Emerging Electricity Futures

Rocky Mountain Institute's autumn 2011 Reinventing Fire will explore practical pathways for the U.S. to eliminate oil, coal, and nuclear energy by 2050 (and natural gas thereafter), led by business for profit. This ambitious synthesis integrates transportation, buildings, industry, and electricity-the sole sector previewed in this seminar. Four divergent electricity futures are feasible, plausible, surprisingly similar in cost, but very different in risk. Contrasting their technological, financial, operational, carbon, security, and other risks favors renewable futures-whose variability is manageable with little or no bulk storage-and fair competition by distributed resources in netted islandable microgrids. This future maximizes competitive opportunities for rapid innovation and learning, and seems well matched to global market trends and to emerging revolutions in customer choice and utility business models. All four futures require major regulatory reform. At least the first three need significant new transmission, though probably less for renewables than often supposed. Renewables require big shifts in utility culture and operational procedures-especially if grid architecture becomes more granular-and assume continued progress down observed cost learning curves. Renewables, with scale and technology mix modulated by markets and policies, generally hold promise of more robust response to both political obstacles and exogenous shocks than do nonrenewable futures.

Speaker: Amory Lovins, Cofounder, Chairman and Chief Scientist, Rocky Mountain Institute

NVIDIA Auditorium