Tag Archives: Clean Energy

ENERGY: Coal use in the United States drops, clean energy use rises

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Image via the russians are here on Flickr

It seems that the United States is shifting away from coal energy and moving towards sustainable, more rational energy sources.

Utilizing more clean energy into our energy mix while moving away from fossil fuels is a commonsensical energy policy, because fossil fuels are nonrenewable, exhaustible, and unsustainable; contribute to climate change; contribute to rising public health costs; pollute the environment; and are subject to volatility. As a result, an energy policy based largely on fossil fuels is imprudent and a national security nightmare. Furthermore, solar energy is the only energy source that can keep up with human consumption. More via The Huffington Post:

In the first quarter of 2012, coal made up just 36 percent of U.S. electricity generation – down from nearly 45 percent from the same period in 2011. That’s a 9 percent drop in U.S. coal use in just one year.

The report, released this week by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), had even more bad news for big polluters. Electricity generation from coal may drop another 14 percent this year. The EIA also believes coal production will decline 10 percent in 2012.

Meanwhile, wind energy is thriving. In the first quarter of 2012, the U.S. installed 1,695 megawatts of wind, one of the industry’s best quarters ever, up 53 percent from the same time last year, according to the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA). Wind projects are creating jobs and economic opportunity across the country, with 32 new projects installed in 17 states in the first quarter alone.

Hat tip to Jerry Greer

ENERGY: As the world’s population grows, meeting future energy needs will be difficult

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Image: Each red square illustrates an area that could capture three terawatts of solar energy. Together, the red squares could supply the world’s energy needs

There is no such thing as unlimited growth, so the U.S. government and other governments must understand the connection between energy availability and population growth by integrating sustainability into energy policy and into energy law. The current business-as-usual scenario will not meet the future energy needs of a rapidly growing world.

Also, exponential population growth and increasing energy demands will impact efforts to mitigate climate change. As a result, large amounts of renewable, clean energy will be required to sustain the energy needs of a growing world. However, not even nuclear power can keep up with escalating population growth and the future energy needs of a business-as-usual world in 2050. Solar energy, however, is the only natural energy resource that can keep up with human consumption.

Nathan Lewis provides a gloomy but sobering assessment of the challenges humanity will face in meeting its future energy needs (emphasis added):

Energy is the single most important technological challenge facing humanity today. Nothing else in science or technology comes close in comparison. If we don’t invent the next nano-widget, if we don’t cure cancer in 20 years, like it or not the world will stay the same. But with energy, we are in the middle of doing the biggest experiment that humans will have ever done, and we get to do that experiment exactly once. And there is no tomorrow, because in 20 years that experiment will be cast in stone. If we don’t get this right, we can say as students of physics and chemistry that we know that the world will, on a timescale comparable to modern human history, never be the same.

The currency of the world is not the dollar, it’s the joule.

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Humanity’s current energy consumption rate is 13 trillion thermal watts, or 13 terawatts.

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The United States consumes a quarter of the world’s energy, at a rate of about 3.3 terawatts[.]

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With population and GDP growth conspiring together, we would then obtain a tripling of energy demand by 2050. This is partly mitigated, however, by the fact that we’re using energy more efficiently per unit of GDP. The ratio of energy consumption to GDP has been declining at about 1 percent, globally averaged, per year. The United States actually saves energy at a faster rate, about 2 percent per year. Because we have such a high per-capita energy baseline consumption, it is easier for us to save off that base, whereas the developing countries save less. The “business as usual” scenario assumes that this will continue, and if we project that down, we will achieve an average energy consumption of two kilowatts per person within our lifetimes. (The United States now uses 10 kilowatts per person.) But factor in population growth and conservative economic growth, and we’ll still need twice as much energy as we need now.

