Wind Power MUCH faster but some new nuclear will help....

Today's post: Wednesday, 4-14-2010

We need an 80% reduction in fossil fuel use by 2050 to avoid the worst global warming effects. And, practically speaking, we need to also double our electricity generation and double the useful work done per unit of electricity & other energy sources as well during that same time to have a decent economy.

At some point, the oil that we’ve been using to power much of our economy will begin to run low enough that our world economy will shrink due to lack of supply or excessive costs or both.

And, once the demand for oil picks up again with the apparent economic recovery or supply begins to plateau or drop, the prices will again go back up. That will cause more hard times economically unless we have enough alternative sources of energy to turn to.

Further, it’s extremely clear that the most supported and economically beneficial solution to add energy that does not use oil nor burn fossil fuels to release more CO2 into air that already has too much is to build massive amounts of new renewable energy production, particularly those that generate electricity & to dramatically increase energy efficiency and reduce the amount of energy that is now wasted.

And, of those, the more important long range solution is to build massive amounts of new renewable energy generation.

Today’s post:

Point one:

In the near term, getting more electricity that involves no coal, natural gas, or oil and produces no CO2, can best be done and & is already being done dramatically faster by simply building a bit more wind generation.

Further, we are already setting up to switch from using oil for vehicles to using electricity.

Wind generated electricity is still a bit less expensive to build per kilowatt produced than solar and is already competitive with coal. Solar is catching up; but we have a lot of untapped potential for wind power still; and as the real costs of mining coal and burning it without pollution begin to be included in its pricing, wind will be far cheaper.

And, we are just getting started building more wind generation of electricity. We can clearly build more at triple the rate we have been. Even better, in 2009 it was recently reported that 10 megawatts of wind generation were added in the United States. One the stories reporting it noted that this is the amount of electricity that THREE nuclear power plants would produce.

So, if we begin to build three times a many wind generators per year, we can add the electricity generation of NINE new nuclear power plants per year.

One reason for this is threefold. Much smaller wind generators are now available. They now have the tax incentives that have been in place already for the big windmills I just found out. And, without reducing the output apparently, existing wind farms can come close to doubling their output on the same land they already own or lease by adding these smaller wind generators.

With good reason, T. Boone Pickens has noted the corridor between Iowa and West Texas, the reason the United States may be the “Saudi Arabia” of wind.

By building a combination of both large and small wind generators in this area and in the smaller areas in the United States where there is a lot of wind such as the three areas in California now in use and the proposed offshore area off the East coast, we can easily build 30 megawatts of new wind generated electricity per year. In fact, since in some areas individual homeowners can already cost justify building their own small wind generator, we may be able to do even better than that. In addition, some small wind generators are already being added to many skyscraper sized tall office building in many cities.

My source for some of this information was the online article from NPR: “SCIENCE FRIDAY” from NPR with Ira Flatow from (Friday, 4-9-2010). (The transcript became available later.)

And, this source quotes Mike Bergey, the president of Bergey Windpower Company in Norman, Oklahoma. His company makes one of the small sized wind power generators. He said that in some communities with their wind access and the current tax credits, they can get as short as a three year payback for installing one of his company’s systems!

Although wind is not always blowing in any one of these locations, by beginning to install many wind generators in thousands across the United States, Canada, and Mexico adding new transmission lines and smart grid technology, this will solve that problem in part.

And, when this new wind generated electricity is added to the current power plants and more photovoltaic and thermal solar and some new geothermal this will become a reasonably reliable 24 hour system and will rely far less on the generation of electicity that can be done reliably 24 hours a day that the existing fossil fuel using power plants provide.

At that point we can possibly retrofit some to these plants to use Bloom Energy’s technology to power this with fuel cells instead of burning the fuel which will be more efficient and far less polluting.

Certainly we will begin to need NO new coal fired plants despite increasing the amount of electricity generated.

That all said, it would be helpful if we had another way to add more electricity to the grid that was available 24-7 and that did NOT use fossil fuels.

That leads me to my second point:

Point two:

Some more nuclear power plants would help do just that.

Here’s the first reality check however for those who think we can build 45 new nuclear plants at all quickly. It was in an online NPR article, yesterday, 4-13:

“Nuclear analyst Matthew Bunn at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government says it'll have to be a long swim for nuclear power to slow global warming. Right now, he says, only four new nuclear plants are built every year worldwide.”

That suggests that a goal of building ONE new nuclear power plant per year for the next 10 years would be a realistic goal.

Remember that we just built three times that much wind generation in 2009 and are well able to build the equivalent of more like TEN times that much wind generation per year for the next several years.

That’s why we can build new clean energy in that time so much faster with wind than with nuclear.

Then, in addition to the fact the U.S. government may have to almost finance these new plants to get them built, the main subject of NPR article I just referenced, there are several other considerations to make these power plants as safe to have built as possible.

It’s clearly a large part of the solution to the nuclear waste issue to instead enrich it at the reactor site or in a breeder reactor to begin with where it becomes plutonium and is then reused for many, many years.

That helps to avoid transporting nuclear and radioactive materials and makes our finite supply of uranium last dramatically longer.

But, plutonium can be made into nuclear weapons. So that means EVERY one of these new reactors must be built in an area in the United States that is centrally located and away from the coasts in a politically stable state and to be placed there initially, one that is somewhat conservative politically.

Then the U.S. government needs to use its armed forces to protect this site 24-7 as long as it contains any such materials – essentially forever.

Needless to say, that suggests we can’t afford to build very many of these a year.

The good news is that one a year for the next 10 years may still be doable and possibly safe if done well. And, with this central location, these 10 reactors would add a stability anchor producing electricity 24-7 to the grid eventually allowing close to all of the rest of it to be from renewable sources &/or extremely clean fossil fuel plants that use Bloom Energy’s fuel cells and recycle the CO2 into biofuels with algae.

The four states where these 10 new nuclear plants might best be built are North Dakota, likely in the Southwest corner of the state where they could be paired with wind generation; South Dakota in the Western part of the state, again paired with wind generation; Nebraska in the Western part of the state, again paired with wind generation; and in Utah paired with solar thermal and solar photovoltaic installations.

Then once those four areas are connected across the country with the grid, we will have a very robust system even with the majority of it eventually being from renewable sources.

I think it will take a LOT of work just to build that many nuclear plants and keep each one safe. I DO think it’s probably desirable and worth doing if we take peak oil and global warming seriously. (I think we are fools or horribly misinformed if we do not.)

However, the idea that we can build 45 new nuclear plants even in 10 years strikes me as both horribly unsafe and about as realistic a goal as asking Harry Potter to use his wand to make that much electricity for us.