Summary
Wind and solar power generation could provide societal benefits including climate change mitigation, but are subject to the variability of weather. In the Earth’s atmosphere, large planetary scale waves contain most of the kinetic energy. Interestingly, the transition from low wind energy to high wind energy corresponds to the size of today’s electricity balancing areas (low energy) to the size of the 48 contiguous US states (high energy).Topography and the geographic separation between wind and solar resources also vary dominantly on large geographic scales. Thus, the efficiency (cost reduction and carbon mitigation) of distributed wind and solar electric generation should rise with increasing geographic size of electric power system.
A detailed study was conducted over the US 48 contiguous states to determine the geographic characteristics of wind and solar dominated electric power systems. The systems also included natural gas plants and power transmission. The study used high-spatial and temporal-resolution (hourly) weather data from 2006 to 2008 and concurrent electric demand data projected to 2030 to determine cost-optimal wind, solar, natural gas plant, and transmission configurations for domains of various sizes. It was shown that wind and solar generation is maximized, total atmospheric carbon release minimized, and system costs minimized by using the largest domain. The study indicates that the crucial element of the transition is the implementation of a large-domain High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) power transmission system. Such a transition would reduce carbon dioxide emissions from the electric sector by 83% compared to the 2010 mix. A less sophisticated study showed that other large geographic domains, such as Europe and China, could achieve similar systems by the 2030s.
Biography
Dr. Alexander “Sandy” MacDonald is Chief Science Advisor for NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, and Director of the Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL) in Boulder, Colorado. In February of 2014, he was selected as the American Meteorological Society (AMS) President-Elect and will take over as the Society’s president in January of 2015.
A Montana native, Dr. MacDonald’s interest in weather began at age eight, when his mother gave him a subscription to Scientific American, and he became fascinated with a nearby weather disaster. He earned Bachelor of Science degrees in Mathematics and Physics from Montana State, before joining the U.S. Air Force as an officer, serving from 1967 to 1971.
After the service, Dr. MacDonald earned both his Master of Science degree and Ph.D. in Meteorology from the University of Utah. Knowing that he wanted to work in the atmospheric sciences and determining that NOAA conducted the best science in this area, Dr. MacDonald sought a position at the newly formed agency (1970), beginning his career with NOAA’s National Weather Service’s Western Region in 1973. While at the NWS, he received a bronze medal for his work on the automated weather information system.
Dr. MacDonald’s leadership role in NOAA began in the 1980s when he led a group within NOAA’s research laboratories that developed and tested systems to bring data streams and models together for operational forecasters (PROFS). He headed the research and development group that later became the Forecast Systems Laboratory (FSL), until his present assignment. In 1993 he received the Department of Commerce Gold Medal Award for his role in the development of the National Weather Service AWIPS (Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System) model.
Dr. MacDonald’s contributions to the science of weather and climate include bringing parallel computing to FSL, which led to the development, installation, and operation of a High-Performance Computing System called JET; developing a new, unique mesoscale weather prediction model; and originating the idea of diagnosis of three-dimensional water vapor using a GPS (Global Positioning System). His work in the White House with Vice President Al Gore to start GLOBE, an educational web-based program involving classrooms worldwide in atmospheric sciences, earned him the Distinguished Presidential Rank Award in 1998.
In the new century, Dr. MacDonald invented a unique way of showcasing NOAA science. His Science On a Sphere® – a multimedia system using high-speed computers, advanced imaging techniques, and strategically placed projectors to display full-color animated images of satellite, geophysical, and astronomical data on a sphere – is being placed in museums and science centers across the globe. More recently, Dr. MacDonald is leading efforts within NOAA to use Unmanned Aircraft Systems to improve the accuracy of weather and climate predictions.
In the last decade, Dr. MacDonald served as OAR’s Deputy Assistant Administrator for six years while directing the Earth System Research Laboratory. He was awarded a Meritorious Presidential Rank Award for his invention of Science On a Sphere® in 2007 and a Distinguished Presidential Rank Award for his leadership of the global modeling efforts at the Earth System Research Laboratory as well as two other Distinguished Presidential Rank Awards. He is still fascinated with weather and is dedicated to improving forecasts at all time scales.
Dr Christopher Clack is a research scientist II with the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at the University of Colorado working with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). He received his Ph.D. in applied mathematics and plasma physics from the University of Sheffield in the UK, where he was studying waves in the atmosphere of the Sun. He also has a B.Sc. in mathematics and statistics from the University of Manchester in the UK. Dr Clack previously worked on solar physics and the governing equations of magnetohydrodynamics, which is a convolution of the Navier-Stokes equations with the simplified Maxwell equations. His work in that field brought him into his passion of renewable energy with research into ignition temperature possibilities using Alfven resonances. In 2010, Dr Clack moved to Boulder Colorado to study the emergence of sunspots to help the prediction of solar storms that can disrupt communications and the electrical power grid. While in Boulder, Dr Clack saw an advertisement for a researcher on the optimal siting project and immediately applied. After two years, Dr Clack and the team have produced a sophistical mathematical optimization model with the best weather and electrical data available to design a national electrical system (for any country) that incorporates large amounts of weather-driven renewables. Dr Clack is an active member of AMS and AGU; organizing conferences, sessions, and speakers on renewable energy in both organizations. In addition to research, Dr Clack enjoys teaching and researching mathematics, stargazing, and hiking with his wife and their two dogs. Dr Clack can be contacted at Christopher.Clack@noaa.gov.