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Wind speed map of US. Credit: eere.energy.gov
According to the latest “Energy Infrastructure Update” report from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s Office of Energy Projects, 1,231 MW of new in-service electrical generating capacity came on line in the United States in January 2013 — all from wind, solar, and biomass sources.
This represents a nearly three-fold increase in new renewable energy generating capacity compared to the same month in 2012 when wind, solar, and biomass provided 431 MW of new capacity.
In other words, all of the new energy generation in the US last month came from clean and renewable energy — wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, et cetera — and none of it came from coal, oil, or nuclear power.
Why is this happening, even as the extremely heavily-subsidized dirty-energy industries dump tens of millions of dollars in TV ads alone designed to make you feel impressed by their great size and importance and alleged necessity? Because Wall Street (joining its European counterparts) is gradually realizing that dirty energy as a source of electricity is a sucker’s bet:
…Investing in and lending to emissions-intensive companies, though profitable in the short-term, will expose banks to future carbon-related credit and investment risks. For example, an electric utility that extends the life of an aging coal plant faces risks from future greenhouse gas regulations. It also faces competitive threats from peer companies that switch to natural gas or renewable generation options that are currently or will soon be cost-competitive with coal. Over the long term, the utility’s investors and creditors will bear the financial risks from coal-fired generating assets that may be stranded by a carbon-constrained economy. These risks have already begun to materialize for some electric utilities and have prompted a wave of coal plant closures in the U.S. 8
But, you say, what about nuclear power? Isn’t Wall Street in love with that? Actually, no — it turns out that Wall Street started backing away from nukes decades ago, even with the Get Out of Jail Free card known as the Price-Anderson Act as a backstop. As Christian Parenti stated back in May of 2008:
The fact is, nuclear power has not recovered from the crisis that hit it three decades ago with the reactor fire at Browns Ferry, Alabama, in 1975 and the meltdown at Three Mile Island in 1979. Then came what seemed to be the coup de grâce: Chernobyl in 1986. The last nuclear power plant ordered by a US utility, the TVA’s Watts Bar 1, began construction in 1973 and took twenty-three years to complete. Nuclear power has been in steady decline worldwide since 1984, with almost as many plants canceled as completed since then.
All of which raises the question: why is the much-storied “nuclear renaissance” so slow to get rolling? Who is holding up the show? In a nutshell, blame Warren Buffett and the banks–they won’t put up the cash.
“Wall street doesn’t like nuclear power,” says Arjun Makhijani of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research. The fundamental fact is that nuclear power is too expensive and risky to attract the necessary commercial investors. Even with vast government subsidies, it is difficult or almost impossible to get proper financing and insurance. The massive federal subsidies on offer will cover up to 80 percent of construction costs of several nuclear power plants in addition to generous production tax credits, as well as risk insurance. But consider this: the average two-reactor nuclear power plant is estimated to cost $10 billion to $18 billion to build. That’s before cost overruns, and no US nuclear power plant has ever been delivered on time or on budget.
As Dieter Helm, an Oxford professor and leading economic expert on energy markets, has found, there never has been and never will be a nuclear power program totally dependent on the market.
Gee, imagine what the American solar industry would be like if the Federal government paid for 80% of the costs of each new solar install — and gave the industry boatloads of tax credits to boot? We’d probably all be driving on these by now.
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This good news is a welcome change. Even better news would include curtailing exporting coal, which will be burned elsewhere and send us back the CO2 anyway.
Our big coal plant just announced they are closing 2 stacks. Heh, looks like it had less to do with the anti-coal campaign of environmentalists. The market always decides.
Thanks for the post, PW.
What will the cost to the oil and coal companies be, when they are sued, for their lies about carbon dioxide and climate change, much as were the tobacco companies, who lied about cancer and cigarettes, and required to pay for the damages.
These companies are like dinosaurs.
If they do not adapt, (move into renewable energy) their stock will be worthless soon enough, and they will suffer a mass corporate extinction.
PW – we still have to deal with the fact that the grids owned by the coal/oil/gas/electric utilities are basically over-subscribed. Adding all of this renewable does not help if there is no way to get the energy where it needs to go. literally, generators have to get called by the state or regional ISOs and given an appointment to generate and push power into the grid. This is the bottleneck for us to get rid of coal, oil, and gas-fired generation. Those folks basically are first in line in terms of getting time on the grid.
