Jaime Haro, AmerenUE’s director of asset management and trading, said his company paid $30 to produce a megawatt of electricity. The coal burned emits roughly a ton of carbon dioxide. If federal legislation effectively prices emissions at $30 a ton — estimates have varied from $20 to $115 — “my costs could double,” Mr. Haro said.
Those costs probably would be passed on to customers.
For now, Missouri ranks among the lowest five states in retail electricity rates — about 6.3 cents per kilowatt hour, compared with a national average of 8.9 cents.
Most competing non-coal sources of electric power are at $100 and higher per megawatt-hour. Coal electric is cheap as long as external costs are ignored.
You can tell where in the United States coal generates most electricity just by looking at a table of by-state electric power costs. Leave aside some northwestern states that get most of their power from cheap hydro. The rest of the low electric price states are big coal burners. Wyoming at 8.18 cents/kwh has the massive Powder River Basic coal deposits and local electric power plants burning that cheap coal. Similarly, North Dakota at 7.48 cents/kwh has big coal deposits and coal electric plants running off of their cheap coal.
This regional distribution of coal reserves and coal electric plants has important ramifications for efforts in the US Congress to cut CO2 emissions. Some states will pay huge increases in electric power costs if carbon emissions get taxed. Houses built less efficiently for low cost electricity will become much more expensive to own. So Senators from these states could potentially block efforts to tax CO2 emissions.
An article by Matthew Wald in the New York Times takes a look at costs for different ways of generating electricity. Wald reports that declines in the prices of coal and natural gas make the renewables (wind, solar) a much harder sell.
The cost of solar thermal electricity, made by using the sun’s heat to boil water and spin a turbine, would be nearly three times that of coal and more than twice that of natural gas. (It would be almost double the cost of wind energy, too.)
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A modern coal plant of conventional design, without technology to capture carbon dioxide before it reaches the air, produces at about 7.8 cents a kilowatt-hour; a high-efficiency natural gas plant, 10.6 cents; and a new nuclear reactor, 10.8 cents. A wind plant in a favorable location would cost 9.9 cents per kilowatt hour. But if a utility relied on a great many wind machines, it would need to back them up with conventional generators in places where demand tends to peak on hot summer days with no breeze. That pushes the price up to just over 12 cents, making it more than 50 percent more expensive than a kilowatt-hour for coal.
Solar photovoltaics (PV) on home rooftops costs more than solar thermal (aka concentrating solar). Plus, Brian Wang argues that PV is more dangerous than nuclear and wind because roofers get injured and killed in falls. But he says PV is still safer than coal. My guess is it depends on how tightly regulated the coal plants are. If only coal plants weren't allowed to emit particulates and mercury their damage to our health would go down substantially.
In the US half our electricity comes from burning coal. The 2000 terawatt-hours (twh) of electricity generated each year in the United States from coal electric would cost 3 cents more per kilowatt-hours (kwh) if generated from nuclear power. So what would that cost us? 2000 terawatts is 2 petawatts or 2 times 10 to the 15th power of watts. A kilowatt is to the 1 times 10 to the 3rd power watts. So we are talking 2 times 10 to the 12 power kilowatts times 3 cents extra per kilowatt. Or 6 times 10 to the 10th power of dollars. Am I correct in thinking that is $60 billion per year extra? Seems pretty small.
Of course the cost of converting to nuclear power would be higher than the price difference since lots of existing coal electric plants would need to be phased out before end-of-life. What is the cost of all existing coal electric power plants?
Prices. Within the past few weeks, a number of utilities have requested permission from State regulators to raise electricity rates in response to rapidly increasing delivered fuel costs for power generation. It is likely that most other utilities will soon need to pass through these increased costs to retail customers as well. As a result, the forecast for growth in electricity prices is significantly higher than it was in last month’s Outlook. Average U.S. residential electricity prices are expected to increase by 5.2 percent in 2008 and by 9.8 percent in 2009 (U.S. Residential Electricity Prices).
In spite of this projected rise in prices for electricity we are in a long term trend of shifting more and more applications to run off of electric power. For example, in many parts of the United States electric power is now cheaper than heating oil for heating a house or other building. Also, the auto industry sees rechargeable electric cars as a way to escape from higher gasoline and diesel costs.
