The good news is that there is no need to build new nuclear power plants to provide for the projected energy needs of the future. Indeed, it would be possible, using other forms of electricity generation, to close down most of the existing nuclear reactors within a decade. There is enough wind between the Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi River alone to supply three times the amount of electricity that America needs.
Many kinds of alternative solutions are currently on the drawing board because of the extreme urgency of countering global warming. For instance, the conversion of coal to a synthetic fuel, which can be used for transportation and which would contribute much less to global warming than petroleum, is actively being championed by Governor Brian Schweitzer of Montana.1 This chapter, however, concentrates exclusively on renewable sources of power for the generation of electricity. The most commonly cited figures show that currently in the United States, just over 2% of the electricity is provided from renewables, whereas nuclear power provides 20%.2 These figures, however, exclude hydropower electricity. If this is taken into account, 2004 figures show 9.06% of U.S. electricity came from renewables, and 18.60% came from renewables worldwide.3
But American politicians lack the political will, at least at the federal level, to resist the coal, oil, and nuclear industries’ demands and to shift their focus from these tired and dangerous technologies to explore the alternatives. Vice President Cheney devised the 2005 energy bill behind closed doors, consulting exclusively with top executives of the coal, oil, and nuclear industries (including Ken Lay from Enron who is currently under indictment), all of whom had contributed significant funds not only to the Bush campaign, but also to the campaigns of most of the important Republican players in the House and Senate. Thus, American politicians are bought and sold, and global warming continues unabated.4
However, the world at large has already begun to shift over to alternative energy sources, as is documented in several recent studies. A 2005 Rocky Mountains Institute report by Amory Lovins titled “Nuclear Power: Economics and Climate-Protection Potential,” uses industry and government data to show that globally, nuclear power is being outstripped by other, better sources of electricity production. Globally, more electricity is now produced by decentralized, low-carbon or no-carbon competitors than from nuclear power plants—about one-third from renewables (wind, biomass, solar) and two-thirds through a very efficient form of energy production in which electricity is made from waste heat emanating from industry in a process called fossil-fuel combined-heat-and-power CHP, or cogeneration.5
Even without the subsidies enjoyed by the nuclear industry, worldwide, decentralized electricity generators provided almost three times as much output and six times as much capacity as nuclear power by 2004.6 (Output is the actual amount of electricy generated, whereas capacity is the potential output of an electricity generator. These two numbers are different whenever generators are not operated at top capacity.) And decentralized capacity is projected to increase 177 times by 2010, at the same time that orders for new nuclear reactors decline and aging reactors shut down. Nuclear power plants take years to build, they are energy intensive, and they are extremely expensive. Lovins contends that even the relatively inefficient use of decentralized electricity generation in today’s market supersedes nuclear electricity in cost, speed, and size by a large and rising margin.7
Lovins ultimately concludes that none of the centralized thermal power generators (coal, gas, oil, or nuclear) can compete economically with wind power and certain other renewables, let alone the two cheaper alternatives (cogeneration and energy efficiency).8 He finds it interesting that most of the studies that examined the energy future, such as the oft-quoted 2003 MIT study, fail to examine the feasible economic alternatives to nuclear and large centralized generation.9 And, as stated above, the U.S. administration and Congress apparently have no intention of seeking the obvious economic and ecological alternatives to coal, oil, and nuclear power.
