Bulletin of the American Physical Society
APS April Meeting 2019
Volume 64, Number 3
Saturday–Tuesday, April 13–16, 2019; Denver, Colorado
Session Q07: New Energy Technologies & PoliciesInvited Undergraduate
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Sponsoring Units: FPS Chair: Richard Wiener, Research Corporation Room: Sheraton Governor's Square 16 |
Monday, April 15, 2019 10:45AM - 11:21AM |
Q07.00001: An energy plan the Earth can live with Invited Speaker: Daniel M Kammen The climate science, technology, and policy landscape we face today are hugely out of alignment. While the climate science community has highlighted the critical need for immediate action towards a 1.5 degree C (or lower) global climate warming target [IPCC, 2018; USGCRP. 2018], and while energy and transportation technologies are moving rapidly to enable that tremendously challenging goal, the US stands as the sole denier of a path that requires immediate action. Both large infrastructure choices and immediate daily decisions are needed. Sadly, every delay in moving the US to a productive, proactive position, makes achieving these goals less likely, or more costly, or both. Immediate, pro-environment and pro-business decisions are needed at the household, state, regional, national and global levels to put us on a sustainable path. I highlight a set of energy, transportation, and land-use modeling tools and policy opportunities that are consistent with the needed 1.5 degree Celsius objective (Kittner, Lil & Kammen, 2017). The critical role of decision-making is highlighted through a series of technical, policy, and social justice opportunities. Recent events including the rise of a populist “Green New Deal” ethos, congressional debate over carbon pricing, and the role of environmental justice will be highlighted as critical, potentially 'last best chance' opportunities (Sunter, Castellanos & Kammen, 2019) for climate sanity and meaningful support of much needed action. References: Kittner, N., Lil, F., and Daniel M. Kammen (2017) “Energy storage deployment and innovation for the clean energy transition ”, Nature Energy, 2, 17125. Sunter, Deborah, Castellanos, Sergio, and Daniel M Kammen (2019) “Disparities in rooftop photovoltaics deployment in the United States by race and ethnicity,“ Nature Sustainability.DOI: 10.1038/s41893-018-0204-z |
Monday, April 15, 2019 11:21AM - 11:57AM |
Q07.00002: North American Power-Grid Network: Failures and Opportunities Invited Speaker: Adilson E. Motter A fundamental problem in electrical grids is that the same connections that give a network its functionality can promote the spread of failures that would otherwise remain confined. Understanding the resulting cascading failures has been hindered by the lack of realistic large-scale modeling that can account for variable system conditions. In this presentation, I will discuss our full-scale modeling of the U.S.-South Canada power-grid network, which allows us to characterize the set of network components that are vulnerable to cascading failures. I will show that the vulnerable set consists of a small but topologically central portion of the network and that large cascades are disproportionately more likely to be triggered by initial failures close to this set. These results elucidate aspects of the origins and causes of cascading failures relevant for grid design and operation. They also point to opportunities for failure mitigation through a combination of suitable control and regulation solutions of relevance for the ongoing increased integration of renewable energy from intermittent sources. |
Monday, April 15, 2019 11:57AM - 12:33PM |
Q07.00003: Integrative Design for Radical Energy Efficiency Invited Speaker: Amory Bloch Lovins Delivering the world’s 2005 energy services used ~9x the minimum energy theoretically required for those changes of state, so including passive systems, an estimated ~85% of energy demand (say Cambridge University’s Cullen and Alwood) “could be practically avoided using current knowledge and available technologies.” Economists, however, assume that even the much smaller energy efficiency potential visible in their models must incur steeply rising costs. Yet the empirical reality is the opposite. Integrative design—optimizing buildings, vehicles, factories, and equipment as whole systems, not as isolated components—makes practical energy efficiency gains severalfold larger and cheaper than most experts now suppose. Properly choosing, combining, timing, and sequencing fewer and simpler efficiency techniques can often even yield increasing returns (lower cost with higher volume), akin to those that drive today’s renewable electricity revolution. Across most energy uses in all sectors of the economy, basic physics principles and sound engineering practices thus offer astonishing opportunities to make the world richer, fairer, cooler, cleaner, healthier, and safer—not at a cost but at an immense profit. |
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