In terms of average thermal load, a person on a 2,000-calorie-per-day diet is basically a hundred-watt lightbulb. And in our highly mechanized western agricultural system, the energy embedded in food—to run the farm and grow the food and transport it to the supermarket and put it in the refrigerator—is 10 to 20 times the energy content of the food itself. And the farther you live from the food source, the more embedded energy you consume. If we are 100-watt lightbulbs, this means that just keeping us fed requires one to two kilowatts.

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Ice cores taken near Vostok Station, Antarctica, show that the CO2 level has been in a narrow band between 200 and 300 parts per million by volume (ppmv) for the last 425,000 years; data from other cores have extended this back to 670,000 years. Current CO2 levels are about 380 ppmv. “Business as usual” will require 10 trillion watts, 10 terawatts, of carbon-free power, and it never stabilizes CO2 levels—they just keep going up. So even on that track, we are betting against data that goes back for almost a million straight years, and hoping that this time, we get lucky.

.       .       .

[U]nfortunately, there is no natural destruction mechanism for carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. Unlike ozone depletion, it will not heal by itself through chemical processes. In our highly oxidizing atmosphere, CO2 is an end product. The lifetimes of CO2 in the atmosphere are well known, and the time for 500 to 600 ppmv of CO2 to decay back to 300 ppmv is between 500 and 5,000 years. Which means that the CO2 we produce over the next 40 years, and its associated effects, will last for a timescale comparable to modern human history. This is why, within the next 20 years, we either solve this problem or the world will never be the same. How different that world will be, we won’t know until we get there.

If we want to hold CO2 even to 550 ppmv, even with aggressive energy efficiency we will need as much clean, carbon-free energy within the next 40 years, online, as the entire oil, natural gas, coal, and nuclear industries today combined—10 to 15 terawatts. This is not changing a few lightbulbs in Fresno, this is building an industry comparable to 50 Exxon Mobils. Furthermore, if we wait 30 years, the amount of carbon-free energy we’ll need will be even greater, and needed even faster, because in the meantime we will have put out 30 years of accumulated CO2 emissions that will not go away for centuries to millennia. So stabilizing at 550 ppmv will then require about 15 to 20 terawatts of carbon-free power in 2050.

.       .       .

So let’s look at carbon-neutral energy sources. We could go nuclear, which is the only proven technology that we have that could scale to these numbers. We have about 400 nuclear power plants in the world today. To get the 10 terawatts we need to stay on the “business-as-usual” curve, we’d need 10,000 of our current one-gigawatt reactors, and that means we’d have to build one every other day somewhere in the world for the next 50 straight years. I’ve been giving this talk in one version or another for five years—we should have already built on the order of 1,000 new reactors, or double what’s ever been built, just to stay on track. So we’re really behind.

There isn’t enough terrestrial uranium on the planet to build them as once-through reactors. We could get enough uranium from seawater, if we processed the equivalent of 3,000 Niagara Falls 24/7 to do the extraction. Which means that the only credible nuclear-energy source today involves plutonium. That’s never talked about by the politicians, but it’s a fact. Forgive my facetiousness, but on some level we should be thanking North Korea and Iran for doing their part to mitigate global warming. We’d need about 10,000 fast-breeder reactors and, by the way, their commissioned lifetime is only 50 years. That means that after we choose this route, we’re building one of them every other day, or more rapidly, forever.

We don’t have time for the physicists to figure out how to make nuclear fusion reactors—they’ve been saying it will be demonstrated (although not economical) in 35 years, and they’ve been saying that for the last 50. If we assume they’re right this time, then ITER, a multinational demonstration fusion reactor being built in the south of France, will demonstrate break even—that is, it will put out as much energy as it takes to run it—in 35 years, and it will run for all of one week before the entire machine will, by design, disintegrate in the presence of that high-neutron radiation and temperature flux. And in the meantime we would have to build a commercial fission reactor every day for the next 30 years. It’s not going to happen.