Wind turbines, concentrated solar power, and solar photovoltaics all place ceilings on electricity prices. So higher priced natural gas and coal can not cause even a doubling of US electric prices before massive substitution with wind and solar sources of electricity would take place.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers claim if pluggable hybrids don't get recharged until after 10 PM then they will require little or no additional electric power plants.
In an analysis of the potential impacts of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles projected for 2020 and 2030 in 13 regions of the United States, ORNL researchers explored their potential effect on electricity demand, supply, infrastructure, prices and associated emission levels. Electricity requirements for hybrids used a projection of 25 percent market penetration of hybrid vehicles by 2020 including a mixture of sedans and sport utility vehicles. Several scenarios were run for each region for the years 2020 and 2030 and the times of 5 p.m. or 10:00 p.m., in addition to other variables.
The report found that the need for added generation would be most critical by 2030, when hybrids have been on the market for some time and become a larger percentage of the automobiles Americans drive. In the worst-case scenario—if all hybrid owners charged their vehicles at 5 p.m., at six kilowatts of power—up to 160 large power plants would be needed nationwide to supply the extra electricity, and the demand would reduce the reserve power margins for a particular region's system.
The best-case scenario occurs when vehicles are plugged in after 10 p.m., when the electric load on the system is at a minimum and the wholesale price for energy is least expensive. Depending on the power demand per household, charging vehicles after 10 p.m. would require, at lower demand levels, no additional power generation or, in higher-demand projections, just eight additional power plants nationwide.
Since I suspect the world has already reached Peak Oil I expect the shift to electrically-powered vehicles will happen sooner than this study assumes. Also, total electric demand will grow more rapidly as dwindling oil supplies cause a big shift toward electrically powered equipment of all kinds.
The great difference in power plant usage between the afternoon and late night is partly a result of a lack of dynamic pricing. If electric rates for homes varied by the time of day based on relative levels of demand then people and companies would shift more of their electric demand toward the late night even before significant numbers of hybrid vehicles hit the market. Such a shift in demand would cause higher utilization of power plants at night and therefore less excess power generation capacity available to charge electric cars.
Fortunately thermal solar and photovoltaic solar will drop in prices and will become cost competitive sources of day time power. Electric cars will then preferentially get recharged in the morning sun before the peak business demand for electric power in the afternoon.
The growth in China's carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions is far outpacing previous estimates, making the goal of stabilizing atmospheric greenhouse gases much more difficult, according to a new analysis by economists at the University of California, Berkeley, and UC San Diego.
Previous estimates, including those used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, say the region that includes China will see a 2.5 to 5 percent annual increase in CO2 emissions, the largest contributor to atmospheric greenhouse gases, between 2004 and 2010. The new UC analysis puts that annual growth rate for China to at least 11 percent for the same time period.
A constant percentage increase per year turns into an absolute increase per year. If China maintains an 11% CO2 increase per year through the 2010s then by 2020 it will likely emit more CO2 than all the rest of the world put together. Will they do that?
The study is scheduled for print publication in the May issue of the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, but is now online.
Keep in mind that many Kyoto Accord signing countries are falling far short of meeting their pledges anyway.
The researchers' most conservative forecast predicts that by 2010, there will be an increase of 600 million metric tons of carbon emissions in China over the country's levels in 2000. This growth from China alone would dramatically overshadow the 116 million metric tons of carbon emissions reductions pledged by all the developed countries in the Kyoto Protocol. (The protocol was never ratified in the United States, which was the largest single emitter of carbon dioxide until 2006, when China took over that distinction, according to numerous reports.)
Put another way, the projected annual increase in China alone over the next several years is greater than the current emissions produced by either Great Britain or Germany.
Picture China's economy 2 times bigger. Picture it 3 times bigger. Huge demands for raw materials. Huge consumption of fossil fuels. Lots of pollution generated even from the solar photovoltaics industry.
Suppose rising CO2 emissions will cause global warming and that global warming will cause big negative impacts that outweigh the benefits. Well, we are going to have to use climate engineering techniques to stop and reverse the warming. Barring big breakthroughs to lower the costs of solar and nuclear power I do not see a substantial decrease in CO2 emissions until Peak Coal hits.
