Overcoming Barriers to Large-Scale Renewable Energy: Managing Greenhouse Gas Emissions

Manage Greenhouse Gas Emissions 1
MANAGING GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS
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Manage Greenhouse Gas Emissions 2
Managing Greenhouse Gas Emissions
Introduction
Exploration, production and use of renewable energy have increased significantly over
the past few decades mainly because of the global problem of climate change. Solar and wind
power are among the commonest types of renewable energy. These energy systems have
numerous economic, social and environmental benefits including: reduce greenhouse gas
emissions, improve public health, stabilize energy prices, create jobs, are reliable and resilient,
and produce inexhaustible energy, save money, help diversify energy supply, and enhance
energy independence. However, adoption of large-scale, 100% renewable solar and wind power
systems still faces various barriers. One of the major barriers is the reliability conceptions of
solar and wind power systems. It is factual that solar and wind power systems cannot reliably
generate base load power electricity because of the variability of sunlight intensity or sunshine
and strength of wind. Nevertheless, this does not mean that solar and wind power stations are not
reliable renewable energy systems. This is because even though they cannot guarantee base load
power, they can generate peak load power and other loads below the base load. Base load power
stations are power stations that are designed to ensure that a particular power plant generates and
provides the required minimum quantity of electric power at any given time1. The base load
power stations operate continuously only to stop for maintenance, repair, upgrade or
unanticipated outages. On the other hand, peak load power stations are power stations that
generate and provide electric power that is above the minimum power required at any given time
(i.e. base load).
1 Benjamin Matek and Karl Gawell, 2015. The Benefits of Baseload Renewables: A Misunderstood Energy
Technology. The Electricity Journal, 28(2), pp. 101-112.

Manage Greenhouse Gas Emissions 3
Opponents of large-scale, 100% renewable solar and wind power systems have used the
sunlight and wind variability notion to argue that solar and wind power systems are not reliable
or require additional systems such as diesel or hydro-powered generators or geothermal base
load power plants, which increases the complexity and cost of solar and wind power systems.
The fact that these systems can generate peak load makes reliability their strength rather than a
weakness. The argument of the opponents, including energy regulators, conservative politicians,
mainstream media and business people, is mainly for individual interests such as political
mileage or a way of supporting nuclear, gas and coal power plant projects from which they make
a lot of money and undermine investments in large-scale renewable energy2. The base load
mindset is propagated by persons with vested interests in non-renewable energy sector and is
greatly affecting adoption of solar and wind energy systems. Their main aim is to discourage
investments in large-scale renewable solar and wind power plants so that they can continue
benefiting from their establish businesses in fossil fuel industry. They are not considered with the
negative environmental impacts of non-renewable energy systems. They also never discuss about
other real issues in the non-renewable energy sector, such as conventional power plants operating
only half their design life, which is making their future reliability a big doubt. For example, the
capacity factor at which conventional power plants ran in India in 2015 was 49.9%, it stood at
56.2% in China in 2014 (and dropped to 50.9% in 2015) and in Lithgow, NSW, it was 45% in
2015. The fact that capacity factors for conventional power plants are declining in an indicator
that these plants will not have the capacity to meet the ever growing global electricity demand in
the near future. This makes adoption of renewable energy unavoidable.
2 Union of Concerned Scientists, 2017. Barriers to Renewable Energy Technologies. [Online]
Available at: https://www.ucsusa.org/clean-energy/renewable-energy/barriers-to-renewable-
energy#.XEQ3LbxRXIU
[Accessed 20 January 2019].