2024 – The Year in Review - ORIGINAL CONTENT

The year 2024 was a year of growing awareness of the societal effects of “Net Zero by 2050” and of growing resistance to elements of government energy and climate policies intended to achieve “Net Zero by 2050”.

The governments of several developed nations realized that, while they had established goals to be achieved on the path to Net Zero, they had no actual plans to achieve those goals. Several national governments also realized that the goals they had set were unlikely to be achieved or even achievable.

Several wind and solar “droughts” helped make it obvious that storage was a critical component of an intermittent renewable generation powered electric grid. Two peer reviewed studies identified the magnitude of the storge required to achieve reliability of a renewable grid. Comparing their conclusions with the currently installed grid-scale storage capacity exposed the woeful inadequacy of the current storage fleet. Storage could be, and had been, largely ignored because there was adequate conventional generation capacity available to “fill in the blanks” when renewable generation was inadequate or unavailable.

The combination of demand growth and the scheduled closure of coal and natural gas generation capacity increased focus on the storage issue. Several approaches to expanding storage capacity have been studied, including combinations of short, medium and long-duration batteries, “Green Hydrogen”, pumped hydro, compressed air and even flywheels. All of these storage approaches are more expensive than the generating capacity they would support and have long implementation times.

Several governments have concluded that Net Zero would require the installation of Dispatchable Emissions-Free Resources (DEFRs). The most likely DEFR technology is nuclear generation, including gigawatt-scale generators and Small Modular reactors (SMRs). However, nuclear installations require long lead times and SMRs are not yet commercially available.

Corporations which operate large data centers and Artificial Intelligence (AI) facilities have realized that renewable generation, even with storage, would not be sufficiently reliable for their needs; and, in many cases, utilities do not have adequate generating capacity available to supply them. These corporations are now refocusing on dedicated nuclear generation systems of up to 2 GW capacity.

In the US, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the North American Electric Reliability Council and several ISOs and RTOs have realized that the combined effects of renewable generation growth, storage inadequacy, grid load growth and planned conventional generation retirements threaten grid reliability.

Resistance to Net Zero policies is growing in the developed nations. Farmers and ranchers are protesting proposed government programs to limit the use of synthetic fertilizers, reduce cattle, lamb and hog herds, remove farmland from cultivation and require the use of currently unavailable electric farm equipment.

Public interest in electric vehicles has plateaued and is declining in some markets. Vehicle manufacturers are slowing or cancelling planned EV manufacturing facilities. Some governments have reduced or eliminated incentives for EV purchases, triggering significant reductions in EV sales. Range anxiety also remains an issue for EVs.

UK homeowners are resisting conversion from natural gas furnaces and boilers to electric heat pumps, both because of the high cost of heat pump conversion and because electricity rates have increased to the point that electric heat pumps are also more expensive to operate.. Others successfully resisted using their homes as demonstration sites for Hydrogen conversion from natural gas.