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One hundred twenty thousand terawatts of solar power hits the earth . . . It is the only natural energy resource that can keep up with human consumption. Everything else will run up against the stops, soon. In fact, more solar energy hits the earth in one hour than all the energy the world consumes in a year.

EXTERNALITIES: Coal isn’t cheaper: David Frum ignores the negative externalities associated with burning coal

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Image: The impacts of coal utilization. Illustration by Alan Morin via “Cradle to Grave: The Environmental Impacts from Coal.”

Recently, on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher (episode 183 that aired on May 7, 2010), David Frum claimed that “the cost of electricity from non-coal sources, is much, much greater than the cost of electricity from coal.” Bill Maher missed an important opportunity to correct Frum.

First, Frum ignored the externalities associated with burning coal for electricity, and if merely considering the price paid for electricity, he also ignored the fact that renewable energy will become competitive with energy derived from coal and other fossil-fuel sources (but if considering externalities associated with burning coal—a dirty energy source—renewable energy is much much cheaper than coal). Furthermore, coal, like other fossil fuels, is subsidized (i.e., governments and society pick up the tab for the environmental and health consequences associated with burning coal). To illustrate the externalities associated with burning coal, I recently investigated whether coal can be clean:

When coal is burned, dozens of hazardous or toxic substances52 in addition to “trapped” carbon dioxide53—a greenhouse gas pollutant—are released.54 Consequently, some of these substances released through coal combustion, such as mercury, disseminate by means of deposition throughout the landscape and into aquatic environments.55 The hazardous substances not released directly into the atmosphere are present in combustion wastes such as fly ash.56 The coal combustion wastes released into the atmosphere are a public health hazard, and the corresponding healthcare costs are passed off to the consumer and government entities. In fact, states are seeking to abate combustion from some coal-fired power plants over economic, environmental, and public health concerns.57 Although the negative health impacts of burning coal may be not be readily recognized, healthcare costs have been estimated to be in the billions.58 For example, “the National Research Council has estimated the external costs associated with emissions of nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, and PM from coal-fired power plants in the U.S. at $62 billion in 2005.”59 Another study released in 2010 found that “filthy air in California cost federal, state and private health insurers $193 million in hospital costs.”60 That same study determined that “Medicare and MediCal, California’s Medicaid program, paid for more than two-thirds of the costs, while private insurers paid the rest.”61 Granted, coal-fired power plants are not the sole contributor of air pollution, but they are a significant producer of air pollution.62 In fact, coal-fired power plants are significant contributors of carbon dioxide, mercury emissions, nitrogen oxide emissions, ozone pollution or smog, and particulate matter pollution.63 Furthermore, an EPA study found that “coal plants were found to release 67 different air toxics, many of which are known or probable human carcinogens and neurotoxins that can harm brain development and irritate the respiratory system.”64

Mercury, in particular, negatively impacts the health of ecosystems and the health of humans. The EPA has estimated “that about one third of U.S. [anthropogenic mercury] emissions are deposited within the contiguous U.S. and the remainder enters the global cycle.”65 Mercury emissions are problematic, because there is a connection between blood mercury levels and intellectual performance, and the costs to society over “lifelong diminution in intelligence” has been estimated to be $8.7 billion per year.66 As a result, mercury is recognized as posing a public health threat,67 since mercury is a neurotoxin.68 The most dangerous form of mercury is the organic form of mercury or methylmercury,69 which is produced by microbial activity in aquatic environments.70 Methylmercury is the most dangerous form of mercury, because it is easily absorbed by the human body.71 Furthermore, methylmercury is a bioaccumulative environmental toxicant,72 and as a result, undergoes biomagnification within food chains.73 As a result, seafood consumption is directly related to methylmercury intake by humans.74 In fact, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the EPA advise “women who may become pregnant, pregnant women, nursing mothers, and young children to avoid some types of fish and eat fish and shellfish that are lower in mercury.”75 Despite warnings, according to the EPA, “it is estimated that more than 300,000 newborns each year may have increased risk of learning disabilities associated with in utero exposure to methylmercury.”76

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52Alan H. Lockwood et al., Coal’s Assault on Human Health, (2009), available at http://www.psr.org/assets/pdfs/psr-coal-fullreport.pdf (Discussing that “coal combustion releases sulfur dioxide, particulate matter (Pm), nitrogen oxides, mercury, and dozens of other substances known to be hazardous to human health.”).

