Achieve Global Renewable Energy and Low Carbon Goal Through Constructing Human 'Faults' in Electric Grids

Abstract

The current 25% of global renewable energy among electric grids generation is far from the stated goal of 60% in 2040 and 100% in 2050. One of the biggest dilemma to cost-effectively increase this percentage, through grids interconnection, is that the traditional fault blocking methodology has reached its safety protection ceiling. In contrary to the traditional wisdom that any form of faults must be avoided, here we proposed a fault dredging methodology by constructing human “faults” to create artificial fault current release channels to solve high-level fault current bottleneck during grids interconnection. Using actual region electric grids from globally representative countries across six continents for demonstration, our results show that human “faults” can enable the percentages of renewable energy in USA, UK, China, Brazil, Australia, Nigeria and IEEE RTS system increase from 19.2%~47.2% to over 90%, which are much higher than all of conventional technologies. Correspondingly, the emissions of CO2, NOX and SOX in these systems respectively decrease by 67.84%~88.07%, 61.17%~88.24% and 58.25%~88.33%. Our findings suggest a new approach to reach the global renewable energy goal and promote the progress toward achieving carbon-free energy system.