Suppose the leaders of this country were wise enough to put a moratorium on traditional coal (the most urgent climate policy needed, as discussed here)? How will we meet our steadily growing demand for carbon-free power over the next decade? And to get on the 450 ppm path, we don't just need to stop U.S. emissions from rising -- we should return to 1990 levels (or lower) by 2020.
Nuclear
Nuclear is an obvious possibility, beloved of conservative Francophiles like McCain and Gingrich, but energy realists understand that it is very unlikely new nuclear plants could deliver many kilowatt-hours of electricity by 2018, let alone affordable kwh. Indeed, back in August, Tulsa World reported:
American Electric Power Co. isn't planning to build any new nuclear power plants because delays will push operational starts to 2020, CEO Michael Morris said Tuesday ...
Builders would also have to queue for certain parts and face "realistic" costs of about $4,000 a kilowatt, he said ...
"I'm not convinced we'll see a new nuclear station before probably the 2020 timeline," Morris said.
And that in spite of the amazing subsidies and huge loan guarantees for nuclear power in the 2005 energy bill (see here).
As for the $4,000 a kw capital cost -- and the related electricity price of about 10 cents per kwh -- mid-2007 has already turned into the "good old days" for nukes. Utilities are now telling regulators that nukes will cost 50 to 100 percent more than the AEP estimate, as I'll report in a couple of weeks.
One very good source of apples-to-apples comparisons of different types of low- and zero-carbon electricity generation is the modeling work done for the California Public Utility Commission on how to comply with the AB32 law (California's Global Warming Solutions Act), online here. AB32 requires a reduction in statewide greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. The most valuable document is probably the "Generation Costs," although the slides for the recent May 6 presentation are fascinating.
The research for the CPUC puts the cost of power from new nuclear plants at 15.2 cents per kwh. It also puts the cost of coal gasification with carbon capture and storage at 16.9 cents per kwh. In any case, given its immature state and the mismanaged federal effort (see "Bush drops mismanaged 'NeverGen' clean coal project"), coal with CCS won't be providing much power by 2020. At this point, it would even be pure speculation to say that coal with CCS will be one of the low-cost options in the 2020s.
So what do we do in the near term to meet the projected 1 percent annual increase in demand over the next decade while simultaneously reducing carbon emissions? There are only three plausible options, and we'll need them all: Energy efficiency (including cogeneration), wind power, and concentrated solar power (CSP).
By "plausible," I mean capable of delivering power affordably and quickly -- and that means having no obvious production bottlenecks (unlike, again, say, another well-known power source). The goal is to fund technologies and boost industries that are capable of scaling up to deliver hundreds if not thousands of gigawatts of carbon free power by mid-century. No surprise that these three sources account for a (slight) majority of the wedges I propose for 2050.
Efficiency
Energy efficiency is the cheapest alternative. California has cut annual peak demand by 12 gw -- and total demand by about 40,000 gwh -- through a variety of energy efficiency programs over the past three decades. Over their lifetime, the cost of efficiency programs has averaged 2-3 cents per kw. If every American had the per capita electricity of California, we'd cut electricity use some 40 percent. If the next president aggressively pushes a nationwide effort to embrace efficiency and change regulations to encourage efficiency, then we could keep electricity demand close to flat through 2020. That is particularly true if we include an aggressive effort to push combined heat and power.
A May presentation [PDF] of the CPUC modeling results shows that energy efficiency could deliver up to 36,000 gigawatt-hours of "negawatts" by 2020 (that is the equivalent of more than 5 gw of baseload generation operating 80 percent of the time). At the same time, the state could build 1.6 gw of small CHP and 2.8 gw of large CHP. So that is nearly 10 gw of efficiency by 2020. If this were reproduced nationwide, efficiency would deliver more than 130 gw of efficiency by 2020.
Wind
Power purchase agreements for wind power are currently averaging 4.5 to 7.5 cents a kilowatt hour, including the federal wind tax credit, which is a fair comparison in the near term to new nuclear, which itself gets huge subsidies, loan guarantees, and liability protection (this does not include transmission costs). Even unsubsidized, and with the recent price rise that most power sources have seen, wind power is delivering power at 7.5 to 10. The country has thousands of gigawatts that could be delivered for under ten cents unsubsidized. Just 300 gw by 2030 would provide 20 percent of U.S. electricity. The world added 20 gw last year alone, with over 5 gw in this country.