53The problem is that the burning fossil fuels, such as coal, results in a release of carbon dioxide that has been trapped for millions of years. As a result, burning coal contributes an increase in concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide over time. This additional carbon dioxide is problematic due to carbon dioxide’s warming effect. For this reason, carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. See The Carbon Dioxide Greenhouse Effect, http://www.aip.org/history/climate/co2.htm (last visited February 17, 2010).

54See American Institute of Physics, The Carbon Dioxide Greenhouse Effect, http://www.aip.org/history/climate/co2.htm (last visited March 1, 2010).

55See U.S. Envtl Prot. Agency, Environmental Effects of Mercury, http://www.epa.gov/hg/eco.htm (last visited February 27, 2010).

56See Tim Lucas, Toxic Coal Ash Threatens Health And Environment, Duke University, Aug. 18, 2009, http://news.duke.edu/2009/08/toxiccoal.html (Discussing how hazardous elements remain in fly ash and how toxic ash can leave storage ponds or spill sites by becoming “re-suspended in the air as dust [upon drying] and could have a severe health impact on local residents or workers who inhale them”).

57See North Carolina ex rel. Cooper v. Tennessee Valley Authority, 515 F.3d 344 (4th Cir. 2008) (Due to impacts to human health and environmental quality, the State of North Carolina brought a public nuisance action against Tennessee Valley Authority seeking an injunction prohibiting it from operating its plants in a harmful manner.).

58For the FY 2008, EPA estimates that its 10 largest civil enforcement actions against stationary source Clean Air Act violations of emissions of sulfur oxides, nitrogen oxides, and particulate matter resulted in annual health benefits valued at $35 billion. According to the EPA, some of these health benefits translated into thousands of avoided premature deaths, fewer emergency room visits, fewer cases of chronic and acute bronchitis, fewer nonfatal heart attacks, fewer cases of respiratory problems, and a reduction of days of people missing school or work. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, EPA FY2008 Enforcement & Compliance Annual Results (2008), available at http://www.epa.gov/compliance/resources/reports/endofyear/eoy2008/fy2008results.pdf.

59Alan H. Lockwood et al., Coal’s Assault on Human Health 10, (2009), available at http://www.psr.org/assets/pdfs/psr-coal-fullreport.pdf.

60Kristina Shevory, Health Costs of California Air Pollution, New York Times, March 12, 2010, http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/12/health-costs-of-california-air-pollution.

61Id.

62See Physicians for Social Responsibility, Coal-Fired Power Plants: Understanding the Health Costs of a Dirty Energy Source, available at http://action.psr.org/site/DocServer/Coal_Power_Fact_Sheet.pdf?docID=2821.

63Id.

64Id.

65U.S. Envtl Prot. Agency, Human Exposure to Mercury, http://www.epa.gov/hg/exposure.htm (last visited February 27, 2010).

66Physicians for Social Responsibility, Coal’s Effects on the Nervous System 32, available at http://www.psr.org/assets/pdfs/coals-assault-chapter-5.pdf.

67See U.S. Envtl Prot. Agency, Former Mercury Mine Above Cottage Grove Reservoir Proposed for Federal Cleanup List, http://yosemite.epa.gov/opa/admpress.nsf/d0cf6618525a9efb85257359003fb69d/d76a7f9d4c5368448525763a007f0099!OpenDocument (last visited February 27, 2010).

68U.S. Envtl Prot. Agency, Human Health and Mercury, http://www.epa.gov/hg/health.htm (last visited February 27, 2010).