Most of this increase is coming from burning coal to generate electricity. If only they were building nuclear rather than coal electric power plants the emissions (and not just of CO2, also particulates, mercury, etc) would be far less.
China's installed nuclear power-generating capacity is expected to reach 60 gigawatts by 2020, a senior Chinese energy official said -- much higher than an earlier government estimate of 40 gigawatts. A gigawatt is the equivalent of one billion watts. The new estimate is equal to about two-thirds of Britain's total electricity-generating capacity today, although still equivalent to less than a tenth of China's current total.
Faced with an energy crunch resulting from its fast economic growth, China has decided to develop more nuclear power. By 2020, the nation will have an installed nuclear power capacity of 40 million kw, accounting for 4 percent of its total installed generating capacity.
They still see nuclear power as too costly as compared to coal. Without cheaper ways to generate cleaner power the world is going to become a dirtier place.
The amount of oil available for import (in contrast to the larger amounts produced or exported) by OECD countries (basically the most developed countries) looks set to decline. We need substitutes. The obstacles in the way of many of those substitutes keep growing. Fear of carbon taxes has helped drive cancellation of many new proposed coal electric plants.
Utilities canceled or put on hold at least 45 coal plants in development last year, according to a new analysis by the US Department of Energy's National Energy Technology Laboratory in Pittsburgh. These moves – a sharp reversal from a year ago, when the industry had more than 150 such plants in development – signal the waning of a major US expansion into coal.
Part of the reticence to build new coal electric plants stems from rising construction costs. Nuclear power is faced with the same problem. High prices for construction materials lowers the profit protential of proposed plants. I wonder whether the high costs are transitory. If not then we are going to pay more for electricity as demand rises.
Natural-gas and renewable power projects have leapt ahead of coal in the development pipeline, according to Global Energy Decisions, a Boulder, Colo., energy information supplier. Gas and renewables each show more than 70,000 megawatts under development compared with about 66,000 megawatts in the coal-power pipeline.
This year could diminish coal's future prospects even more. Wall Street investment banks last month said they will now evaluate the cost of carbon emissions before approving power plants, raising the bar much higher for new coal projects, analysts say.
The turn from coal to natural gas will raise electric prices. On the bright side, the higher prices will make renewables and nuclear power more competitive.
I do not expect the growing opposition to coal electric plants necessarily will cause the United States to reach a peak in coal usage in the next 5 or so years. As world oil production declines another surge in demand for coal will come from a desparate move to convert coal into liquid fuel. So limits on use of coal for electricity just leaves more coal available to power cars with the product of coal-to-liquid plants.
Lots of states are turning against new coal electric power.
State governments already are leading the movement to curb greenhouse gases, with 26 now requiring that a percentage of electricity come from renewable sources, such as wind and solar. Those include five of the top ten coal-producing states — Pennsylvania, Montana, Texas, Colorado and Illinois.
Nearly all of those 26 states also have signed on to three separate, regional cap-and-trade systems that will eventually require cuts in carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and other industrial sources. Under those systems, coal-fired power plants would be given or have to buy credits for the carbon dioxide they produce and pay for additional credits if they do not meet reduction targets.
This opposition to coal will increase the demand for nuclear power. But construction cost increases hit nuclear harder than coal because nuclear power plants are more capital intensive. Power plant construction costs have risen very dramatically since 2000.
The costs that drive the rates that power customers pay have been going up dramatically, according to the new Power Capital Costs Index (PCCI) developed by IHS Inc. (NYSE: IHS) and Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA) and introduced today at the CERAWeek 2008 conference in Houston. The index shows the cost of new power plant construction in North America increased 27 percent in 12 months and 19 percent in the most recent six months, reaching a level 130 percent higher than in 2000.
The new PCCI -- which tracks the costs of building coal, gas, wind and nuclear power plants indexed to year 2000 -- registered 231 index points in the third quarter period ending in October, indicating a power plant that cost $1 billion in 2000 would, on average, cost $2.31 billion today.
“These costs are beginning to act as a drag on the power industry’s ability to expand to meet growing North American demand, and leading to delays and postponements in the building of new power plants,” said Candida Scott, lead researcher for the Capital Costs Analysis Forum for Power, a new project of CERA. “As the cost of construction rises, firms may become reluctant to invest in new plants, or delay and postpone these projects, in turn constraining the growth of capacity.”