The dark side of this is
Nate Alden, Climate Progress
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/02/21/1618671/2012-us-coal-exports-reach-record-high/
“In 2012 the U.S. exported 114 million metric tons of coal (126 million short tons) — 12 percent more than the previous high set in 1981. The rapid rise of U.S. coal exports exceeded the Department of Energy’s forecast, published in the 2012 Annual Energy Outlook, by 30 percent.”
We need an IWW for the age of international corporate control.
1) The holdups for nuclear power are financial and procedural rather than technological. At least potentially, these obstacles could be swept away fairly quickly, speeding the time a conventional nuclear plant could be built and brought online. And keep in mind, for all the dangers associated with them, nuclear plants are far, far less deadly than coal.
2) But there’s much better news for nuclear. Check out thorium-powered molten-salt reactors. The technology has been around for 60 years or so. It produces very little waste, and the waste it does produce is far less dangerous than the waste from conventional plants. MSR plants can’t melt down, and the power source, thorium, is abundant and easily accessed, with the U.S. alone having enough to provide all our power needs for 400 years. That’s far better than uranium (which could soon be in short supply) and even coal.
3) Finally, haven’t we had quite enough talk about wind and solar? These technologies have been around for decades and they never seem to provide more than a tiny fraction of anyone’s power. Plus they’re intermittent and the power can’t be stored.
Your post is a revelation, PW: I had no idea that such a trend existed. Thanks.
Methinks thou doth protest a bit much…
In addition to not understanding electricity, you’re so pre-9/11.
Heavily centralized generation means you have to move electricity. It doesn’t move well as electricity and you lose a lot of it. Better to use it proximate to where you generate it.
Heavily centralized generation only makes you more susceptible to terrorist attacks.
You contradict yourself in your #2 and #3. According to you, the age of the technology is good in number 2 and bad in number 3.
“If the Chinese can crack thorium,” notes the Telegraph, “the world will need less oil, coal, and gas than feared. Wind turbines will vanish from our landscape. There will less risk of a global energy crunch, less risk of resource wars, and less risk of a climate tipping point.”
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/01/nuclear-energy-china-thorium
Hydrogen is a very efficient storage medium for electricity, and it generates electricity from a CHEMICAL reaction, meaning it gets a lot closer to carbon negative. Other stuff regarding hydrogen, particularly wrt transportation fuel cells has to get worked out. Until it does Audi is methanating hydrogen from intermittent sources and storing it as natural gas.
“Audi to Make Fuel Using Solar Power: The automaker is using technology from SolarFuel to make renewable methane for natural-gas vehicles”
“To make the methane, SolarFuel combines two existing technologies. One is electrolysis, which splits water to produce hydrogen and oxygen. The other is methanation, which combines hydrogen with carbon from carbon dioxide to make methane. The company says its innovation lies in the way it’s combined the two processes…..”
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/510066/audi-to-make-fuel-using-solar-power/
Natural gas is just methane. In addition to getting it from “intermittents,” it also comes from manure. Hilarides Dairy in CA runs their truck fleet on CNG from their cow manure. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIkEm8JUOfY
We already have a natural gas pipeline which we can fill with natural gas from renewable sources, not fracking. That’s the battery you said we don’t have. Over time, can it be upgraded to move pure hydrogen?
Endbridge, who currently trades north of $38/share on the NYSE, says “yes.”
“….But the way Enbridge describes this collaboration, it has little interest in fuel cells. Instead, it wants to generate hydrogen and inject it into its natural gas pipeline assets, “proportionally increasing the renewable energy content in natural gas pipelines.” In other words — the way I read it from the press release — it wants to reduce the carbon intensity of the natural gas in its pipelines by mixing it with hydrogen. That cleaner natural gas will then be burned in natural gas-fired plants, people’s home furnaces, etc……
We already have a huge storage and transport system that is all bought and paid for and can be used for hydrogen,” says Daryl Wilson, CEO of Hydrogenics. “It is the natural gas pipeline system.” Hydrogenics is pioneering what it calls “power-to-gas” – the idea of feeding excess electrical power as hydrogen into the natural gas grid. The company recently announced a deal with Enbridge, owner of the world’s largest liquid pipeline and a company that also has significant investments in photovoltaics, to jointly develop utility-scale energy storage in North America. Wilson admits that “power-to-gas” is just one of the many ways in which hydrogen can be used. “We live in a world where energy has traditionally been separated into different industries – we use gasoline for transport, natural gas for fuel and electricity for power. Hydrogen has the potential to be used for all these applications and so brings a new economic flexibility,” says Wilson. “Of all the energy storage solutions available, hydrogen is the only one that will be able to cope with demand. If Germany continues of its path of implementing renewable energy, it may need to store up to a month’s worth of energy. You can’t do that with batteries!….”
http://www.cleanbreak.ca/2012/04/23/enbridge-hydrogenics-partner-for-utility-scale-energy-storage-for-renewables/
I don’t like or trust Endbridge, but I do pay attention to what they say.
