A Globe article today on meeting the area’s power needs presents us with a stark choice:
Facing a worsening crunch in the supply of electricity, soaring prices, and rolling blackouts, top New England utility officials are thinking about some once-unthinkable solutions: more coal and nuclear power.
Officially, no proposals for new nuclear reactors or coal-fueled power plants are in the works. But in an interview with the Globe, Gordon van Welie, chief executive of Independent System Operator New England, which runs the six-state power grid, broached the idea of coal and nuclear plants — along with better conservation and wind power — as steps the region, overly reliant on natural gas, must consider to stave off a power crisis.
“We don’t want coal. We don’t want nuclear power. We don’t want windmills off the coast of Massachusetts. We don’t want windmills in Vermont,” van Welie said. “We don’t want any of that stuff, but then once you’ve made that decision, acknowledge what the costs are. You can’t have it both ways.”
Again, conservation is the elephant in the living room, which van Welie acknowledges. But beyond that, let’s stop pretending about our options: it’s either wind, or something dirtier. We can piss off the Kennedys and some other rich folk on the Cape, who define “the commons” as “a breathtaking view that makes my property valuable”; or, we can have more nukes and coal. Choose.
Here’s an article on the subject. Money quote:
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Oops. And sure, there’s wind in Nantucket Sound, and I’m in favor of Cape Wind. But even Cape Wind, if developed to the full extent sought by its backers, still won’t meet the electricity needs of the Cape & Islands (it’s projected to produce up to 75% of the need). We need more.
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Personally, I think the lefties made a big mistake back in the day, when they relentlessly opposed every expansion of nuclear power, and lefties are apparently continuing that mistake today. Yes, nukes have problems (disposal of spent fuel chief among them), but in important ways they’re a hell of a lot cleaner than burning fossil fuels, and they don’t carry the national security risks of being dependent on oil controlled by scary governments. < /liberal heresy >
Thousands of people die every year directly from fossil fuels — extracting them, moving them, burning them — not to mention the tens of thousands who die, or have their lives drastically shortened, indirectly from pollution. And then, of course, there are the millions hurt by wars for oil, like the Iraq war, and global warming. In short, nuclear power has many advantages compared to fossil fuels, and the “environmentalists” who helped shut down new plants and most research and development in this country may not actually have done our environment any favors at all.
I don’t know if wind turbines off the coast, and in the Berkshires, could be enough to prevent our need for building more coal or nuclear power plants, but what you said doesn’t demonstrate that they won’t.
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To begin with, Cape Wind is not the only possible project. We’re talking about hypothetical future coal & nuclear plants; we could just as easily throw hypothetical wind farms into the discussion. More can be built. Secondly, though, the fact that Cape Wind would only supply 75% of the Cape & Islands’ energy needs doesn’t mean it’s “not enough” for the Cape & Islands to obviate the need for more dirtier power – it just means it’s not enough to allow us to eliminate all of the dirty power plants currently supplying the Cape & Island. That’s an important point, but it’s different than the one the original post talks about, which is the need for new power sources. For example, if our rate of energy growth over N decades is projected to be 20%, and during that time we can add wind farms that supply 25% of our energy needs, then we wouldn’t need any new dirty power, and could even have a mild reduction from the dirty power we use now.
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I don’t mean that to debunk what you say about nuclear energy (which I have mixed feelings about), just to point out that based on what we’re reading here, we don’t know whether wind power can eliminate the need for building new plants, be they coal or nuclear – and it’s possible that it can.
I’m running for Town Meeting in Brookline’s Precinct 1, in an attempt to bring some progressives to the legislature from my neighborhood.
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In case the sig isn’t configged correctly, head on over to
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http://www.tommyvitolo.com
of lefties there
In fact, I’m wearing my “IBEW 103 Boston MA” windmill shirt right now.
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I support Cape Wind. However, the Cape Wind project — even if it created 5 times the amount of electricity it is slated to produce — couldn’t stave off a single coal or nuclear plant.
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Wha? Allow me to explain.
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1. Storing large quantities of electricity is incredibly difficult and expensive. In fact, the most efficient way known is to use the electricity to pump water into a lake up a hill, and then open the gates later and use the flowing water to spin turbines. Of course, you’ve got to have the geography to support such a system, and there isn’t much of that in these parts. It’s also not so great for local ecologies most of the time.
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You can’t store electricity.
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2. The electricity you’re using now is being produced now. Since storage is such a difficult thing, we simply produce electricity exactly when we need it.
