And if so, can Virginia copy them?
The short answer is, yes and no.
Yes, they seem to have a carbon-free electrical grid. They are the only state in the U.S. to be able to make that claim.
But not, we can’t copy them. They are the gateway for hydroelectric power generated in Quebec to enter the U.S. And they have significant hydroelectric power generated within the state.
They’ve done other things as well. But hydroelectric power is the backbone of Vermont’s carbon-free grid. And that’s not going to help Virginia meet its 2045 goal of having its own carbon-free electrical grid.
Instead, weirdly enough, near as I can tell, without explicitly saying so, Virginia has made a big bet on batteries as the backbone of our system. In 2020, our legislature laid out an explicit path for converting our generation to wind and solar. But unlike hydroelectric, those are intermittent sources — they require something to store the energy. Rationally, the same legislation requires construction of specific amounts of “energy storage facilities” to match.
The legislation doesn’t spell it out, but near as I can tell, with current technology, the only thing on the table with the potential to store that much energy is batteries. Big batteries, for sure. At least, at the scale and distribution required for an entire state’s electrical grid.
I guess the takeaway is this: I thought I was taking a big step by buying an EV. Running my car off batteries seemed like a real leap forward. But, as it turns out, twenty years from now, Virginia’s entire electrical grid is going to be running off batteries, half the time.
Or, at least, that’s how I read the plan, as laid out in Commonwealth of Virginia statute, Section 56-585.5. Generation of electricity from renewable and zero carbon sources
Virginia: We’ve done all the easy stuff, and we’re only halfway to a carbon-free electrical grid.
Virginia, where I live, has a target for a carbon-free electrical grid sometime around mid-century. This is set in statute, as of 2020. The main electrical supplier (Dominion) is required to be carbon-free by 2045, and smaller suppliers are required to be so by 2050.
That’s just two decades from now. Which, as power plants go, is not quite the blink of an eye. But it’s close.
Virginia cut its C02 emissions per kilowatt-hour of electricity in half, in the first two decades of the 21st century. Virginia is currently just a touch under 0.6 pounds C02 per kilowatt-hour.
Source: Analysis of data from the U.S. EIA.
It’s straightforward to see how Virginia achieved most of its progress to date: It substituted natural gas for coal. Shown below, from my analysis of underlying data from the U.S. EIA:
That works because natural gas is fossil-fuel lite. Electricity from natural gas generates less than half as much C02 per KWH as electricity from coal.
Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration.
That has to be tempered with the understanding that methane leaks from natural gas wells and other aspects of natural gas supply are a significant source of greenhouse gasses in their own right. But in the long run, it’s all about C02, as methane is a relatively short-lived greenhouse gas. Depending on the source, the time it takes for methane to “break down in the atmosphere” is somewhere between eight and twelve years. Whereas the residence time of additional C02 in the atmosphere is centuries to millennia. Separately, a small part of the difference shown above is a vintage effect — coal plants tend to be old plants, all other things equal, and old plants tend to be less efficient.
But note that this all occurred well before the Virginia C02 mandate was in place.
The changes so far in Virginia’s electrical generation have been driven mainly by market forces. Mostly, the relative cheapness of natural gas, the increasing cost of coal, and, secondarily, the increasing expense of running coal-fired power while meeting current Federal air pollution standards.
Source: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, annotations in red and black are mine.
In a nutshell, all Virginia has done, so far, has been to substitute a cheaper fossil fuel power source for a more expensive one: Gas for coal. And that, just incidentally, substituted a lower-carbon power source for a higher-carbon one.
I am reminded of the true and scary story of Freon and the hole in the ozone layer. Freon is a chlorofluorocarbon. In the atmosphere, it’s inert unless struck with high-energy ultraviolet, at which point it fragments to form, among other things, a chlorine-based free radical that is just the ticket for converting ozone (oh-three) to molecular oxygen (oh-two), thus creating “a hole in the ozone layer”. That upper-atmosphere ozone is critical, in that it prevents the surface of the earth from being, in effect, sterilized by the hard ultraviolet (UVC) in sunlight. The scary part is that we can (and did) manufacture near-identical chemicals using bromine instead of chlorine. For example, Halon (r) fire extinguishers used a bromoflurocarbon. The sole reason that chlorine-based compounds were far-more-widely used is price: Chlorine is cheaper than bromine. But, as a completely separate issue, bromine radicals are vastly more efficient at destroying ozone. Given the long time lag between production of these products and when we were first alerted to what they did in the upper atmosphere, if the world had gone down the path of using bromofluorocarbons instead of chlorofluorcarbons, we’d all be dead by now. (Or most of us, anyway, as crops can’t survive high levels of UVC ). And the reason that we aren’t has nothing to do with forethought. It’s essentially a random consequence of the fact that chlorine is cheaper than bromine. We escaped complete UVC-related environmental catastrophe purely because, by chance, economic forces pushed manufacturers in a less-harmful direction. Thus I’m reminded of the current situation with natural gas versus coal. Power generators began switching to it, without significant blowback, because it’s cheap, not because it’s better from a global-warming perspective.
At this point, that’s over with. There’s all-but-no coal-fired generation left, in Virginia’s grid mix. In short, we’ve now finished grabbing all the low-hanging fruit.
How Virginia is going to get from its current status to carbon-free, in just two decades, remains a complete mystery. To me, at least. Nobody’s talking about building more nuclear power plants. We don’t have sources of hydroelectric power, to speak of. And we’re not the greatest place in the world for either solar or wind, both of which are intermittent power in any case.
Vermont: It’s easy being green.