The single best idea for decentralized electricity generation imho is “Solar Roadways.” http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151055213272126&set=a.10150843746337126.393046.41869107125&type=1&theater
I first learned about the idea from the author of this post, Phoenix WomanMN.
Why pour concrete for roads, when you can use a technology that allows the roads to pay for themselves over time?
I don’t know enough about Thorium, but if it works we’re going to need a lot more energy for pulling green house gasses out of the atmosphere and putting them back in the ground.
Although counter-intuitive, 350.org’s Bill McKibben has been pushing Biochar as a use of “pyrolysis” to burn biomass that is carbon negative. That’s another source.
You had best do some reading on storage;
I would point you to some sources, but based on your comment, I don’t think you’d be interested.
This is comical.
A-yep. And we export our coal to China and other Southeast Asian nations.
Thanks, Boo.
The two biggest reasons I have for backing the Solar Roadways concept: It can be done simply by re-paving our existing roads, bike paths and parking lots (in other words, no giant ten-mile-on-a-side solar or wind farms need to be created out of arable land or wilderness), and since they are road surfaces, they would go anywhere a road would go (which means they’d have a longer reach than the current electrical grid, which is dependent on wires strung from poles).
As to your interesting remarks on thorium-based power, pelham, I confess that I (a former physicist) had never heard of it, so your comment inspired me to look it up. According to the basic Wikipedia article (what would we do without that site?!), which bears out your claims about its advantages, the reason it’s so little known is that in 1973 the government shut down research on it at Oak Ridge, including an actual prototype reactor, because “uranium breeder reactors were more efficient, the research was proven, and byproducts could be used to make nuclear weapons.” (Emphasis added, because one suspects that that was the most important reason during a time when the Cold War was at its height.) One journalist reported that the Oak Ridge director even lost his job for championing thorium.
So it seems that current problems like the leakage at the Hanford site are even more the heritage of the drive for nuclear weapons hegemony than we thought.
I do question your pooh-poohing of renewable energy. For a time in the 1990s I did some telemarketing for solar-powered hot water heaters in Maryland; granted that there is not enough sun there for all the hot water needed (much less to heat the entire home as perhaps in Arizona), so that a switch had to kick conventional power in when needed, they seemed to work well enough for the home owner to save money.
For completeness we also should mention the subject of nuclear fusion as opposed to fission, a technique which would be essentially free of nuclear waste (more so than thorium reactors, I suspect), and with an inexhaustible supply (not just for 400 years) of fuel from sea water. The problem in making it sustainable is how to confine the material at the high temperatures required; research with prototype devices using the “tokamak” principle has been going on for a very long time, but the expected date for something really tangible keeps getting put off.
(When I made the last comment on an earlier FDL post someone responded that there was research with some non-tokamak mechanism that looked more promising, and said that he or she might write a diary on it, but that never appeared.)
It sounds like the thorium option needs more discussion at FDL, but for the moment renewables still seems what we should champion.
(But the above was written before I saw BooRadley @ 10; I haven’t assimilated that yet.)
What will finally get those folks’ attention will be the growing number of people who wind up getting off the established grid, either by themselves or through their own cooperative networks.
Everybody keeps talking in terms of replacing fossil fuels with alternate sources for power generation as the top priority, but there seems to be very little interest in conservation. Why are we such wasteful gluttons? We could significantly reduce our consumption of electricity, and that’s where we should start.
So part of the reason we’ve been stuck with the most dangerous possible form of nuclear power is so we can make warheads? That’s interesting, EFB. And unfortunately all too telling.
We’ve been chasing after fusion for over half a century now, and it’s always been another twenty years in the future. Doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t keep chasing after it — after all, it took a couple of centuries for the European powers to solve the longitude problem, and that was a top priority for them — but it does mean that we can’t expect it to be up and running anytime soon.
Meanwhile, solar and wind are not only up and running, they’re already near or at the point where they’re cheaper than coal — which is another reason why there’s been a boom in solar and wind power financing and construction. (And they ARE cheaper than coal when all of coal’s hidden costs are totaled up.)
