Rolling the dice on renewables
Posted April 23, 2009 at 7:44 am 
Filed in: Perhaps it’s fitting that as a Nevada lawyer, FERC Chairman Jon Wellinghoff is willing to gamble that the U.S. won’t need new baseload power generation from nuclear or coal (“We may not need any, ever,” reported Greenwire http://www.eenews.net/gw/2009/04/22/1). The Chairman predicated that vision on a 50 percent reduction in energy usage (the share of electricity we derive from coal today), a fully-digitized smart grid, and advances in energy storage — which is a little like saying blackjack is a strong bet as long as the deck only has tens and face cards in it.
There’s no question that technology advances in solar power, enhanced geothermal recovery, wind (on-shore and off), ocean and tidal energy all hold great promise for a robust role for renewables in our future. Last year, the DOE released a study saying that wind could provide 20 percent of demand by 2030 — if all sorts of advances on energy storage and transmission also happened. And in September, the U.S. Geological Survey released an updated assessment of the geothermal resource base, finding that the generating capacity ranged from 3,600 to 16,500 megawatts, with a consensus of around 9,000 megawatts. And the DOE in February authorized a loan guarantee for a solar panel fabrication facility that will have an annual production capacity equal to 500 megawatts per year.
All useful, helpful, and hopeful, to be sure, but keep in mind that net summer generating capacity is 986,000 megawatts — 100 times greater than available geothermal and almost 2,000 times greater than the capacity of the new solar plant. And also keep in mind that while wind (when it blows) is almost competitive (almost) with conventional sources, solar today is anywhere from three to four times more expensive than conventional sources.
When campaigning, then-Senator Obama promised to “develop and deploy clean coal technology,” promote “safe and secure nuclear energy,” and foster the “responsible production of domestic oil and natural gas.” He recognized that conventional fuels must be our bridge to a renewable and cleaner future and that the best policy was one of technology neutrality — with externalilities priced appropriately in the case of fossil fuels and waste and proliferation issues addressed in the case of nuclear.
That is the right policy; putting all our chips on renewables is not. Maybe the FERC Chairman is right, and we won’t “ever” need a new baseload power plant. If he’s wrong, well, plenty of countries have insufficient, expensive, and unreliable electricity. They just happen to be countries in which most Americans prefer not to live.
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