Well, it’s easy when you live next-door to the world’s largest exporter of carbon-free hydroelectric power.
Most state electric utilities have some sort of mandatory or voluntary C02 emissions target in place. Some weaker than others. Only the states in white and brown, below, have no plans to de-carbonize their electrical generation.
Source: National Conference of State Legislatures.
Unsurprisingly, by eye, the white and brown states are pretty much the list of usual suspects for reactionary, backward-looking policies. I.e., the states making no acknowledgement of global warming in their public utility regulation lines up shockingly well with (e.g.) states with low COVID vaccine uptake.
If you look at statistics on C02/KWH by state, about one-quarter of states do better than Virginia. And the reasons for the reduced carbon-intensiveness of their grids are reasonably clear. These are a mix of hydroelectric-focused grids (e.g., Washington), states with renewables-friendly environments (e.g., California), and states that are heavily focused on natural gas and/or have some hydroelectric power available (much of New England).
Below, you can see how renewables tend to cluster geographicially and, where economically available, displace other sources. Blue (hydro) is concentrated on the West Coast and in the U.S. far Northeast. Green (wind) runs down the middle of the Great Plains. Yellow (solar) is both concentrated in the sunny southern U.S., and in other areas where implementation must have been driven by mandates rather than economics, such as around the urbanized areas of the Mid-Atlantic and New England states, as well as a cluster, all by itself, in Minnesota.
Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration.
And then there’s Vermont. Which, on paper at least, already has carbon-free electricity.
Carbon-intensiveness of electrical production, by state, 2022:
Source: Statista, inc. Underlying data are from U.S. Energy Information Administration.
How can they do that? Meaning, is that for real? Particularly when nobody else in the U.S. makes that claim.
For sure, there are nearby areas with essentially-carbon free grids, such as Quebec. Quebec achieves that because electrical generation there is virtually 100% hydroelectric generation.
Source: Statista.com
Starting with information from the Federal government, Vermont is a major gateway for Quebec-generated hydroelectric power to enter the U.S. Below is the detailed data for Vermont production, import, consumption, and export of electricity.
Source: State profiles, U.S. Energy Information Administration, detailed tables for Vermont.
Above, Vermont uses about 5.5 million megawatt-hours (MWH) of electricity per year. But it imports 13.7 million MWH from Quebec, uses 3.6 million of that, and exports the remaining 10.1 million MWH to other states.
In other words, (3.6 / 5.5 =~) two-thirds of the electricity used in Vermont is carbon-free hydroelectric imported from Canada. It’s quite hard to get at that figure, based on the data Vermont itself publishes. But there’s no way getting around it, based on the Federal numbers. The difference between imports and exports of electricity accounts for about two-thirds of the electricity used in the state.
This is not to downplay everything else they have done. Much. They appear to have encouraged solar power. They have their own domestic hydro sources. It appears that they purchase some nuclear, so the net interstate trade may hide some additional back-and-forth within it.
But the bottom line is that they sit at the point where a whole lot of Quebec Hydro power enters the U.S. And that has given them a lot of options not available to the rest of the states. For example, Vermont still maintains significant oil-fired generating capacity, but they only use it during extreme peaks in demand.
If I look back in the data, it’s clear that something happened in 2012, allowing vastly greater import of Canadian electricity. Based on press coverage, that appears to be a purely contractual result. That is, in 2010, Vermont reached a an agreement for a long-term purchase of electricity from Hydro Quebec.
I supposed I should dig further, but my take on it is that Vermont has no deep lessons to offer for Virginia’s grid. Vermont has achieved zero-carbon electricity mainly (but not entirely) by dint of being located next to Quebec, and being able to purchase the bulk of their power from Hydro Quebec.
Summary: We’re betting on batteries, in Virginia?
In a nutshell, I still don’t see how Virginia is going to meet its 2045 goal of carbon-free power. Unlike Vermont, the renewables we have access to — solar and wind, mostly — are intermittent. At present, there’s no way to rely on them to guarantee base load generating capacity.
We have one big nuclear plant — North Anna — but I don’t see anyone champing at the bit to build more.
If you read the legislation requiring a carbon-free grid by 2045 — found at this reference, Section 56-585.5. Generation of electricity from renewable and zero carbon sources— there’s an entire path laid out in terms of utilities being required to request permitting for additional onshore wind and solar generate every year.
So, unambiguously, laid out in law, we’re proposing to go carbon-free, within a couple of decades, more-or-less by replacing all of our current gas-fired electrical generating capacity with wind and solar. Along with any residual coal-fired or oil-fired capacity.
Going hand in hand with this, the law spells out the requirement for our electric utilities to install “energy storage” facilities, ten percent of which (as I read it) are to be on the end-user’s premises (“behind the meter”).
E. To enhance reliability and performance of the utility's generation and distribution system, each Phase I and Phase II Utility shall petition the Commission for necessary approvals to construct or acquire new, utility-owned energy storage resources.
But, unlike wind and solar, the law is delightfully non-specific as to what, exactly, those “energy storage resources” will be. I can only guess because there’s nothing currently available that could plausibly have been sketched in.
The bottom line is that, assuming we could build or buy the rights to the generation of that much wind and solar capacity, the big unknown is the batteries. Or whatever gets used as an “energy storage” resource.
For my part, I now feel a lot better informed. For the past few years, I knew that we’d mandated a carbon-free grid in Virginia by mid-century. But I could not for the life of me figure out how we proposed to do it. Now I know that the answer, as laid out in law, is wind, solar, and … not explicitly stated, but what else is there … great big batteries.