According to Lovins, the oft-made claim by nuclear energy proponents that “we need all energy options” has no analytical basis and is simply not true. Quite the contrary, society cannot afford all options. Because the disastrous economics of nuclear power mitigate against private investment, all new orders for nuclear reactors are to be heavily subsidized by taxpayers—$13 billion is allocated to the nuclear industry in the 2005 U.S. energy bill, for example.10 Although a bonanza for nuclear power plant owners, this money is directly diverted from investment in cheaper, cleaner, greener options—cogeneration, renewables, and efficiency—that would ultimately serve consumers and the environment infinitely better.11
The 2003 MIT study on the future of nuclear power demonstrates that each ten cents spent to buy a single nuclear kilowatt hour (kWh) of electricity could instead be used to generate 1.2 to 1.7 kWh of gas-fired electricity, 2.2 to 6.5 kWh of cogeneration from large industries, an infinite number of kilowatt hours of waste heat cogeneration, or 10 kWh of saved energy through efficiency measures.12
The New Scientist, a well-known scientific journal published in the United Kingdom and the United States, recently editorialized that although renewable electricity technologies are heavily criticized by the nuclear, coal, and oil industries and by many politicians who listen to the industry propaganda, the combination of wind power, tidal power, micro-hydro, and biomass make renewable power ever more practical. Windpower and biomass are now almost as cheap as coal, and wave power and solar photovoltaics are rapidly becoming competitive.13
A report from the New Economics Foundation reinforces the conclusions of the New Scientist. Renewable energy is quick to build, abundant, and cheap to harvest, and it is safe, flexible, secure, and climate friendly. Surplus electricity can be fed back into the grid. Furthermore, renewable electricity generation produces electricity at the point of use, making large-scale grid connections unnecessary. Thus, from an economics standpoint, renewable sources of energy make a great deal of sense.
To have any impact upon carbon emissions that contribute to global warming, fast and effective climate solutions must be implemented immediately. Empirical data confirms the terrifying phenomena of global warming:
• At least twenty severe catastrophic weather events occurred every year since 1990. During the preceding twenty years, only three such years were recorded.
• The four hurricanes that devastated the United States in 2004 produced a record loss of $56 billion over a period of several weeks.
• In 2004, ten typhoons hit Japan, four more than any previous record, the costliest year ever caused by Japanese typhoons.
• Europe experienced its hottest summer on record in 2003, which killed 22,000 people from heat-related illnesses and caused catastrophic wildfires incurring $15 billion in losses.
• The number of severe winter storms doubled in Britain over the last fifty years.14
The U.S. administration, however, has long attempted to ignore or to deny that global warming even exists. President Bush refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol on climate change in 2001,15 and the United States secretly undermined Prime Minister Tony Blair’s attempts to tackle climate change at the G8 Gleneagles meeting in 2005. Leaked U.S. government documents associated with that meeting reveal that the science of climate change was subverted, and that the United States had withdrawn from a crucial United Nations commitment to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions.
Washington officials had:
• removed the reference to climate change as a “serious threat to human health and to ecosystems”;
• deleted suggestions that global warming is happening;
• deleted suggestions that human activities are responsible;
• deleted the statement that “Africa, Asia-Pacific and the Arctic are particularly vulnerable to climate variability and are starting to experience the impacts”;
• reneged on economic pledges to provide a network of regional climate centers throughout Africa designed specifically to monitor the ongoing impact of global warming.16
Unlike nuclear energy, all the renewable forms of energy mentioned above are extremely effective carbon displacers per dollar. For example, each $100 spent to develop nuclear power instead of end-use efficiency translates into the atmospheric release of one ton of CO2. Nuclear power thus contributes to global warming by diverting valuable assets away from all environmentally sounder alternatives such as wind power, solar power, geothermal energy, biomass, and cogeneration, each of which produces very little if any carbon dioxide.17
Much to everyone’s surprise, some weeks after Hurricane Katrina, President Bush began to encourage Americans to save energy, to drive less, to observe the speed limit, and to buy smaller cars, while ordering the federal government to conserve energy. On October 3, 2005, the Department of Energy announced a campaign to convince Americans to use less energy. The DOE even produced a new mascot called Energy Hog, like Smokey the Bear, to encourage people to conserve. They also published booklets with conservation tips, established a Web page, distributed public service announcements to radio and newspapers encouraging energy conservation, and sent specialists to factories to advise on energy conservation. Astonishingly, the Alliance to Save Energy, which is partnering with the DOE, officially announced that America is wasting half its fuel.18
Maybe this signals a significant change in the Bush administration in light of its previous record. Perhaps they too are getting worried about global warming and not just the shortage of oil. Paul Krugman, however, writing in the New York Times, is skeptical. He says the Bush administration is just responding to public anger over higher heating oil and natural gas prices secondary to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Krugman argues that there is little to suggest a substantial shift from Bush’s “drill-and-burn” energy policy, pointing out that the administration has made no significant changes, such as raising mileage requirements for cars and trucks, or raising gasoline taxes. (Australia and many other countries pay up to three times as much for their gas as the United States, which has always maintained artificially low, subsidized prices.)19
But more substantial developments are taking place at the state level in the United States. Many states are banding together in regional agreements to regulate carbon dioxide emissions. The first regional agreement announced in the Northeast in September 2005 plans to freeze CO2 emissions from big power stations by 2009 and then reduce them by 15% by 2020. This large industrial area stretching from New Jersey to Maine generates approximately the same volume of CO2 emissions as Germany. Participating states include New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Maine, Vermont, Rhode Island, and Delaware.