69See U.S. Envtl Prot. Agency, Health Effects and Mercury, http://www.epa.gov/hg/effects.htm (last visited February 27, 2010).

70U.S. Envtl Prot. Agency, Environmental Effects, http://www.epa.gov/hg/eco.htm (last visited on March 22, 2010).

71Laura Griesbauer, Methylmercury Contamination in Fish and Shellfish, http://www.csa.com/discoveryguides/mercury/review.pdf (last visited April 13, 2010).

72Wikipedia, Methylmercury, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methylmercury (last visited on March 22, 2010).

73Frances Solomon, Impacts of Metals on Aquatic Ecosystems and Human Health (2008), available at http://www.infomine.com/publications/docs/Mining.com/Apr2008c.pdf.

74See Raquel Rutledge, Mercury in sushi can hit risky levels, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Jan. 11, 2008, http://www.jsonline.com/news/29548599.html (“But while sushi is packed with protein and essential omega-3 fatty acids, some types are also tainted with methyl mercury, a dangerous neurotoxin that causes brain damage in babies and other problems for adults who ingest too much. . . . Tests showed the two pieces of tuna had potentially dangerous, and nearly illegal, levels of mercury. Most of the other samples, such as shrimp, salmon and mackerel, contained only trace amounts.”).

75U.S. Food and Drug Admin., Seafood, http://www.fda.gov/food/foodsafety/product-specificinformation/seafood/ (last visited on March 22, 2010).

76U.S. Envtl Prot. Agency, Human Exposure to Mercury, http://www.epa.gov/hg/exposure.htm (last visited on March 22, 2010).

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ENERGY INDEPENDENCE: Fox News says no to clean energy climate advertisement

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According to Ben Smith, “A Fox sales executive, Mike Mandelker, told the group’s ad buyer that the spot was too confusing.” What’s so confusing about the future consequences (and current ramifications) of a world power remaining dependent on a foreign nonrenewable energy source?

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CAPE WIND approved

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After some ten years of what some folks would call shenanigans and poppycock, Cape Wind was finally approved by the Obama Administration.

However, one of the more serious claims against Cape Wind came from Cape and Vineyard Native American tribal members, since there’s the possibility that construction of the offshore wind project “will interfere with important sunrise ceremonies and potentially damage ancestral burial grounds in what was once dry land now submerged beneath the Sound.” Both the Massachusetts state government and federal government are attempting to compensate Cape and Vineyard Native American tribes for the potential disturbance to cultural resources and are attempting to offer plans to mitigate impacts to cultural resources. No formal deal has apparently been reached.

If Cape Wind is constructed, there will be 130-turbines, and “Cape Wind will produce 468 megawatts (MW) of electricity, about the same as a medium-sized coal-fired power plant.” Direct-drive technology could propel offshore wind turbines, which is “a technology that could help address concerns over cost and reliability of offshore wind.” However, Cape Wind is contracted to use use the gearbox and rotor technology.

Opponents of the offshore wind farm argue, amongst other things, that the turbines would ruin the scenic beauty of Nantucket Sound and harm aquatic wildlife and seabirds. However, Nantucket Sound receives heavy commercial traffic in addition to heavy touristic-type traffic. The anthropogenic footprint on the area is undoubtedly already huge. Furthermore, research shows that impacts to seabirds are minimal.

Given the United States’ need for energy and reliance on polluting nonrenewable fossil fuels (not to mention the recent Gulf of Mexico offshore oil rig disaster, a Brobdingnagian-sized environmental disaster, which will cost that region billions of dollars in economic loss due to the devastation done to ecosystem services), Cape Wind is an important step in the right direction that should have begun many years before.

Video: New Bedford may become wind farm’s HQ:

Video: Wind farm gets mixed reaction on Cape

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Photo source for attribution. The author or licensor of this image does not endorse my work or me and their image is protected under an attribution license.

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