Why are we such wasteful gluttons? Largely because until relatively recently, there’s been no pressing incentive not to be. But the power transmission bottleneck Toby mentions may cause this to become much more important than it is now.
Yea, I’d heard that the Uranium reators were heavily promoted because of the nuclear weapons aspect
I don’t know anything about nuclear anything, but here’s a page on a website I’d ran across a few years ago
http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:Thorium_Reactors
Offhand that looks like a pretty good site, jis, a sort of wikipedia specialized to clean energy; thanks. The thorium page you link to doesn’t have much discussion in itself, but certainly has links to a lot of places that do.
Thanks for the reply.
I would only say in response that I share your suspicion of centralized sources of energy. I’d much prefer sources close to home. But nothing viable appears to be on the horizon.
In fact, all the technologies you mention sound wonderful. But either they’re not very new but somehow nonetheless never show up in any great quantity or they’re just around the corner. And after decades of promises that never materialize, I’m quite done with “just around the corner.” Wind and solar and accompanying technologies to render them more useful are much like fusion energy in that regard: theoretically appealing, not quite proven at scale and always just a few years off.
Thorium MSR was proven and in use decades ago and could be back up and running in a brief time. It has its problems, yes, but we can’t wait. It can produce a lot of power in the concentrations and quantities our current infrastructure, industrial base and economy require without much in the way of complications and, with the right governmental and international push, could be available in fairly short order.
Moreover, it can serve as a single, compelling source that all the disparate, atomized and largely ineffectual clean-energy advocates could rally round. The sheer proliferation of energy alternatives and offshoots and their many advocates campaigning every which way for this, that and the other now dissipate their collective force with the result that nothing much gets done. (The coal industry, by the way, loves wind advocates because King Coal knows it can never work at the necessary scale, thus ensuring the fossil future.) Meanwhile, the fossil-fuel forces are highly organized with lots of money and one or two basic goals and a solid strategy.
We don’t have the money but we can have the focus. And for that we need one, proven energy source that does the job completely.
Thorium MSR. Let’s go.
“I would only say in response that I share your suspicion of centralized sources of energy. I’d much prefer sources close to home. But nothing viable appears to be on the horizon”
100 square miles of solar collection at the Arizona Mexico border @ 35 percent efficiency can harvest in a years time @ 400 TW in a year time.. World used 18 TW last year. Dedicate toward desalination of sea water using radio frequency waves which produces heat source 1800 Celsius to then be utilized for steam electrical production.. Problem solved clean potable water and all the electricity we need using sun and sea water. The most abundant sources of life undercut all supply side commodity nation fucking bullshit….
Electric cars…75 percent efficient opposed to drive cars wasting .80 cents of every dollar spent on a monopolies commodities called gasoline? This is fucking servitude…. Protect the slaveowners…..
Dubious + / – exploitation economics lead / leading and going to looming + / – planet outcomes…
As I said when you first chimed in this morning, pelham, I hadn’t heard of thorium reactors and they sound interesting now that I have. I would only say tonight that in view of data like what JJ cites @ 23, you might argue for the technique better if you did not pose the issue in so either/or a fashion.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-to-use-solar-energy-at-night
Solar thermal is a reality. Germany is solarizing their electrical grid with thousands of rooftop panels. Solar water heating does not have to attain full temperature in order to impact energy usage, simply raising the temperature 25 degrees before sending it to a conventional water heater saves energy, money, and resources. We do not need one single, centralized, investor owned, profit driven generating system. We need decentralized, broad based, non-profit system using regionally appropriate sources. One of the wonders of electricity is the wide range of ways it can be generated, kinetic (wind blowing, water flowing), chemical, thermal (geo and solar), even radiant (remember crystal radios?).
A one dimensional approach to this problem is simplistic and a proven loser.
Once we get past the 19th century paradigms of investment driven utilities, we might stand a chance.
Right of ways for interstate highway? The best geographical locations can be identified along the Interstate hwy right of ways to install solar. From West Texas to southern California up into Nevada. all the way down to Arizona New Mexico the AmMex border is one of the “sunniest” places in the world. Bathed in 12.2 Trillion Watts of sunlight, per square mile, per year.
I to share your concern about a centralized system. I think the key word here is “aggregate.”
America needs jobs and productivity. Ike provided that with the interstate Highway System. Connecting the real needs of Americans to the real needs of a Nation, to real jobs is what is not being done. We as a nation are in servitude to energy monopolies, in commerce and trade. America needs liberation, as Scott needed freedom.