...
“Although the PCCI has been on an upward trend since 2000, a surge that began in 2005 has pushed costs up 76 percent in the past three years,” according to Scott. “The latest increases have been driven by continued high activity levels globally, especially for nuclear plants, with continued tightness in the equipment and engineering markets, as well as historically high levels for raw materials.” Excluding nuclear plants, costs have risen 79 percent since 2000, she noted.
I hope big strides are made in lowering the costs of solar and wind power. Otherwise look for big price increases in electric bills in the coming years. Also, high construction costs for nuclear and coal electric plants reduce the amount of substitution possible for dwindling oil. Less energy substitution means lower living standards.
A Bloomberg article mostly about prospects of increased sales by GE of natural gas electric generator turbines highlights a shift away from new coal electric plants due to fears of carbon emissions regulations.
Concern that climate-change legislation could render coal- fueled plants obsolete prompted the cancellation of about 13 this year. Coal plants capable of generating 12,000 megawatts, enough power for 9.6 million average U.S. homes, were proposed for construction in 2005. Only 329 megawatts, enough for 263,200 homes, were built, according to U.S. Energy Department data.
Fears of global warming (now widely relabeled to "climate change" to make the assertion less disprovable?), whether realistic or not, are serving a constructive purpose by cutting back on coal electric plants. We get less conventional pollution as a result. Both nuclear and wind gain from this turn of events. Coal gets used for base load demand. But wind can contribute little to reliable base load demand. Therefore power companies either need to build nukes or a combination of wind with natural gas back-up.
If nuclear power plant building firms can manage to get nuclear power plant cost overruns below the 25% cost overrun of the Olkiluoto-3 plant in Finland (and some of the mistakes seem avoidable next time) then I expect nuclear will become much more competitive against the wind/natural gas combination - especially when natural gas production starts declining. Parts of Europe (France excepted) might go with the more expensive wind approach. Offshore wind costs more than onshore wind or nuclear. Yet the British government has just decided on a big offshore wind push. On the bright side, when natural gas prices skyrocket at least offshore wind will be cheaper than natural gas for electric power generation.
Update: Regulatory obstacles to new coal electric plants might work in our favor for reasons unrelated to pollution. More nuclear and wind facilities will be developed and therefore the coming peak in world coal production will fall less hard on countries that are forced away from coal by environmental opposition. The Energy Watch Group released a report in October 2007 which argued that measured by energy content US coal production already peaked in 2002.
The USA, being the second largest producer, have already passed peak production of high quality coal in 1990 in the Appalachian and the Illinois basin. Production of subbituminous coal in Wyoming more than compensated for this decline in terms of volume and – according to its stated reserves – this trend can continue for another 10 to 15 years. However, due to the lower energy content of subbituminous coal, US coal production in terms of energy has already peaked 5 years ago – it is unclear whether this trend can be reversed. Also specific productivity per miner is declining since about 2000.
The Energy Watch Group expects world coal production to peak around 2025.
Global coal reserve data are of poor quality, but seem to be biased towards the high side. Production profile projections suggest the global peak of coal production to occur around 2025 at 30 percent above current production in the best case.
In the United States coal provides about half of all electric power. A decline in coal production in the US means higher electric prices and inability to migrate current oil uses to electric power instead. We need a lot more nuclear and wind power. We also need accelerated research and development into ways to make photovoltaics cost competitive.
CalTech professor David Rutledge also expects a coal peak much sooner than previously projected.
The Electric Power Research Institute’s staff estimates the effect of a charge on carbon dioxide emissions on the price of a kilowatt-hour, the amount of electricity needed to run 10 100-watt bulbs for an hour. Natural gas produces 0.84 pounds of carbon dioxide per kilowatt-hour, and coal produces more than twice as much, 1.9 pounds.
At $10 per metric ton, the impact is minimal. But at $50 a ton, for example, the cost of a kilowatt-hour produced by coal goes from about 5.7 cents to about 10 cents. Wind power currently isn’t competitive, according to the institute’s calculation, but it becomes competitive when carbon dioxide costs $25 a ton. By their calculations, nuclear energy, with negligible carbon dioxide emissions, looks sensible at a small carbon charge.