The second regional agreement is evolving on the West Coast, as California, Oregon, New Mexico, Washington, and Arizona explore similar pacts. Increasingly, other states are attracted to these measures.20
These new initiatives are especially significant because the United States continues to retain its status as the world’s most profligate consumer of energy. For instance, in 2001, 49% of the electricity-related carbon dioxide emissions came from the industrialized world—North America, Western Europe, and industrialized Asia, of which U.S. emissions were 24%, which accounts for a mere 4.5% of the world’s population, whereas the other 51% of CO2 emissions emanated from the developing nations, the former Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe.21
Wind power, already used extensively in Europe, is rapidly becoming the energy of the future. It is cheap, fast to produce, and attractive to farmers and U.S. rural communities. In 2004, wind power globally outpaced nuclear power sixfold in annual capacity additions and threefold in annual output additions. Wind power is very attractive because it is benign, its development has short lead times, its mass production is economically very efficient, its technological development is rapid, and it is easy to site windmills on available land. Furthermore, the speedy deployment and lack of regulatory fuss will always support the growth of wind power compared to the long lead time and delay-prone, complex, and contentious technology of nuclear power, which could experience a meltdown or terrorist attack at any time.22
A recent study, which collated more than 8,000 wind records from every continent, found a potential global wind power resource of 72 terawatts—forty times the amount of electricity used by all countries in 2000. If just 20% of this wind energy were to be tapped, all energy needs of the world could be satisfied (one terawatt of electricity would power 10 billion 100-watt light bulbs).23 (This analysis of global available wind power performed by Christina Archer and Mark Jacobson of Stanford University is probably somewhat conservative in scope because many continents lack the specific data for wind over large unmapped areas.)
The most powerful wind forces in the world occur in the North Sea in Europe, the Great Lakes of North America, the northeast and northwest coasts of North America, and the southern tip of South America.24 Archer and Jacobson found that, although wind generation has increased at a remarkable rate of 34% annually over the last five years, becoming the fastest growing source of electricity production, wind currently provides a mere half percent of the world’s energy.25
Stimulated by the world’s oil crisis in the 1970s, Denmark decided to develop wind energy. In 1988, two years after the Chernobyl accident, the Danes passed a law forbidding the construction of nuclear power plants. This country is now the world’s leader in a large, lucrative wind energy technology and is pursuing the fourth generation of wind turbines. Most Danes are delighted with their decision. As one of them said, “I wanted my children to have five fingers, we made a choice: No nuclear energy. We’re going to do something else.” (Sadly, the legacy of Chernobyl will linger for hundreds of years in Denmark, as tragically some of their food is still radioactive.)26
Wind power has enormous potential in the United States. The land between the Rockies and the Mississippi is referred to as the Saudi Arabia of wind because of the relentless gales that consistently batter this huge American prairie.27 Texas, Kansas, and North Dakota together could provide 100% of America’s electricity. The offshore potential for wind energy is incalculable, and the wind potential of the Great Lakes and the northwest and northeast areas of the States has hardly been tapped.28 Wind power from readily available rural land in just several Dakota counties could produce twice the amount of electricity that the United States currently consumes.