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3. Different amounts of electricity are used depending on time of day, day of week, and time of year. This cycle is pretty dramatic. For example, in NY on August 1, 2005, 4:00 am needed 16,000 Megawatts, 4:30 pm needed 28,000 megawatts. Since we expect to have electricity available 24/7/365, we must have capacity to generate the absolute peak; the worst case in terms of demand.
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4. Different generation methods produce along different timelines.
4a. Nuclear: it’s baseline. Whatever it produces, that’s how much it’s producing 24 hours a day. This means that, generally speaking, you don’t want to be producing more electricity than the system ever needs. In the case of number (3) above, NY shouldn’t have more than 16,000 Megawatts of nuclear generating capacity, unless it has a way to sell off the surplus 4:00 am electricity to other regions.
4b. Natural Gas: Natural gas nozzles can be adjusted very quickly, so the amount of electricity generated via natural gas can be adjusted on the order of every few seconds.
4c. Coal: coal changes production rates on the order of every 5 minutes, so it’s not as flexible as gas but far more flexible than nuclear.
4d. Oil: Massachusetts burns oil (#6 oil IIRC) to generate a bunch of electricity. It’s sort of sickening. Because oil isn’t used outside of some New England States, Florida, and Hawaii, there isn’t as much published about it.
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4e. Wind: Wind is variable. It is most likely to be blowing well near sundown and sunrise, but there’s no certainty. So, when it is blowing, you can reduce your useage of 4b, 4c, and/or 4d. But, if it’s not blowing at 4:00 PM on August 1, 2005 (peak demand), you’ve got to have capacity to generate all of that electricity elsewhere.
4f. Solar: The sun is out when we use the most electricity — during the day. This means that solar can be used to reduce the peak draw on the system, which helps the most. Unless it’s cloudy out.
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Neither solar nor wind can be used to prevent building more power plants, because neither of them can be used “on demand”. There are green alternatives however — landfill gas (behaves like 4b), wood chips (behaves like 4c), geothermal (behaves like 4a), etc.
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The bottom line: there must be enough generational capacity to meet peak demand, and neither wind nor solar can be counted. That doesn’t mean that they’re useless — if they result in us firing up the coal plants less often, they’ve done a valuable service. But, they can’t reduce the necessity of building more power plants.
This is how things are now, not the way we expect them to always be. If our governments had invested as much money in renewables over the past two decades as they have in oil, I think it very likely we’d have electricity storage by now that would be cost-effective enough to allow wind power to store from its peaks to help the valleys. And we can get there, possibly with fuel cells, in a decade or two, don’t you think? If we put enough people on it. It’s now less of a need for new discoveries, than simply a need to try out lots and lots of variables and develop efficiency – Edison style “invention by perspiration”.
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That said, with where we are now, here are some examples:
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Solarfest is an annual music festival in Vermont that runs off the electric grid. They set up with solar collectors a week ahead of time, to fill their batteries, and the batteries have enougth to smooth out supply during cloudy times and night performances.
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In Israel, my grandarents had a solar water heater. It stored the results of solar energy in water on the roof – as you said, the most efficient way to do it. We never had to use any other method of water heating, that I recall. What if this were standard here, if every home had that? Both peak and valley demand for electricity, as well as oil, would be reduced.
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More interesting are some of the micropower generation projects in Africa, but I don’t know about those in detail. NGOs and local entrepeneurs working in countries where the national government isn’t together enough to actually provide an electricity grid to serve rural villages, are stitching together decentralized methods of supplying everyone, using a variety of generation methods but especially solar. Granted, we don’t get nearly as much sun up here as they do, but there are some vey electricity-demanding parts of our country that do (such as greater Los Angeles), and displacing need there could allow us to buy power, or oil, or gas, that they’re currently using.
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Just brainstorming. Any comments?
What’s important to emphasize is that the details of those projects are distributed.
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Concert: it works because lots of people brought batteries. The flip side though is that current chemical batteries are nasty things to manufacture, ship, and dispose of. Using chemical batteries is not really a large-scale solution, either centralized or distributed.
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Solar hot water heater: Great stuff. Did you know that Jimmy Carter had one installed in the White House, noting that the cost of installation would repay itself in energy savings? Ronald Reagan spent more money to have it ripped out. True story. The Big Gipper was a Big Jerk in that regard. I’d love for solar water heaters to become more prevalant. It’s a great way to (a) store energy, and (b) reduce load. Now, there isn’t much hot water contributing to peak load in New England, because (a) lots of people have gas/oil based hot water heaters, and (b) people don’t use much hot water during the peak. Still, every bit helps. In addition to solar hot water heaters, it would be nice if we’d switch to tankless hot water heaters — but that’s another rant for another time. Feel free to google about if you’d like.