Thanks to "Fat Man" for the article tip. He suspects that the New York Times is using Nuclear Energy Institute estimates for nuclear costs (PDF) by way of an Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) report. Until we see some nuclear power plants built in the United States using the newer designs we aren't going to know for sure. But my guess is that the NEI numbers aren't too far from reality. Otherwise we wouldn't be seeing so many plans for new nuclear power plant construction.
The nuclear revival got its official kickoff last month with an application from NRG Energy Inc., Princeton, N.J., for the first new nuclear plant in three decades. The NRC is preparing for 32 nuclear-power-plant applications by 2009, including as many as nine this year.
The electric power industry is factoring in some probability of a carbon tax in coming years and it is hedging its bets. The passage of a carbon tax of just $10 per metric ton would likely stop all new coal electric plant construction in the United States. I'd like to see that happen just to prevent mercury, particulates, and other conventional pollution. However, even if that happens Asian demand for electricity looks set to put new 1000 coal plants online in just the next 5 years alone.
More than 1,000 coal-fed power plants will be built in the next five years, mostly in China and India, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. China, the world's biggest coal producer, became a net importer for the first time this year, taking supplies from Indonesia, Australia and South Africa and reducing the amount available for Europe.
The mind boggles. Asian economic development makes so many Western debates about the environment seem almost irrelevant. Decades after the environmental movement took off in the United States the world is going to become a more polluted place. Our best hope is the development of cheaper ways to generate electricity using nuclear, solar, and wind power. A carbon tax in China or India seems a distant prospect.
Over at The Oil Drum Robert Rapier argues biomass energy has a very limited role to play as compared to solar photovoltaics.
The fundamental problem here is that photosynthesis is not very efficient. Consider the rapeseed oil yield above. Gilgamesh made a table that is basically the solar capture/conversion to oil from various crops. The gist is that only a few hundredths of a percent of the incoming solar energy gets converted into liquid fuels. Of course some did get converted into other biomass, which could be otherwise used for energy, but generally we get a very low capture of the sun's energy for use as liquid fuels. (This exercise can still be proven by assuming the theoretical limit for photosynthesis. One must just make more assumptions and it is not as easy to follow for a general audience).
Consider instead direct solar capture. Let's not even consider the record 40+% efficiency that Spectrolab announced last year. Let's not consider any of the more exotic technologies that are pushing the envelope on direct solar capture efficiency. BP's run of the mill silicon solar cells operate with an efficiency of 15%. That's about 250 times better than the solar to rapeseed oil route. Or, to put it a different way, you can produce the same amount of energy with direct solar capture in a 13 ft. by 13 ft. area that you can by photosynthesis in 1 acre of rapeseed. And odds are that you have a roof with an area that size, which could be used to capture energy without the need to use arable land.
Rapier has reached the same conclusion I've preached for years: We need to develop the technology we need to shift to electric power for transportation.
Of course the disadvantages are 1). The costs for solar are still relatively high; and 2). We have a liquid fuel infrastructure. But in the long run, I don't see that we have any chance of maintaining that infrastructure. If we are to embark on a Manhattan Project to get off of our petroleum dependence, we should direct our efforts toward an eventual electric transportation infrastructure.
Biomass energy will eat up too much land and agriculture will generate too much pollution with a poor ratio of Energy Return On Energy Invested (EROEI). Synthetically created photovoltaic materials will convert sunlight to energy far more efficiently than plants can manage. This fact might one day enable nanobots to outcompete DNA-based life. But for the foreseeable future the use of photovoltaics instead of biomass energy will protect nature.
Airplanes probably aren't going escape their use of liquid fuels when cars shift to electric power. So the relative cost of air transportation will rise vis a vis ground transportation. But overall the cost of transportation will fall once we can power vehicles off of electricity.
Mark Clayton of the Christian Science Monitor reports that home micro combined-heat-and-power (micro-CHP) systems are becoming cheap enough that the market for home electric generators that also supply heat is starting to take off.
Since Malin changed his home heating system to micro-CHP in February, 18 other families in the Boston area also have adopted the technology, which squeezes about 90 percent of the useful energy from the fuel. That's triple the efficiency of power delivered over the grid.