Yes, wind power is intermittent, but the country has a great deal of baseload power, and many regions of European countries integrate up to 40 percent wind power successfully. An August 2007 review of actual windpower integration by utilities in this country, "Utility Wind Integration and Operating Impact State of the Art," found that the integration cost in eight different major wind projects, ranged from 0.2 to 0.5 cents per kwh. Moreover, as we electrify transportation over the next two decades with plug-in hybrids, the grid will be able to make use of far larger amounts of intermittent, largely night-time zero-carbon electricity from wind. So post-2030, windpower should be able to grow even further.
(Note: On Monday, the wind industry is releasing a major report on achieving 20 percent of our power from wind by 2020, so I will be doing a longer discussion of this core climate solution then.)
CSP
I have previously written about concentrated solar power at length. It has come roaring back after more than a decade of absence with more than a dozen providers building projects in two dozen countries. Google is placing a large bet on CSP. Utilities in the Southwest are already contracting for power at 14 to 15 cents/kwh. The modeling for the CPUC puts California solar thermal at 12.7 to 13.6 cents/kwh (including six hours of storage capacity) -- and at similar or lower costs in the rest of the West.
A number of players are adding low-cost storage that will make the power better than baseload (since it delivers peak power when demand actually peaks, rather than just delivering a constant amount of power 24/7). More importantly, CSP has barely begun dropping down the experience curve as costs are lower from economies of scale and the manufacturing learning curve (see experience curve discussion here). The CPUC analysis foresees the possibility that CSP could drop 20 percent in cost by 2020.
A 2006 report [PDF] by the Western Governors Association "projects that, with a deployment of 4 gw, total nominal cost of CSP electricity would fall below 10 cents/kwh." And that deployment will likely occur before 2015. Indeed, the report noted the industry could "produce over 13 gw by 2015 if the market could absorb that much." The report also notes that 300 gw of CSP capacity can be located near existing transmission lines. As an aside, wind power is a very good match with CSP in terms of their ability to share the same transmission lines, since a great deal of wind is at night, and since CSP, with storage, is dispatchable.
Finally, a brand new report from Environment America, Solar Thermal Power and and the Fight Against Global Warming, explains how the United States could achieve 80 gw of CSP by 2030, which is not even what I would consider to be a true stretch goal given how dire the climate situation is.
This post was created for ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
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Comments
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Matt G Posted 3:42 am
09 May 2008
(for those that don't know what I'm talking about - a GW of wind power means when wind is blowing at design conditions on every one of the turbines, and a GW of solar is sun shining at noon on a cloudless day)
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Sharon Astyk Posted 4:57 am
09 May 2008
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3919#more.
Then there's the DOE commissioned Hirsch Report that suggests that a major build out of renewables would take about 20 years at WWII levels - which means that we won't be seeing that much capacity before 2018 anyway.
Little as any of us like it, it may well be the case that most of what we have is negawatts - and if we're to get to 350ppm, that means a LOT of negawatts, a life much less like Californians, and much more like Keralans, Sri Lankans, Venezuelans, Cubans.
IMHO, we're not going to get there if we keep selling the idea that all we have to do is be Californians.
Sharon Astyk
Sharon, with dirt under her fingernails.
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Jon Rynn Posted 5:27 am
09 May 2008
As I tried to show here, you could shut down all the coal plants if all buildings were to heat and cool themselves -- in my example, with geothermal heat exchange underneath and some PV on top, but there are other possible combinations. If people lived in dense areas, as I argued here, then you could eliminate most oil use.
The point is, we'd have to go beyond California, certainly, in changing the way the society is put together, but we wouldn't have to abandon industrial civilization altogether.
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Ron Steenblik Posted 6:01 am
09 May 2008
Here in France, in order to increase the capacity utilization of their nuclear-based power grid, consumers are encouraged to use appliances at night. (EDF charges about 60% more for electricity consumed between 7 AM and 11 PM.) Electric water heaters are on a switch that gets turned on at 11 PM and then goes off at 7 AM (these can be over-ridden by the home-owner, if they so desire). And many dish-washing and clothes-washing machines have built-in timers, so that the owner can program them to turn on in the middle of the night, to take advantage of the lower electricity tariff.