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As for NGOs, solar is the best way. There are a few hurdles:
1. Legal. In some states, small scale net-metering is legal. In other places, not so much. Net-metering allows for a person to spin their meter backward if they’re currently producing more electricity (from solar typically) than they’re using. The idea is that if I use 10 kW/h of electricity in the morning but then give you back 10 kW/h in the afternoon, we’re “even”. Net-metering is good policy because it (a) encourages distributed small scale electrical generation, and (b) helps reduce the peak, since it’s often done using solar and in places where the peak is due to hot weather, the hottest days aren’t cloudy.
2. Technical. Solar cells are still expensive to manufacture relative to the amount of energy they give back. Once one accounts for installation costs and the price of the solar cells themselves, they have a “break even point” of 15-20 years in sunny climes. This varies depending on tax breaks, etc, and since modern solar cells have a 25-50 year warranty, it is a winning proposition long-term.
3. NIMBYism, often with good reason. Do you want your neighbor buidling his own small-scale wind turbine, putting it on a 50′ post on his property line, which is 30′ from your kid’s window? I don’t. Safety is an issue, as is noise, aesthetics, etc. NGOs often work best in more rural areas. Trouble is, most Americans live in suburban or urban environments. I’m not suggesting that we shouldn’t encourage unique, free-thinking small scale production, just that on a national level, it’s not likely to have a significant impact.
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As for energy storage, it’s been a valuable problem for many years, regardless of wind farms. Folks are working hard on it. More research dollars to materials science and electrical engineering departments at American universities would help.
I’m familiar with tankless water heaters. From 2003 to early 2005 I lived in a friend’s house in Waltham, where they installed one. It passed water through a little flame heater that only turned on when a certain level of water pressure ran through it. That meant it was off most of the time, until someone anywhere in the house turned on a hot water tap to a moderate level (or higher). It was a bit odd to get used to because I’ve gotten so used to tanks, where to get hot water, you have to run it for a while and wait. With this heater, sometimes I’d pre-start the hot water at a low level, so that a few minutes later when I got in the tub/shower, it would run be hot, but then realize oops, it was set too low to trigger the heater. Whereas if I set it high enough, it would get hot almost right away. I got used to it after a few weeks and really liked it.
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At that house, they also mostly cooled it in the summer by circulating air up. There was a big fan placed in the window in the “attic” (the big room under the roof), pointing outward. To turn on the cooling system, one could either open the basement door and the basement window, bringing in fieldstone-cooled air, or at night, just open a window near the back door on the first floor, with a little extensible screen, and bring in cool night air. The fan would draw a breeze up through the whole house, and expel the hotter third floor air.
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I moved into a condo (renting from a friend) in Cambridge last year. In summer, I thought I’d try the same trick, since we have a very cool basement, and I live on the third floor. Alas, there is no window one can open in the basement! There’s a door, but I can’t leave the door to the outside open all night. There could have been an open-able window, but whoever built this place just didn’t build it that way. So frustrating! And so dumb!
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I wish those who build houses and apartment buildings thought about these issues more.
1. Keep building wind and solar. While they can’t be counted toward capacity used to meet peak demand, they do result in the system relying on coal, natural gas, and oil turbines as much. This means less pollution, and it also means insulating the system against price shocks in natural gas, oil, or (less likely) coal. Furthermore, since the marginal cost of wind and solar is $0.00, they actually do result in lower electricity rates for everyone in the system. Good news.
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2. Conservation. Improve building requirements for insulation and materials. Use government programs to make CF bulbs cheaper. Use the home heating assistance fund to insulate the home instead of simply buy more fuel. Increase efficiency standards in appliances. Make improvements to the electrical grid itself so that the system wastes less. It’s merely a question of money and willpower. Personally, I’d rather see the state spend $15,000,000 to increase enough energy efficiency to offset building a $10,000,000 coal plant. Not only would we save on pollution, but the energy efficiency will pay itself back over time; the coal plant is just ugly and polluting.
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But while all conservation is good, conservation between 4:00pm – 5:00pm is far more important than conservation at 4:00 am. Why? Because if we can conserve electricity at it’s peak, we lower the peak. Lowering the peak means we lower the generation capacity needed to meet peak. That’s how we can prevent new coal or nuke plants from being built — by maintaining (or lowering!) peak demand.
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How do we lower the peak?
