Meeting Summary: Transitioning the power grid to zero-carbon sources of energy is essential for avoiding or minimizing climate change. Many technologies such as solar photovoltaic systems continue to improve, and states and regions now routinely generate a significant fraction of their electricity from renewable sources, at least intermittently. But a technologically and economically feasible path to deep decarbonization is still lacking.
While SFI is a global institution, we feel it would be useful to do a deep dive into New Mexico’s own energy transition to explore these challenges and uncover fundamental research questions that have yet to be answered. This Working Group will bring SFI faculty together with local experts to explore New Mexico’s unique resources and opportunities. This ranges from existing infrastructure to collocation opportunities for generation and storage with the help of geological resources, to the need for new infrastructure for generation, storage, and transmission. Our goal is both to find the devils (and angels) in the details and to extract lessons that can be exported to the rest of the country and the world.