That is not the same as signing up for unpredictable, interruptible power, but I would imagine the signal technologies would be similar. Presumably, different packages would be offered. For people worried about food spoilage from having refrigerators or freezers turned off for too long, they might (for example) sign up for a plan that guarantees no more than 1 hour of interruptibility at any one time -- say, for no more than 10 days a month. I could imagine that devices could be created that would ring a bell in the home to let the consumer know that an outage was imminent.
Do you know whether any electric utility has ever tried this? If not, have you ever heard anybody discuss the idea?
These are only my personal opinions.
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Delay And Deny Posted 6:57 am
09 May 2008
Solar company HelioVolt and Architectural Glass & Aluminum on Tuesday announced a partnership to produce glass windows capable of generating electricity.
Texeme.Construct(Participant)
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Tasermons Partner Posted 12:49 pm
09 May 2008
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KenG Posted 1:41 pm
09 May 2008
Various types of residential load management have been in use in the US for many years, they just haven't spread. The relatively low cost of electricity in the US has limited the incentive. The rising costs, reduced reserve margins and significant recent reductions in the cost of the load management hardware suggest we'll see a lot more of it.
For a while it was quite common for customers with electric heat to get a much lower rate for heating power in exchange for agreeing to be interruptible. I think this went away in some cases because utility regulators banned any discounts that would encourage electric heat as a way to avoid building new power plants.
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dotcommodity Posted 2:15 pm
09 May 2008
If people can make a little extra by selling their electricity at retail to the utility they will put up solar pamels.
And if the electricity is a little more expensive (to fund that retail price the utilites must pay for anybodys electrons) then there is both the carrot of the extra income to be made, and the stick of the extra cost if you don't join in.
A FIT is designed so that you earn a little more than your monthly payments on the solar panels, large or small.
PBS interviewed a pigfarmer in Germany who was making $60,000 yr in profit on panels he put up in his fields.
MCain = McSame: check this eco voting record (!)
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amazingdrx Posted 2:03 am
10 May 2008
Why can't the feds pay everyone 10 cents per kwh? Then the power company could pay you retail and you would get a check from the government for 10 cents extra, per kwh, every month.
It would work very well. divert the money to pay for it from subsidies for the old failing energy economy. Coal, nuclear, oil, all the big pork industries. Oil gets 13 billion per year alone and a pass on 7 billion in oil lease fees from the Bushies.
Agribizz subsidies are huge! It would be feasible to divert 50 billion per year.
Germany is doing this to the extreme, this is a milder plan. more acceptable to US politics. A populist movement behind direct subsidies to homeowners and farmers to supply power should work. Farmers riding biogas powered tractors, shunning foreign oil. Thaty sort of image.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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amazingdrx Posted 2:17 am
10 May 2008
Geo heat exchange heating/cooling is a well dospered and undrstood technology. it needs incentives to expand. Conservation subsidies.
Every equivalent kwh of power saved with geo heat exchange should get a 10 cent government payment. The systems can be easily rated and monitered and subsidies dispensed based on power bills before the conversion.
All that ultra expensive coal fired electricity going to air condition buildings, peak summer blackout type load. All that can be canceled with geo heat exchange. Cool ground heat transported by simple circulation pumps. A fraction of the energy of a window air conditioner.
The same on the heating side. No combustion heating with a heat pump operatinmg from ground temperature. Very efficient heating.
With solar electric and heat panels, cogeneration, powering the heating/cooling and storing the heat/cold for a 24 hour cycle in the building mass. That gives a smart grid system a huge storage component to control demand.
This is the biggest, quickest savings area. With a huge economic stimulus in green jobs. Manufacturing, istallation, everything. Better giving the stimulus money out with clean energy checks. It would impell this whole boom. The checks help pay the monthly payment on the new energy saving equipment.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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Jon Rynn Posted 2:20 am
10 May 2008
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amazingdrx Posted 6:13 am
10 May 2008
Thanks to Alito, Roberts, and Scalia. Corporate
citizens have rights that supercede our rights.
Direct incentives are far less socialist, especially if they involve diversion of present subsidies rather than new taxes.