3. Time-based-metering. What if you had to pay more for electricity at 4pm than at 10pm, which would be more than at 4am? After all, it costs more to produce electricity at 4pm than at 10pm, which is more expensive than 4am. Shouldn’t you pay more? If our meters were time-based, we might choose to not run the dishwasher until the evening hours or early morning. We might set up timers for our AC/elec heat so that they ran when the price was a bit lower and didn’t run so much when the price was higher. This would serve to take that mountain peak and spread it around, so it wasn’t so high on top but spread out more, like a plateau.
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Would people make these kinds of adjustments? Some would. Who else would go for this though? Schools, businesses, and government. After all, their utility bills are orders of magnitude higher than yours, and so an adjustment that saves 2% can be $1000s of dollars per year, or more.
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The problem of pollution and energy risk can be mitigated with wind and solar. The problem of having sufficient capacity for peak demand can only be solved by building more fuel-based power plants [b]or[/b] by reducing [i]peak[/i] demand. I’d prefer we do the latter, and I believe the only way to do it successfully is with time-based metering. I don’t want another coal or nuclear plant in my state.
We can, and are, developing better storage capacity from what I understand, the biggest being water converted into hydrogen.
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Which is a lot less flamable than everyone believes. Stupid flammably-painted Hindenburg.
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This is technology we have NOW, we just don’t have the infrastructure yet.
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It would be nice if we had a national push for energy storage similar to the hydrogen bomb project…this is as much if not more important to our long-term stability then even that.
The technology exists, but is neither (a) efficient to convert electricity to hydrogen, (b) efficient to convert it back, or (c) efficient to store large quantities of it.
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It’s not merely a question of infrastructure. It’s a question of improving the technologies so that they are cost-feasible in large scale rollouts. We won’t be there for many years.
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That being said, we’re also nowhere near our “peak” of wind turbines being productive without energy storage. We can be rolling those out now, and who knows… maybe we’ll get energy storage just as we’re approaching the period where it’s really useful for emissions-free energy generation.
I still don’t understand how come there’s no Manhattan-Project-like governmental program for this. It’s THE serious impediment to energy transition (which will happen anyway whether we like it or not – hydrocarbons are finite).
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Oh, yeah, duh, because oilmen are in charge of our f-ing country.
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tears hair out
There’s just no funding.
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The Apollo Alliance.
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Check ’em out.
Thanks for the helpful post. One question: “Nuclear: it’s baseline. Whatever it produces, that’s how much it’s producing 24 hours a day.” I thought they could heat them up and cool them down using the control rods?
1. It’s a process that takes many hours to do.
2. Current nuke plants aren’t so sure that doing this over and over again is such a good idea.
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Modern (read: designed in the past 10 years, not past 50) pebble bed reactors may be more adjustable.
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Currently, the valley of demand (4:00 am stuff) is still higher than maximum nuclear production in many (I think all!) regions, so it doesn’t really matter — they just run the nuclear plants 24 hrs/day and adjust with fossil fuels, which cost more per kW anyway.
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Supposedly, France is producing 70% of it’s power from nuclear. How do they do it? I’d bet they sell off their 4:00 am surplus power to Spain, Italy, Germany, etc. I doubt they’re adjusting their nuclear reactors much either within a 24 hour cycle.
it is solar panels on my roof, item #1.
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Did anyone see that CNN special on the upcoming oil crisis this past week? It wasn’t great–anyone here knows all this data. And it was a complete rip-off of the Oil Storm movie of last year.
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But interestingly–it interspersed the futuristic clips with interviews. One of the first interviewees was James Woolsey, former CIA director. James showed the solar panels on his roof, and the hybrid in his driveway.
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This is someone with good data on the state of the world. I found it pretty telling that he was doing these things.
You could likely do the following:
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1. Calculate the money saved by electricity if you had the solar cells magically appear on your roof.
2. Get install quotes.
3. Get tax rebate quotes.
4. Get a home improvement loan such that your annual second mortgage payment was less than the savings the solar cells provided.
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Then, you’d have some net savings and get “free” solar cells to boot. This has been done in Massachusetts because IIRC MA offers additional tax rebates which help make it economical locally.
and doing some research. I came across this handy article recently: Home Power Magazine, over on the left they have an article that spelled out a lot of the cost/benefit. It is the pdf called: Solar Electric System Costs (620KB). They even had a table based specifically on Boston. I can almost do this.
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I just recently started a second company for nights/weekends to make the extra money! I co-own this house with a friend and we can’t really take a second mortgage right now, but we are both going to do this extra work for home stuff.