% renewable energy for a country feasible?

XiaoYu Wu has answered Likely

An expert from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Energy Systems, Mechanical Engineering

It is a very complicated problem. And I was impressed by the papers published by Jacobson et al and Heard et al. After a briefly scan through these two papers, I have an impression that for a certain country, especially for a developed country without much energy intensive manufacturing inside its boarder, 100% renewable energy is very likely. Two years ago, there was news about Austria’s largest state used 100% renewable electricity. (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/06/all-electricity-in-austrias-largest-state-now-produced-from-renewables) Also, for a certain day in some other countries in Europe, the renewable energy produced more than needed for the nation (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jul/10/denmark-wind-windfarm-power-exceed-electricity-demand and http://fortune.com/2016/05/11/germany-excess-power/). Additionally, the Earth receives 23000 TW of solar energy (Perez & Perez, 2009a), while the global energy consumption is 16 TW. Therefore, it could be possible even if we capture only 0.07% of the solar energy, it work perfectly. However, whether renewable energy can be adapted to other countries depends on a lot about policies, as many other experts answered in this discussion. And I am not very familiar with politics, so I won’t comment on how this can be feasible.

 

Is having 100% renewable energy for a country feasible?

Baptiste Francois has answered Near Certain

An expert from University of Massachusetts in Climatology, Renewable Energy, Hydrology

Not being narrow-minded, we acknowledge that the 100% VRE scenario has been the centre of attention of many studies in recent years. One can for instance mention the exchanges of opinions between Jacobson et al., 2015, Jacobson et al., 2017 and Clark et al. 2016 and between Brown et al,., and Heard et al., 2017. However, note that among the five decarbonisation scenarios that the European Commission (EC) considers, one may find: the High Renewable energy sources (RES) scenario (see page 4 of the Energy Roadmap 2050 ). This scenario reads as: ‘Strong support measures for RES leading to a very high share of RES in gross final energy consumption (75% in 2050) and a share of RES in electricity consumption reaching 97%.’

One may thus acknowledge that the scenario 100% RES (or at least very close to 100%) is worth studying, at least from the European Commission point of view. On this ground, I fully agree with M. Jacobson’s answer, especially when he mentioned how some researchers try to trash any works that study 100 % renewable energy system. I recently got one of my papers rejected for publication for this reason .. (quote from the reviewer: ”100% renewable energy is in reality from system operational point of view infeasible”.) I would also like to highlight the study by B. Sovacool (quote): “Managers of the system obviously prefer to maintain their domain and, while they may seek increased profits, they do not want to see the introduction of new and disruptive ‘radical’ technologies that may reduce their control over the system. In essence, the current ‘technical’ barriers to large-scale integration of wind, solar, and other renewables may not be technical at all, and more about the social, political, and practical inertia of the traditional electricity generation system.”.(Sovacool 2009)

 

Is having 100% renewable energy for a country feasible?

Eugene Preston has answered Extremely Unlikely

An expert from Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in Renewable Energy

100% means all the time, every hour, through good weather years and bad ones. I do reliability studies that simply ask the question, is there enough capacity every hour to meet the demand. I recently gave a talk to ERCOT, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas pushing renewables to 75% penetration see http://www.ercot.com/content/wcm/key_documents_lists/108733/06._EGPpresentation.pdf for the presentation and also gave a video or the same talk to some university students on the same day. That video is posted here https://mediasite.aces.utexas.edu/UTMediasite/Play/22760892ae97482cad74a855bee208ad1d?catalog=132651a4-ec47-440e-ba27-334ffd9889f0&playFrom=32664&autoStart=true ERCOT has quite a lot of wind power and energy, 20,000 MW in a 70,000 MW peaking system with about a 40,000 MW average demand for the year. We are just now beginning to add a lot of solar to our system. The simulations show that somewhere around 7000 to 14000 MW of solar we will have excess power and begin dumping excess energy at times much as California is having to do right now. So this is wasted energy. And we begin to waste this renewable energy at an early point in the conversion to renewables, maybe around 20% to 30% penetration. I haven’t checked the exact value. In order to stop dumping this valuable energy we will need to store it. So I add storage to the model and it works fine. There is a table at the end of the presentation showing scenarios of different penetrations and how much storage is needed. At first the storage is useful for just moving energy to peak shaving. But as renewables pick up more and more of the load the peak shaving is satisfied and now renewables begin to pick up more hours. As you keep on adding more renewables and more storage pretty soon you are seeing renewables picking up nearly all the energy all the time. But there is a problem. Every once in a while you see energy shortages in renewables production. This is because the wind and solar just have low production days in energy. You already have enough storage to distribute the energy to when its needed. That’s not the problem. The problem is that wind and solar and hydro just have times when they don’t produce much energy across the entire state. If you miss a day of production in renewables you have to fire up the gas generators to fill in the demand. So when you run the reliability program I call RTS3 the program forces you to not retire all the gas. In fact you have to keep most of your fossil fuel capacity in standby to fill in when renewables fail to produce enough energy. So this right here prevents 100% conversion to renewables. What if we had really long term storage, like the equivalent of a grain silo? Suppose we could create some form of liquids such as a flow battery does where we could store large amounts of energy in these liquids and even store them for years. We could ride through the low production years with enough storage. But that technology is not yet invented. So until we invent long term storage for electric energy we are not going to be able to achieve 100% renewables. You can download my RTS3 model and run your own scenarios. I could even prepare for you the CAISO data from public sources. I intend to do just that as soon as I finish my NERC www.nerc.com study on the CAISO. They want to finish their report first before we go public. By the way the CAISO has a terrible reliability problem if there is an extended drought which reduces hydro production for years at a time. Hydro is a blessing and a curse. Its a blessing during rainy years and a curse in dry years. California had the driest years in 2013 – 2015 in the past 1200 years. The question is, when is the next drought, and what kind of resources do we need to keep working so we can insure the lights will stay on during severe droughts. Having some nuclear in the mix would make the system more reliable both capacity wise and energy wise as well as reduce CO2 emissions. So those are my comments. Please contact me at any time for modeling how we get off fossil fuels. We all have the same goal of getting off fossil fuels. My web page is http://egpreston.com .