Give taxpayers back their own dollars to spend on renewable/conservation energy investment. spent according to actual kwh saved and GHG free generated, the decisions won't be skewed by lobbying or bureaucrats.
oil companies do not need that 13 billion per year in government subsidy, renewable/conservation investors do. Help pay for my solar panels, exxonmob, thanks.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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Sharon Astyk Posted 1:38 am
12 May 2008
But here is the major difficulty - no program involving a massive build out thus far, that I am aware of, fully includes the energy and climate implications of that build out, while maintaining the larger economy in stable enough condition to meet urgently necessary short term climate requirements. I've written more about this, in response to one particular plan, and using only very rough back of the envelope calculations, but the larger principle applies.
http://sharonastyk.com/2008/01/29/the-cure-is-worse-than- ...
If Hansen is correct and we need to get back to 350 ppm (and there seem to be compelling reasons to believe this is true), then we have only a very, very short time indeed to make whatever alterations we can to industrial society. The kind of massive relocation of population, buildout and reinsulation of housing, etc... may simply be too carbon intensive. I'd need to see specific numbers. Some of what you imagine could be electrified, particularly mining, seems unlikely without a massive nuclear program.
There's also the difficulty that all of these resources have lifespans - we're talking not just about doing a single build out that then gets us to a perfectly sustainable society, but about needing to maintain and replace and repair all of these things - and at the moment we don't make wind turbines or rigid foam insulation without oil and other fossil fuels.
The truth is, I think we may have waited too long to have the choice of a benign form of industrial society - that's not to say that all industrialization must go, but I tend to think that the mythos that we can have an essentially familiar society is not only untrue, but a mistake - perhaps it will turn out to be possible, but isn't it more urgent to start preparing the populace for a harsher reality, just in case?
Sharon, with dirt under her fingernails.
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Colin Wright Posted 5:22 am
12 May 2008
But the sorts of projects Jon proposes are much more modest, on the order of several trillions of dollars. He has another breakdown of oil use which shows oil for construction is only a few percent of our total use. So we could easily double and double again construction activity if we were prepared to transition away from the automobile. (And Hansen says we can use all the oil without endangering the planet -- if we phase out coal, plant a shitload of trees, etc.)
So I think the opportunity is there to transition to a low-energy industrial civilization as long as we give up the idea of infinte economic growth.
It's certainly good to prepare people for a low-energy future, a "harsher reality, just in case". (And I think that is the default position if we don't change our ways rationally.) But I think it's also true that the more low-impact technology we retain and build, the easier our lives will be in the future energy-constrained world.
In any case, your idea that we need to think about the carbon footprints of building out renewables is a good one.
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Jon Rynn Posted 5:40 am
12 May 2008
I remember that you once asked the question about needing windmills to generate the electricity to build more windmills, which is a very important insight -- the industrial system is self-reproducing. Meadows et al were one of the few people, in "Limits to Growth", to show how this self-reproduction can get out of control. But it is also the key to industrial growth, and hopefully, post-carbon growth.
I think it can be argued that the "true" energy basis of a civilization is electricity, and that oil was a terrible distraction, never was necessary, and now will require Herculean efforts to get out from under. But as I tried to show in those two articles I referenced in my previous comment, the guts of the industrial system, the factories themselves -- at least, the nonchemical, paper, and metallurgical ones -- use a pretty small amount of electricity, relatively.
I think there is enough metal around in the world that we could always make enough machinery, such as windmills -- I'm assuming we could use the metal in cars, aircraft carriers, etc., if we had to, but even a certain amount of new steel in manageable. If all transportation was electric and used renewable sources, most of it from local renewable sources, again, I think this is doable.
The big question starts to turn on the culture change, as you point out. Yes, it might look very different (I would hope that, for efficiency's sake, for instance, all firms would be worker-owned-and-controlled as well). We might be in towns and cities with no cars in the center -- j.h. crawford type cities -- with no planes flying overhead, etc. The overwhelming majority of people might be in apartments, not single family homes. As you have pointed out, upwards of one quarter of the population might be gardening and farming. Is this too huge of a culture change for all of the adults in this civilization? Children can adapt, I don't know how well adults do.
What I'm attempting to put forward is envisioning a different kind of civilization, but one that is both industrial and sustainable. Might not work, but then again, it might.
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