Factories and other industrial facilities have used large CHP systems for years. But until the US debut of micro-systems in greater Boston, the units had not been small enough, cheap enough, and quiet enough for American homes. Add to that the public's rising concern about electric-power reliability - seen in a sales boom of backup generators in the past couple of years - and some experts see in micro-CHP a power-to-the-people energy revolution.
"Right now these residential micro-CHP systems are just a blip," says Nicholas Lenssen of Energy Insights, a technology advisory firm in Framingham, Mass. "But it's a ... technology that ... could have a big impact as it's adopted more widely over the next five to 10 years."
Get this: These things pay for themselves by lowering total cost of electricity.
Micro-CHP doesn't come cheap - just with a long-term discount. Basic systems cost from $13,000 to $20,000, installed. Even at the lower range, that's at least $6,000 more than a new high-efficiency hot-air furnace, even after a gas company rebate. Result: The payback period on the initial investment is three to seven years, depending on the cost of electricity, say officials at Climate Energy. The company expects to install about 200 systems next year, mostly in New England.
How fast they pay back probably varies by a lot more than 3 to 7 years. This is so for a few reasons. First off, residential electric costs in the United States vary from 6.23 cents per kilowatt-hour (kwh) in Idaho to 23.53 cents per kwh in Hawaii. Even that table which lists average electric costs per state understates the range of variation since some areas of states have different rates than other areas of the same states. Similarly, per capita electric energy usage by state varies by a factor of 4. Plus, the heat that comes from the gas-fired home electric generators saves much more money in colder states than in warmer states. During warmer periods the heat from the electric generator just becomes waste heat. If you use a lot of electricity, live in a cold state, have natural gas available (not all do) and it is fairly cheap then the economic argument for getting a micro-CHP device is very strong.
Micro-CHP could make home solar power more practical. Micro-CHP could kick in when the sun does not shine. Throw in some micro wind turbines on the roof and then micro-CHP would only need to kick in when the sun does not shine and the wind does not blow.
Semiconductor technology advances are mostly funded by sales of computer processors, memory, and other digital computer parts. Those advances have created capabilities to manipulate small scale devices for a variety of other purposes including microfluidic devices that function as biological and chemical labs on a chip. Another application being pursued at MIT is the development of extremely small gas turbines for generation of electricity. MIT researchers expect their miniature gas turbine to eventually compete with very large natural gas burning electric generator plants in efficiency.
MIT researchers are putting a tiny gas-turbine engine inside a silicon chip about the size of a quarter. The resulting device could run 10 times longer than a battery of the same weight can, powering laptops, cell phones, radios and other electronic devices.
It could also dramatically lighten the load for people who can't connect to a power grid, including soldiers who now must carry many pounds of batteries for a three-day mission -- all at a reasonable price.
The researchers say that in the long term, mass-production could bring the per-unit cost of power from microengines close to that for power from today's large gas-turbine power plants.
Making things tiny is all the rage. The field -- called microelectromechanical systems, or MEMS -- grew out of the computer industry's stunning success in developing and using micro technologies. "Forty years ago, a computer filled up a whole building," said Professor Alan Epstein of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. "Now we all have microcomputers on our desks and inside our thermostats and our watches."
Cheap mass manufactured miniature electric generators could eliminate the need to connect to the electric grid, thereby reducing vulnerability from central system failures. Distributed generation would also cut transmission line losses of electricity due to resistance in cables.. However, large electric generator plants have one really big advantage: Their emissions can be rmonitored, regulated, and controlled.
Massive electic generator plants emit much less pollution per amount of electricity generated as comapred to the much smaller electric generators which institutions have for back-up. During periods of heavy demand for electricity utilities which lack sufficient electric generation capacity incentivize customers to activate their own back-up generators and the result is much higher levels of air pollution.
Power plants built since 1970 are subject to stringent pollution controls. But rules for backup generators are far less strict, and, in most cases, there are no pollution restrictions for diesel generators not used more than 500 hours a year. The Pataki administration proposed new pollution rules several years ago, but they have not been put into effect.
Studies have shown that for each watt of power output, diesel generators produce up to 20 times as much particulate pollution, or soot, as the most advanced, natural gas-fired power plants, and up to 200 times as much nitrogen oxides, precursors to ozone, or smog. They even emit several times as much pollutants per watt of power output as the average power plants that burn oil or coal.
