Comments Grant Smith has made

Greenpeace CCS Report

The real issue is money.  Most of our members, who are primarily moderate to conservative, are worried about affordability and quality of life.  They equate efficiency and renewable investments with green jobs and lower utility bills.  On the other hand, they equate coal with air pollution and lung disease.  Their impressions are right on.  

From a financial standpoint, the era of the large, highly expensive, financially risky, 50-year baseload coal plant investment is over.   Distributed resources and utility-scale wind are cleaner, less financially risky, create more jobs, a attack the global warming issue in an economically viable way.   The idea of new baseload coal plants is being kept alive only by politics.  The coal and utility industries make their money off of baseload investments.  That's how they increase revenue requirement and profit.  They reduce their risk in these ventures with construction work in progress - pay-as-you-go construction - thereby shifting the risk to ratepayers.  The only reason to have CWIP is to build uneconomic investments.  Wall Street is skittish  about coal-based investments, which is driving utilities to CWIP to secure financing.  The coal gasification plant proposed by Duke Energy in Indiana, where I'm from, is already at 9.5 cents a kilowatt hour - more than twice the cost of energy efficiency, which could easily meet increased demand in Duke territory.  The company recently announced, arguably, the first of many cost increases.  This one was 18% - $365 million.  By the time the plant it completed, it will probably cost nearly $4 billion and that's without CCS.  If we invested that kind of money over 30 years in Indiana statewide, we'd eliminate the need for that plant plus 15 others and be able to phase out older units.  

I know, the cost-effectiveness argument.  But we're on the verge of spending $1 to $2 trillion on the Iraqi War.  According to a speaker I heard last week, a Yale study estimates that it would cost $6 trillion to phase out coal over 40 years.  Not only would we be half way there if we decided to apply those dollars to clean energy rather than the war, but, given the timeframe and if the speaker was accurate, we're talking about 2% of the US economy.    Others have demonstrated a complete economic phase out of coal and nuclear over 40 to 50 years.  I'd say that's worth it given the enormous economic and environmental benefits we would achieve.

Ultimately, it comes down to priorities, and buying into CCS is buying into the status quo.    
On Hawkins to industry: 'deal with it' posted 1 year, 6 months ago 12 Responses