 

Is having 100% renewable energy for a country feasible?

Nino Ramos has answered Likely

An expert from Osaka University in Renewable Energy

Yes it is feasible. But the other important question is, “Is it economically practical?”. Renewable energy system designers can modify the system given the available renewable resources and demand to rely solely on renewable source however, the balance may not be anymore economically practical as the trade-off can manifest in oversized storage or oversized renewable input source mix which can be too costly and not practical at present. But there are countries looking forward to the trend that later on in time, production, installation costs, etc. for these systems will go down further and so they are continuing the 100% initiative on small-scale test grids or stand alone systems and have been getting promising results.

 

Is having 100% renewable energy for a country feasible?

Mehmet Numan Kaya has answered Likely

An expert from University of Sheffield in Renewable Energy, Energy Systems

I think it is not feasible without bulk energy storage systems. It is almost imposible to have 100% control on renewable energy systems, so, there have to be some energy storage systems available to make it more feasible by making various renewable energy systems operate together. You can not tell people that the power won’t be available from time to time because of the weather conditions etc. Another point is that how secure energy supply will be with only renewables. It is always good to have various energy sources. To sum up, I think it will be the best way to supply most of the energy from renewables, it can even be 100% if there are energy storage systems available. In additing, energy security has to be taken into account as well.

 

Is having 100% renewable energy for a country feasible?

Qiyuan Li has answered Unlikely

An expert from UNSW Sydney in Mechanical Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Renewable Energy

According to my study (small scale, like buildings and factory), currently, it is technically feasible to have 100% renewable energy for a commercial building or an industrial factory’s energy demand (air-conditioning, water heating, electricity…), however, it is not economical to use 100% renewable energy. I think in the near future (~in 30 years), as long as the fossil fuels are available/existing, it is not feasible to have 100% renewable energy (except for very few countries, like Australia, it has great solar energy resource, but relatively low energy demand). At the system design point view, as there are so many constraints (energy storage capacity…), it would be better to just consider an optimized (or higher) solar or renewable energy fraction.

 

Is having 100% renewable energy for a country feasible?

Clifford Goudey has answered Near Certain

An expert from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Mechanical Engineering, Renewable Energy, Marine Science

There are already many countries that have a 100% renewable electric grid. The conversion of the transport sector to all-electric or the production of biofuels will make the rest of the conversion possible. The lingering use for fossil fuels with be as a feed stock for durable goods. Burning it will some day seem like a very antiquated idea.

 

Is having 100% renewable energy for a country feasible?

Laurence Delina has answered Likely

An expert from Boston University in Renewable Energy, Energy Systems

Feasible in terms of what? If it’s feasibility in terms of technology, it seems likely – following arguments from Stanford’s Jacobson, Delucci, et al. If it’s feasibility in terms of the necessary policy, financing, and institutional drivers, it is less likely, unless current political, economic, and institutional/governance systems are adequately perturbed. In my Gedankenexperiment of the lessons of rapid wartime mobilisation and its potential application as a policy model, I have shown how it could be possible in these non-technical aspects. This is of course full of caveats. If history is to be used as a basis to respond to the question, then yes, it is feasible to move towards a 100% renewable energy globally.

 

Is having 100% renewable energy for a country feasible?

John Kaiser Calautit has answered Likely

An expert from The University of Nottingham in Renewable Energy, Engineering, Clean Technology, Mechanical Engineering, Civil Engineering

It is feasible but there are still several challenges and barriers that should be addressed, not technical or economical but social and political.

 

Is having 100% renewable energy for a country feasible?

Samuel Sun has answered Likely

An expert from University of Florida in Energy Systems

That depends. In 100 years later, it is very likely because of the technology progresses and economic development. But in 10 years, it is impossible since the economic cost is so high that most countries can’t afford it.

 

Is having 100% renewable energy for a country feasible?

Ibrahim Aldaouab has answered Unlikely

An expert from University of Dayton in Energy Systems, Renewable Energy, Electrical Engineering

Due to the unpredictable weather and load.

 

Is having 100% renewable energy for a country feasible?

Yuliya Blondiau née Karneyeva has answered Near Certain

An expert from University of St. Gallen in Renewable Energy, Project Management

Solar and wind produce energy at different time of the day, hydropower can provide base load energy.

 

Is having 100% renewable energy for a country feasible?

Saeed Mohammed Wazed has answered Near Certain

An expert from University of Sheffield in Renewable Energy, Mechanical Engineering

100% renewable energy is possible it will just take some time. Our economy is so embedded in fossil fuel that implementation of renewable energy technologies is a huge task. However, I feel that the best way to do this is to first change our Grid system to provide renewable energy. To fully incorporate renewable energy we will need backing from corporations and companies which will then trickle down to the rest of us. Think about it, if we can base our economy of technology that requires millions in investment to first find oil, dig it out, process it and then we get a product for daily use, why can’t we build a system around free energy available. If we have help from corporations and companies to break the initial investment, we can have 100% renewable Energy sooner rather than later. It is, however, inevitable….