“This is pretty much the dirtiest source of electricity you can find,” said Peter Iwanowicz, director of environmental health for the American Lung Association of New York State.
A given quantity of fossil fuel will produce less pollution when burned if it is burned in a massive electric generator plant. This makes intuitive sense. The electric utilities can afford to hire full-time engineering staffs to make their combustion chambers burn efficiently and to make sure their scrubbers work well. Smaller diesel burning generators aren't as optimized or as regulated.
There's a lesson here: Regional opposition to big new electric power plants leads to the proliferation and usage of smaller fossil fuel burning electric power generators. So the opposition to electric power plants leads to dirtier air, not cleaner air.
Local generation of electric power is appealing if it is done in non-polluting ways. But use of fossil fuels for local electric generation is both much more polluting and more costly.
Micro wind turbines and photovoltaics provide very clean locally generated electricity. But these sources cost much more and also aren't available 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. An acceleration in the development technologies to lower the cost of cleaner energy sources could bring us a cleaner environment and lower costs at the same time.
Writing for the Christian Science Monitor Amy Green reports on the rapidly growing trend toward purchasing back-up electric power generators for homes.
LONGWOOD, FLA. – The first power outage lasted five days. So did the second one. And the third. The hurricanes that racked Florida in 2004 were a miserable experience for Andre Biewend and his family - including his 3-year-old twins at the time. They were left in a stinking, sweltering home as Mr. Biewend argued with local store owners for dry ice for the fridge.
Not anymore. Biewend, a real estate developer in this suburb of Orlando, invested $15,000 more than a year ago in a standby power generator that keeps his 5,200-square- foot home running through any outage. He likens the generator to an insurance policy - he hopes he never uses it, but now with a baby at home, too, it gives him a sense of security.
The growth in sales has been huge.
The standby generator industry grew five-fold between 2000 and 2005 to a more than $500 million industry, according to Generac Power Systems, the nation's largest generator manufacturer.
I see an important implication of this trend: There's a big demand for non-grid electricity. That electricity costs far more than grid electricty. Therefore electricity from solar photovoltaics does not have to become as cheap as big power plant electricity in order to compete. A substantial portion of the population will buy photovoltaics and batteries for their homes once the price allows them some feeling of environmental satisfaction or increased security against natural disasters. Some will also buy rooftop wind microturbines to generate home electricity from the wind.
As living standards rise for the upper middle class and upper class they find they have money to buy things they never bought before. So more people buy second homes, private jet flights, and other luxury goods. While some people buy big $50,000 SUVs others spend far less on a Toyota Prius in order to feel they are doing something for the environment and in order to signal that they are acting on their political beliefs by putting their money where their mouths are.
The combination of rising affluence and eventually falling prices for photovoltaic installations will drive installation of photovoltaics well in advance of when photovoltaics make sense purely from the price standpoint as compared to local utility electricity. Some will be driven by the desire to make a statement. Others will see photovoltaics as utilitarian luxuries that assure they'll never be without electric power. The desires for status, independence, and security will all push photovoltaics along faster than a simple economic analysis would lead one to expect.
In order for photovoltaics to work as a more secure form of electricity in hurricane zones photovoltaics will need to become integrated into roof tiles and siding so that it will stay anchored to roofs under hurricane force winds. Also, home electric battery arrays will need to become cheaper and longer lasting. But the batteries, photovoltaics, and microturbines will make big in-roads in the home electricity market before their prices fall all the way down to the price of grid power.
Update: The willingness to spend money on convenience rises as incomes rise. Once people have satisfied basic needs they tend more toward satisfying desires. One desire is to never be inconvenienced. Loss of electric power for 5 minutes, 5 hours, or 5 days is an inconvenience and people will spend increasing amounts of money to reduce the risk of that inconvenience the more affluent they become.
Pluggable hybrid vehicles and batteries with higher energy density also increase convenience. First off, one can reduce the frequency of trips to get gasoline. Second, the batteries in a car can run a house in event of a power outage. People will spend to save time. People will also spend to reduce the risk of life disruption from natural events or human technological failures. The desire for greater convenience is going to drive the development of better energy technologies.