Energy: Nuclear, Transmission, Efficiency

New nuclear electricity can cost as much as 3X as much as current electricity sources, according to a recent study.  Can nuclear power advocates provide an up-to-date, public cost study of their own?

To harness renewable energy, the American transmission grid needs to be updated and expanded.  Wind and solar farms will be placed further from urban centers than their coal, natural gas and nuclear counterparts.  A company have put together an idea for a national “transmission superhighway”.

One potential transmission build-out scenario that would allow the U.S. to obtain 20% of its electricity from the wind would include 19,000 miles of new 765-kilovolt (kV) transmission lines, for an estimated price tag of US $60 billion. (A 765-kV line is a high-voltage power line that can carry larger amounts of electricity — and with significantly higher efficiency — than most older transmission lines in use today.) These high-voltage lines would serve as the backbone of an interstate transmission superhighway.

While the size and cost of the transmission superhighway may sound large at first glance, it is important to keep these numbers in perspective. Given that electricity transmission infrastructure typically remains in service for 50 years or more, the cost of the investment for the average household would be equivalent to about US $0.35 per month, less than the cost of a postage stamp.

Those costs would be more than made up by the economic savings from replacing natural gas use with wind power generation, not to mention the benefits of reducing emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other pollutants. In fact, the DOE report estimated that obtaining 20% of U.S. electricity from wind would reduce electricity sector natural gas use by 50%. In addition, the DOE study found that the 20% wind energy scenario would reduce CO2 by 7.6 billion tons between now and 2030. Electric sector CO₂ emissions would be reduced by 825 million tons in the year 2030 alone, an amount equal to 25% of all electric sector carbon dioxide emissions in that year or the equivalent of taking 140 million cars off the road.

I don’t expect the natural gas industry to be thrilled with this plan (or anything that comes close to it).  Remember, they’re interested in their profits, not how habitable the planet will be in 100 years.  Kudos to the people that work on these kinds of studies.  They should have a prominent place in our national discussions of energy policy.

Efficiency Portfolio Standards should be as important as Renewable Energy Standards, as Joe Romm argues.  The latter has been much easier to popularize and enact.  The former are probably just as (if not more) important but haven’t received nearly the widespread acceptance they deserve.  Energy efficiency programs are among the cheapest solutions to our energy problems.  If enacted, they would easily reduce our energy usage significantly and immediately.

Total CO2-equivalence of Electricity Sources – Renewables Are Best

An in-depth study conducted by Stanford professor Mark Jacobson found that wind and concentrated solar power (CSP) generated electricity have the lowest lifecycle CO2-equivalent emissions of various energy sources.  The highest?  Coal-Carbon Capture and Sequestration (Coal-CCS) and nuclear.  Also included in the study were estimates of  “opportunity cost CO2e emissions”.  The opportunity cost arises by developing less-efficient energy sources (nuclear, coal-ccs).

The time necessary between planning and operation of different energy plants unsurprisingly skewed toward renewables: wind, tidal, wave, solar-photovoltaic, CSP and ethanol plants typically come on-line within 2-5 years.  That makes their inclusion into the country’s energy portfolio very appealing.  Coal takes 6-11 years (no large-scale CCS project has come on-line yet) and nuclear takes 10-19 years.

So aside from a shorter time between planning a plant and having the plant become operational for renewables, is there another good reason to develop those sources rather than non-renewables?  Absolutely.  Wind over land can provide more than 3 times the amount of energy globally than what is used today globally.  Solar over land can provide more than 24 times the amount of energy globally than what is used today globally.  Combined, 29 times as much wind and solar power is available than is currently used.  That completely debunks a major talking-point used by the fossil-fuel industry: there isn’t enough renewable energy to power our current way of life, so fossil fuels have to be used.  Wrong.  The only choice for out future are renewable energy sources.  There is no other reasonable message from this study.

The study does a very good job of pitting every energy source against each other through multiple evaluations.  By some standards, wind is the best.  Others indicate CSP, or wind and tidal energy.  When every evalution is combined into a final analysis though, wind and CSP come out on top.  More importantly, renewables are clearly shown to be the preferential energy sources in our future.  They are less costly in many respects than any of the competing fossil fuels.  No more public tax dollars should be spent on coal, natural gas, oil or nuclear.  Those industries are mature and their true costs to society are not factored into their usage.

We can no longer promote burning fossil fuels over developing renewable energy resources.  The climate system is changing rapidly before our eyes – in many cases heading towards abrupt changes that are irreversible in any time-frame humans deal with.  We must change our habits and our approaches today.