Integrating Renewable Energy Is Like Racial Integration in the 1960s: It’s Right, But It’s Not Easy

Over the few years that I’ve been writing here at 2GreenEnergy.com, I’ve offered a number of suggestions that, if accepted, would create a more level playing field between renewables and fossil fuels. In my recent piece on investor uncertainties in renewable energy, I argued for legislation that would establish a floor on energy prices, thus enabling alternative energy investors protection from price manipulation from the traditional energy industry, designed specifically to put them out of business.

In response, these words from a reader:

I would have argued that a bigger problem than subsidies is that the U.S . grid is operated on principles that are ill-suited to an intermittent source such as wind or solar. For example, Spain runs a centralized national dispatch center that uses wind when it is available, even if that means ordering other types of generation to throttle back. As wind capacity increases, there are a number of problems that wind providers seem reluctant to address.

ERCOT (Electric Reliability Council of Texas), as an example, has been reluctant to count wind power in certain reliability calculations because the wind providers won’t take responsibility for providing some degree of scheduled power (e.g., a coal plant is going offline in three weeks for scheduled maintenance; wind providers won’t put up the money to guarantee, by buying from other suppliers if necessary, that they will provide a specific level of output while the maintenance goes on). Wind providers have typically received a very large concession in the form of not having to provide reactive load response and frequency control capabilities.

Excellent point. The present-day challenge of integrating renewables on the grid in the U.S. is reminiscent of integrating Black students into historically all-White colleges in the South 50 years ago. It’s so right, for so many reasons, yet it’s pushing against every fiber of the existing modes of thinking and behaving.

In particular, we’re waiting for market forces to come into balance; we wish we had an efficient market that could take all the important factors into consideration and make decisions based on the totality of the facts. The sad part, however, is that the most telling facts are systematically left out of the market equation, i.e., the externalities. As long as no one needs to cover the extreme costs of the lung disease, the long-term ecological damage, the costs of the U.S. military’s involvement around the world to maintain our access to oil, the case for clean energy will continue to languish.