In Minnesota, since the mid-1990s, hundreds of wind turbines have been generating electricity through this windswept region. Constructed by large corporations who pay farmers $2,000 to $5,000 per machine to rent their land, wind power machines have produced enormous benefits to cash-strapped farmers. Some farmers have even developed their own commercial-scale, giant wind turbines on wind-farms called “combines in the sky,” making even more money from this new, green energy crop.29
At the governmental level, several problems need to be addressed for the wind power industry to reach an appropriate scale. While wind power generated in the U.S. Northeast has ready access to electricity grids, which are plentiful in that part of the country, access to the grid is sometimes difficult elsewhere in the country. Wind farms are usually located many miles from major electricity grids, and it is expensive to construct the necessary transmission lines (although the cost is very small compared with the cost of building a nuclear power plant!). Other problems currently bedevil these wind farmers. In North Dakota, most of the grid capacity ranging from Minneapolis-St. Paul to Chicago is dominated by coal burners, and farmers have had great difficulty gaining grid access, a problem that has generated severe political furor.30
However, there is good news for wind farmers. The John Deere Corporation and other companies that sell equipment to farmers are establishing large capital funds to invest in wind, supporting farmers and the production of renewable clean energy. Small local banks attracted to these potentially lucrative schemes are also beginning to invest money in wind power.31
It is imperative that the federal and state governments subsidize these important and critical new energy sources. Some states are already offering worthwhile subsidies. For instance, the Minnesota state Legislature is currently providing a production incentive to small wind farms, and the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission will purchase another 400 megawatts of wind capacity, having decided that wind power is the “least-cost alternative” for new electricity generation in the state.32
Farmers are also investigating other forms of green power including ethanol and soy diesel refineries in southwest Minnesota and anaerobic digesters that convert manure to green electricity. In short, with these types of alternatives, money that normally would be paid out to huge energy monopolies stays in the community, local jobs are created, local banks become involved, and communities prosper.33
Other countries such as China, with its hugely growing energy needs, have also begun to invest in wind power. In Huitengxile, on the grasslands of Inner Mongolia, a 68-megawatt wind farm has been established, which is expected to grow to 400 megawatts by 2008. Similar wind farms are being developed in many heavily populated provinces, and the cost per kilowatt of wind electricity is fast becoming competitive with China’s abundant coal industry. Wang Zhongying, the director of China’s Center for Renewable Energy Development, said that China has huge goals for wind power development, reaching 4,000 megawatts by 2010 and a staggering 20,000 megawatts by 2020.34
China supports the production of wind power and other alternatives with tax incentives for developers, while imposing standardized electricity rates as a subsidy for wind power, because it is still somewhat more expensive than coal. China has also ruled that provinces will be required to purchase electricity from alternative sources even if the cost per kilowatt hour is more expensive than conventional sources, a move that supports the suppliers of wind power.35
In England, wind farms are now providing megawatts of electricity to the national grid at a more rapid rate than those currently being lost as a result of nuclear power plant shut downs.36
Hypothetically 10 trillion to 20 trillion watts of solar power provided by photovoltaics could take the place of all conventional energy sources currently in use. Consequently, it has been estimated that a rather inefficient photovoltaic array covering half a sunny area measuring 100 square miles could meet all the annual U.S. electricity needs.37 Although this is a vast amount of electricity, there are probably enough feedstocks—adequate and appropriate materials—to meet this gigantic challenge.
Photovoltaic cells are becoming both more efficient to produce and more efficient solar collectors. However, fossil-fuelled energy is necessary to create photovoltaic cells. A solar roof collector would therefore take one to four years to recover the amount of energy that produced it, but because it has a life expectancy of thirty years, 87% to 97% of the electricity it produces will not be plagued by pollution—greenhouse gases or resource depletion. There is ample space available to locate these solar arrays, including rooftops, alongside roadways, or on unused desert landcapes bathed in sun. The future production of massive numbers of solar collectors will require certain specialized materials, all of which are readily available, including even the rare minerals—indium and tellurium. The reliability, technological improvements, and market penetration of concentrated photovoltaics have all advanced considerably in the last twenty years.
