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Electrify the Country
Contributed by: John Newman on 7/18/2008

Al Gore wants us to generate every bit of energy we need from wind, sun or other "earth friendly" sources in the next ten years. Is this even possible? Currently, we have an electrical generating capacity of about 1200 GW in this country, but that's only 40% of the story because only 40% of our total energy use is consumed as electricity. The other 60% of the energy we consume is primarily fossil fuels and primarily for transportation, although burning natural gas and heating oil for heating and other uses is a pretty big part of that too.

The only way to reach Al Gore's goal, short of forcing everyone back to living in caves or trees, is to electrify the country. Electricity can be used for everything; it can be used for heating, cooking and powering cars and trains. It may not be as cost-efficient for some of that as natural gas or oil is, but the costs of natural gas and oil are only going to keep rising. Eventually, electricity will make more and more sense, especially if we can generate it cheaply enough. But to replace all the fossil fuels we burn today to do things like heat our homes, and move around the country in ten years, we'd have to more than double the amount of electricity we generate today. Call it triple the amount we generate today, with the power grid to handle it all, if you want to account for population growth. But about 73% of the electricity we generate today also comes from fossil fuels, most of it coal, but also natural gas and fuel oils.

So how much of our current electrical generation comes for Al Gore approved sources? That depends what qualifies. Only about 8% of our electricity comes from "renewable" sources, and about 80% of that is hydropower from dams. It's been nearly impossible to build a new dam in this country for the past 40 years. About 10% of our electricity from renewable sources comes from burning things like municipal waste, gases recovered from landfills, "black liquor" waste from paper mills, tires, scrap wood, and other so-called biofuels. And while a lot of that can be classified as "better to burn than dump," it all still creates CO2 and air-borne pollutants, and most of it is stuff we really don't want to produce any more of if we can help it.

That leaves wind and solar as our only real renewable options. We get a total of less than 1% of our current electricity from wind and solar. And wind and solar is not without it's problems. A certain Democratic Senator from Massachusetts has been blocking a proposed windfarm of the coast for years because he doesn't want it to interfere with his family's traditional yachting areas. And both wind and solar have issues with availability. If you're using electricity to heat your home, you're going to be using more on long winter nights, when solar is not much of an option, for example.

But, that's not to say that wind and solar can't provide a much higher percentage of electricity than they do now. We should build new plants wherever it's most practicable, and in fact, there are ten so-called "big solar" plants now in various stages of planning, each of which is projected to have a peak generating capacity of over 100 MW. And wind farms are going up all the time, but wind farms only have an average generating capacity of 30 MW or so.

But these plants are small potatoes compared to what you can get out of a nuclear plant. Currently, over 19% of the total electricity we generate comes from 104 nuclear plants scattered around the country. Which means the average nuclear plant generates about 1000 MW, ten times what the "big solar" plants can do, and far more than what wind farms can provide. Nuclear power also has the advantage of being extremely reliable. Nuclear plants generated electricity at roughly 92% of their theoretical capacity in 2005, which is far higher than any other type of plant, and completely impossible for either a wind or solar generating plant to match.

Yes, nuclear plants create waste, but we can find a way to deal with it. Keep in mind that a large coal power plant requires 100 train car loads a day of coal to keep running, while the average nuclear reactor requires 1 truck load of fuel every 18 months. And the amount of waste generated by a nuclear power plant, in terms of the size of the area we could devote to storing it safely is minuscule. Waste from a nuclear power plant is not just spewed into the atmosphere, or reclaimed from scrubbers like waste from a fossil fuel plant is. And nuclear plants don't emit massive amounts of CO2.

The biggest problem with nuclear power plants is that they cost a lot to build, largely because everyone of them has a different design. But we should approach it like the US Navy has. Come up with a standardized design and have a rigorous training program for operators. That will keep the capital costs down.

It's certainly possible to foresee a future where we generate three times as much electricity as we do now, 70% from nuclear, 30% from mostly solar and wind, but also the hydro, waste and other biofuel sources we use now. If electricity is cheap enough, we can find a way to use it with the technology that we have now to do everything we want, whether its electrolyzing water for hydrogen to run fuel cell powered cars and trucks, to heating our homes and offices, to powering bullet trains all over the country. And we can do it with nuclear, wind and solar, with vastly lower CO2 emissions that we have now, and no dependency on unstable regimes in the mideast for oil.

But this is going to take time. It takes at least 10 years to build one nuclear plant, mainly because of the constant bureaucratic hoops our many layers of government make energy producers jump through, and the endless minefield of lawsuits they have to navigate. And it's not just nuclear plants that have this problem. There's been an attempt to build a wind farm off the coast of Massachusetts that has been tied up by various layers of government, lawsuits and Ted Kennedy for the past ten years. And let's not even talk about how hard it is to build a large power transmission lines these days.

This is never going to happen unless our government can get it's act together and help it happen instead of seemingly doing everything in it's power to prevent it from happening. It's long past time for the American people to demand better from it's government in regards to energy.

Sources:
US Energy Consumption by Sector: http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/consump.html
US Electrical Generation by Type: http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epat2p2.html
Planned US Solar Thermal Generating Stations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_solar_thermal_power_stations


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Showing 1-2 of 2 comments
Submitted By: Dharini Chandrashekhar
posted on 7/18/2008 @ 1:17:27 PM
Rated Story
Highly thought-provoking!!
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Submitted By: Tom Treloar
posted on 7/18/2008 @ 12:48:27 PM
Rated Story
I have not heard of any solutions from Al Gore, just comments on what should be done.
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Showing 1-2 of 2 comments
CONTRIBUTOR INFORMATION

John Newman

Northglenn , CO

John Newman has posted 2 stories and 12 comments since joining on 9/27/2005. John Newman 's average story rating is 5.
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