Browse
Engage
Research
- Fritz Reiner
After the BP oil spill in the spring of 2010, President Obama ordered a moratorium on off-shore drilling, and millions rallied in support of a cleanup effort. Following the dual disasters in Japan a year later, pundits were seen and heard debating the future of nuclear energy, with some spelling its demise. And with the cross-country heat waves sending most Americans into the shelter of air conditioning, speculation on the health of the electricity grid abounds.
What is almost entirely missing from the discussion is a healthy, sober and realistic discussion about the possibility of a resilient energy future. With every new emergency comes a raft of discourse, policy change and political posturing that combine to give the impression that Something is Being Done.
Re-Examining BP
In the wake of the Spring 2010 BP oil spill, offshore drilling was stopped, and those who support alternative sources to fossil fuels saw a chance to discuss real change in U.S. energy strategy. But Erb Institute Director and Professor Andrew J. Hoffman found that the conversation -- and media coverage -- focused on the economic impacts of the spill, leaving the ecological devastation nearly unnoticed.
Within the context of a global economic recession and continued conflict in the other Gulf, sick coastal birds and tainted waters simply didn't have the same impact as stories of fishermen landlocked by those tainted waters and hoteliers experiencing sky-high vacancy rates during high season.
Professor Hoffman's research is detailed in a paper co-authored with P. Devereaux Jennings at the University of Alberta, Canada, in Journal of Management Inquiry. In the paper, Hoffman and Jennings contrast the response to the BP spill with the Santa Barbara disaster of 1969, when millions of gallons of crude oil dumped into the Pacific and ocean beaches.
In 1969, the spill catalyzed a ban on offshore drilling in California that remains in place today. Following the BP spill, a brief moratorium on offshore exploration in the Gulf of Mexico was repealed within a year of the disaster.
Even more important is how the spill has -- or hasn't -- changed Americans' overall perceptions of the role of fossil fuel production and consumption in our daily lives. Hoffman and Jennings observe that despite the Gulf spill, steadily climbing gas prices and continued conflict in oil-rich regions of the world, Americans' attitudes about fossil fuels don't seem to have changed much.
Revisiting Japan
The dual disasters of earthquake/tsunami and near-nuclear meltdown in Japan this spring provided another opportunity to examine energy production and consumption worldwide. Germany announced it would move completely away from nuclear power, but the catastrophic events did not lead to a worldwide moratorium on the development and use of nuclear energy. In fact, China announced the building of nuclear plants within weeks of the crisis, even as the outcomes were still unknown.
Next page: Revamping the Status Quo
A resilient energy policy
A resilient energy policy needs to strike a balance between redundancy and efficiency (A more technical way to say this is that it should minimize the free energy of the energy system). Whether we like it or not, almost all alternative energy sources are more expensive and less reliable than our current baseload coal and nuclear plants. They do, however, have the advantage of providing redundancy. Thus, any restructuring of the energy sector must be aimed at finding the proper balance. I don't think you have done so.
First, we have poured billions of dollars into solar energy over the last four decades. The cost of solar vs our current baseload power system is a factor of 4-10 higher. While we may still see some technical improvements, it doesn't seem worthwhile to invest much more there. I do not mean to say that solar doesn't have a role to play, I am simply saying, "Enough is enough."
Second, while wind energy is much more cost-competitive than solar, it still cannot yet compete with current baseload technologies.
Third, dispersed wind and solar may have a role, but I see no reason why the taxpayer should subsidize them. Further, I would suggest we consider a very different business model for this sort of technology (I include geothermal heat pumps in this group - which already is cost competitive): encouraging local utilities to install and maintain them. This could allow the capital cost to be amortized over a longer period without a burden on the homeowner, while ensuring that systems were properly cared for.
Fourth, I believe it would be more useful for the government to invest in transmission and storage than in further improvements in either solar or wind. In general, places capable of sustaining large wind or solar "farms" are far from where people live. Further, given their intermittency, the full benefit of these technologies cannot be reaped without the ability to store the captured energy. Thus, their economic viability is now much less about the technology itself, and more about how to get the most out of the energy captured.
Fifth, forced renewable energy strategies hurt the country economically. In general, they seem to be more based on someone's guess on what might be available, and less about what makes economic sense. They tend to disproportionately penalize the poor.
Sixth, we need to stop demonizing any one part of the solution. All forms of energy make waste. All forms of energy have both their advantages and their disadvantages. Though I have no ties to the nuclear industry, I do appreciate both the benefits and the risks it offers us.
As someone who has been in the waste business for the better part of 40 years, it is clear that technologies are available today to permanently dispose of all nuclear waste. In fact, we have been safely disposing of >99% of the volume of nuclear waste in this country for decades. That we haven't done the same with the much smaller fraction of high activity waste is indicative of a lack of political will, not a dearth of technical know-how.
On the other hand, look at solar. Waste is not a problem but cost and area are. Our solar technologies rely, in part, on expensive materials and processes. Some of the raw materials come from places that aren't very friendly to us, i.e., the reliability of the source is in question. Further, capturing usable amounts of energy requires an areal commitment that many homeowners don't find pleasing or desirable. Current attachment technologies for home solar panels almost ensure that they become unguided missiles in wind storms. The flip side, of course, is that solar allows some independence from the grid, and can be very efficiently utilized at the source.
Renewables can be part of the necessary balance; so can our current baseload technologies. The challenge for us is to strike that balance in a wise manner; one that recognizes the real problems and opportunities, and leads us to invest our scarce resources most effectively.