Managing the Grid to Decarbonize Energy Services: Minimum Viable Scale, Heating Electrification, and the Mid-Transition

Deep decarbonization models of the US energy system suggest that successfully transitioning to clean electricity and electrified energy services could increase power generation capacity needs by a factor of 2 to 6 by 2050. Yet, grid planners and transition scholars have consistently failed to highlight this crucial value, even amidst concerns about data center demand for much smaller capacity requirements (~gigawatts rather than terawatts). Electrified heating presents a particular challenge, especially as peak loads associated with heating are life safety critical, nondeferrable, and misaligned with deployable resources like solar and battery storage. Simultaneously, planners fail to recognize "minimum viable scale" issues associated with the fossil system, which can pass critical size thresholds that render it unable to provide backup services. For example, it is unlikely that natural gas heating will be a reliable backup for rare cold snaps. During the "mid-transition" where the new, growing clean system and the old, shrinking fossil system are each too small to provide all services but too large to avoid constraining the other system, carefully managing for energy services rather than traditional metrics of reliability and efficiency will be crucial. This talk will address some observations about grid planning that lead to qualitatively different futures than most decision-relevant models currently point to, with the goal of prompting a service lens on how we plan the grid for decarbonization.

Bio

Dr. Emily Grubert is Associate Professor of Sustainable Energy Policy, and, concurrently, of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Earth Sciences at the University of Notre Dame. A civil engineer and environmental sociologist, her research focuses on justice-oriented deep decarbonization and decision support tools related to large infrastructure systems, with emphasis on the US energy system. Grubert holds a Ph.D. in Environment and Resources from Stanford and is a licensed professional engineer. She previously served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Carbon Management and Senior Advisor for Energy Asset Transformation at the US Department of Energy. She is currently Editor-in-Chief of Environmental Research: Energy.