Silicon Valley venture capitalists are now investing in “clean tech,” a term encompassing solar energy, water purification systems, and alternative automotive fuels. These investors are not necessarily altruistic, although they recognize that doing good things for the planet is a “great by-product.” (They freely admit that their motivation has a green tinge more to do with the color of money than with green energy.) Their investments are stimulated in part by the high price of oil but also by the increasing demand for electricity in India and China.38
Incentives encouraging solar power development are rapidly expanding and are now available in thirty states, including California, New York, and Texas, where in some cities the basic cost of conventionally generated electricity has risen 50% over the last three years. The legislators of these states recognize that they need to endorse creative technology to offset the large demand for electricity, without having to construct dirty new fossil-fuelled plants. Consequently, these solar initiatives are funded by alternative energy surcharges placed upon utility bills.39
Three-hundred thousand houses are now equipped with solar power, whereas five years ago the number was only 100,000. Sales of solar arrays increased 28% to $500 million during June 2004–2005 and this number is expected to rise more than 20% during June 2005–2006.40 Because Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is a solar enthusiast, solar installations have increased by 53% to power 4,614 residences in 2004 under California’s rebate program. The Californian Public Utilities Commission in January 2006 passed the largest solar initiative in U.S. history approving a $3 billion rebate program to subsidize the installation of one million rooftop solar installations over the coming decade.41 Other states are joining the solar fray. New Jersey offers the most generous rebates, whereas Connecticut and Ohio pay $5 per watt, Nevada offers $4 per watt, Oregon pays $3.50 per watt, and Idaho allows homeowners a 100% tax deduction up to $20,000 spent on the solar array.42 Washington State has initiated a new solar tariff, similar to the one in Germany, to stimulate a major new demand in photovoltaics.43 Forty states now allow homeowners to sell their excess solar power back to the grid.44
Despite these attractive and growing incentives, it is still relatively expensive to install a solar system. For example, a solar array installed in New Jersey cost the owner $50,000, of which the state provided $5.50 for each watt of generating capacity in his system, which covered $35,000 of the total cost. The owner is optimistic because he says he will recoup the balance of $15,000 in four to five years through savings on electricity bills and special credits earned through a state program akin to a frequent-flier mileage program to reward producers of non-polluting electricity.45
Moving on to other forms of renewable energy including solar power, Germany, which plans to phase out nuclear power by 2025, is moving rapidly toward alternatives. It now generates over 8% of its electricity from wind and biomass and is the world’s largest user of photovoltaic cells. Because half its energy requirements will be generated from renewable sources by 2050, it predicts that carbon emissions will be reduced to one-fifth of its 1990 levels.46
In England, wave farms have moved from an experimental to a pragmatic stage and are now being heavily subsidized. This is where the fledgling wind power industry was five years ago (the first wave farm is now being launched in Portugal). Tidal power also has promising potential in Britain and may well become complementary to wind. At the same time, houses are being equipped with exciting new energy-saving gadgets.47
Some people question whether renewables could provide a practical electricity supply when wind power in various places can be intermittent and solar power changes according to season, climate, and the like.
Various studies have examined this “intermittency” problem related to renewables and solutions abound, including geographic aggregation of wind generators, improved weather forecasting techniques, timely extension of transmission and distribution grids, transboundary (between states and countries) of electricity exchange, and a mixture of renewable energy technologies including hydro, biomass, wind, solar, tidal, wave, geothermal, and cogeneration all interconnected on the same grid. This diversity will provide the full potential of renewables for adequate electricity production.48
Meanwhile, the U.S. Congress on October 6, 2005, allocated $50 billion more to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. One reason that the United States is involved in these countries is to control and own the oil. But oil burning adds to global warming. Would it not be better to withdraw from both these tortured countries and allocate these enormous sums of money to a world-class wind and solar economy? The money and technology are there, but the will and wisdom are not.49