MODERN TIMES
by Art Hobson
ahobson@uark.edu
WHERE WILL WE GET OUR ELECTRICITY? PART I
"Climate change is the most severe problem that we are facing today--more serious even than the threat of terrorism." --David King, chief science advisor to British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
King's pronouncement highlights the conundrum surrounding energy and the environment, with global warming standing right at the center. The problem is that the fossil fuels emit carbon dioxide, the main global warming gas. John Holdren, Professor of Environmental Science at Harvard and former member of President Clinton's science advisory committee, puts it this way: "Energy is the most difficult part of the environment problem, and environment is the most difficult part of the energy problem. The core of the challenge of expanding and sustaining economic prosperity is the challenge of limiting, at affordable cost, the environmental impacts of an expanding energy supply."
Most of the world's energy problems stem from motor vehicles and electricity generation. Let's talk about electricity.
The USA gets 53 percent of its electricity from coal, 21 percent from nuclear power, 16 percent from natural gas, 8 percent from hydroelectric power, 2 percent from oil, and less than 1 percent from "new" renewables such as wind. It's nearly impossible to generate more from hydroelectric, and oil's contribution will decrease due to short supplies.
This leaves coal, nuclear, natural gas, and renewables as possible sources of expansion. Arguably the most important fact about these four is that only two of them burn the fossil fuels that contribute to global warming: coal and natural gas. Nuclear power is, along with the renewables, a "good guy" when it comes to global warming.
Coal is the bad guy, by far. It has greater carbon content and is less efficient than natural gas, which means that it emits twice as much carbon dioxide as does a natural gas plant of equal size. Furthermore, even the "cleanest" coal plants still emit not only twice as much carbon dioxide but also seven times as much non-carbon pollution as natural gas plants. Touting "clean" coal is like touting "safe" cigarettes.
Despite coal's huge carbon dioxide emissions, the U.S. Energy Information Agency forecasts that 112 "gigawatts" (a gigawatt is one billion watts, or 1000 megawatts) of new coal plant generation capacity will be installed by 2025. Since one gigawatt is about the output of one large coal or nuclear plant, this 112 gigawatts is equivalent to 112 new large coal plants. This will be a global warming disaster, and must be avoided. The USA is already responsible for 36 percent of the planet's industrial carbon dioxide emissions, and new coal plants will only increase this irresponsible and embarrassing figure.
It's theoretically possible to store carbon dioxide underground, but this process carries its own environmental dangers and cannot solve the global warming problem because storage capacity is limited. Building new natural gas plants instead of all those new coal plants would help, but natural gas is already expanding about as fast as it can.
What about the renewables? Other than hydroelectric, the USA generates only about two gigawatts of electricity from renewables, nearly all of it from wind. Wind-generated electricity is nearly competitive with coal, and would be cheaper than coal if coal were required to pay for it's own environmental damage. Wind energy has been growing worldwide by an astonishing 25 percent per year since 1990. At this rate, U.S. wind generation would reach about 130 gigawatts by 2025 and could remove the "need" for those 112 new gigawatts of coal that are forecast for that date. This is plausible: The land area needed for this many wind turbines is equivalent to only about 3 percent of the USA, and the land can be shared for other purposes such as grazing cattle. The only other electricity-generating renewable on the horizon anytime soon is photovoltaics--electricity generated directly from sunlight via a really cool quantum physics process called the "photoelectric effect." It's promising, but it currently accounts for only a tiny amount worldwide and won't become cheap enough to contribute significant amounts until after 2025.
What about energy efficiency? We Americans waste enormous amounts of energy in our gas-guzzling automobiles, overheated and overcooled homes and malls, etc. etc. Can we get the same services, such as transportation and comfort, from less energy? One good measure of a nation's energy efficiency is the amount of energy needed to produce a dollar's worth of gross national product. By this measure, Europe and Japan are twice as energy efficient as the USA, and they plan to further improve their present energy efficiency. If the USA were to get its act together and do as well as other industrial nations, we could run our present economy on half the energy we currently use and eliminate the "need" for new electricity generation through 2025.
So renewables and efficiency could easily provide enough electricity to eliminate the so-called "need" for new coal plants for decades. But do we have the political will to make the changes needed to follow this path?
You can help Insulate your home, use low-emittance double-paned window glass, plant shade trees, don't overheat or overcool your home, complain about overheated or overcooled public buildings, avoid frozen foods, use high-efficiency appliances (manufacturers must display energy efficiency ratings), unplug that extra refrigerator or freezer you rarely use, use compact fluorescent light bulbs, don't use more light than necessary, support "green buildings" such as Fayetteville's new library.
You might have noticed that I haven't yet discussed one of the big contenders: nuclear power. That's coming in my next column.