Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist (52 page)

If the CCS technology can be developed, and if there are suitable geological formations under the thousands of existing coal plants, the cost of retrofitting each plant will likely be more than the cost of the original plant itself.

CCS technology will be energy intensive; therefore it will use a significant percentage of the electricity generated by the plant, thus making the plant’s electrical output more expensive and requiring more electrical generating capacity to be built to satisfy the existing demand for power.

Compared to nuclear, the cost of CCS technology may well make new nuclear plants look even better than they do at present. This would result in the cancellation of plans to build coal plants in favor of nuclear plants and the replacement of existing coal plants with nuclear plants when either the coal plants reach their end-of-service or when the cost of retrofitting them with CCS becomes prohibitively high.

The first integrated coal plant with CCS technology has been built in Germany by the electrical utility Vattenfall. At this writing the company has been unable to find a single suitable place to store the CO
₂
underground. Communities are in open revolt, fearing the impact if the CO
₂
were to escape. Ironically, Vattenfall finds itself in competition with natural gas importers who have been using underground formations to store their gas for many years. This practice has never been controversial even though natural gas is obviously much more of a potential hazard than CO
₂
.
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Another irony is the fact that the only viable CO
₂
capture operations involve pumping CO
₂
into oil fields to increase the recovery of petroleum.
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In other words carbon is being pumped into the ground in order to extract more carbon-emitting fuels, a self-defeating situation.

A Path to Sustainable Energy

There are, of course, many complexities in seeking a path to a sustainable energy future. Each country and region has different energy resources and different energy requirements. But there are a few key policy directions that could take us toward sustainability if we could only break the lock that the solar promoters and their believers have on politicians and the public. Here are the priorities as I see them:

Where there are suitable sites for hydroelectric development these should be developed as a first priority. Countries such as Brazil, China, Russia, Canada, India, the Congo, and Chile have substantial hydro potential and they should develop it as needed. This is renewable, clean, and often the lowest cost energy technology.

The world should embrace the nuclear renaissance and build alliances between governments, businesses, universities, and research institutions so that hundreds of nuclear reactors can be constructed over the coming decades. Today, 439 reactors provide 15 percent of the world’s electricity and many of them are smaller than the new class of reactors. Therefore 800 reactors could supply at least 30 percent and 1600 reactors could supply 60 percent, not counting for growth in demand. Then let’s aim for 2000 reactors by 2100, not five times as many as are operating today. Hydroelectric already accounts for 15 percent of global electricity and could hold that percentage if the available capacity were developed. With 75 percent clean and reliable energy, we would be on a path to sustainability.

With increased nuclear and hydroelectric energy, we would have the clean energy to charge batteries at night in all-electric and plug-in hybrid passenger cars and small delivery vehicles. This would drastically reduce the use of petroleum for light transport.

The use of biofuels, which in the future would be derived mainly from wood and woody materials, should be focused on heavy transport (buses, trucks, trains [trains that are not electrified], and aircraft), where batteries alone will not be sufficient.

Clean nuclear and hydro energy could be used to power ground source (geothermal) heat pumps in most new buildings and retrofitted into many existing buildings. This would greatly reduce the amount of natural gas and other fossil fuels used to heat and cool buildings.

Direct solar hot water heating, especially in the tropics, should become far more widespread, which would reduce natural gas consumption for this essential service.

Continued improvements in energy efficiency will come as a matter of course as inventors and engineers work to get more from less, which is a natural part of human ingenuity and technology improvement. The green building movement, the rising cost of energy, and the increased demands of a growing and more affluent global society will all result in a trend toward improved conservation and efficient use of energy.

Smaller contributions will continue to come from wind, deep geothermal, solar voltaic, and solar thermal electric. More research and development is needed to make these technologies more cost-effective, because they are not cost-effective at present. We should pursue other promising technologies, such as nuclear fusion, vigorously.

Energy policy has many other nuances, but these few directions, if pursued with political will, could reduce fossil fuel consumption by the 50 to 80 percent demanded by environmentalists and promised, without a technically feasible plan, by politicians around the world. I can only hope to live to see the day when the logic of this approach is more widely recognized.

Vinod Khosla was a cofounder of Sun Microsystems in Silicon Valley in 1980 and now heads Khosla Ventures, a company that invests in a wide range of clean tech startups. He is one of the most influential entrepreneurs in computer science and clean technology. In a 2008 interview he was asked, “What do you think is the single biggest failure of American environmental policy that we could actually do something about?”

His reply: “For every nuclear plant that environmentalists avoided, they ended up causing two coal plants to be built. That’s the history of the last 20 years. Most new power plants in this country are coal, because the environmentalists opposed nuclear. They’d like to see wind and solar photovoltaics. Well, it doesn’t work if it’s 40 cents a kilowatt hour, and it doesn’t work if you have to tell Pacific Gas and Electric’s customers: ‘We’ll ship you power when the wind’s blowing and the sun’s shining, but otherwise, you gotta miss your favorite soap opera or NFL game.’ That’s just the reality, so you have to be pragmatic about this. What is the most cost-effective way to do it?”
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The past few years have seen dramatic changes in the energy world. Most people hear about all the wind turbines and solar energy panels being installed and because the idea is so popular many electrical utilities use images of these technologies in their promotions. Even businesses with no relation to energy are using windmills to advertise their products. It is becoming common to see a few windmills and solar panels prominently displayed in front of coal and nuclear plants. The utility people and the electrical system operators know how expensive the electricity from wind and solar really is. But in many cases they are required by law to produce wind and solar energy due to popular demand fueled by activists and promoters of wind and solar energy. Wind and solar energy have become synonymous with “green,” even though solar is economically unsustainable and both wind and solar are intermittent.

The big change that’s coming is the shift away from coal toward nuclear. This will happen in a big way in the U.S., where 50 percent of electricity is now produced by coal and where there is sufficient wealth to make the large capital investment needed to build new nuclear plants. It is already happening in China, where there are only 11 nuclear plants in operation today but 21 under construction and many more to come.

The coal industry needn’t worry about being shut down overnight. Many countries will continue to use coal, in some cases a lot of coal, preferably with better pollution control. The thousands of coal plants that operate today were built to run for 40 to 50 years, so even if no more coal plants were built, which will not be the case, there will be a continuing demand for coal for at least the next 50 years.

The International Energy Agency (IEA), founded by 28 industrialized countries in 1974 during the oil crisis, predicts that without major policy changes the use of coal will increase by 53 percent by 2030.
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Clearly such changes must be implemented if we are to avoid such a dramatic rise in consumption. We need a policy that increases the use of hydroelectric energy where possible, and one that supports an aggressive program of new nuclear power plant construction. This policy should also focus on converting cars and light trucks to battery and plug-in hybrid technology, and replacing fossil fuel with geothermal heat pumps in buildings. There are clear signs this is already under way.

One of the most important objectives for the future of energy is to connect to the grid the 1.6 billion people who have no electricity. In order for this to happen the people of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia must become wealthier and better organized. The IEA predicts universal access to electricity will require $35 billion per year between now and 2030.
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This seems like a lot of money, but it is about equal to the estimated $700 billion and counting spent on the Iraq War.
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The prospects for oil and gas are daunting, even in the short span of the next 20 years. The IEA predicts the demand for oil will increase by 24 percent by 2030 and more than half of this will have to come from as yet undiscovered oil fields. This makes it clear peak oil is not an unreasonable prediction, as we have no guarantee these new fields will be found. The demand for natural gas is forecast to increase by 42 percent, from 3 trillion cubic meters today to 4.2 trillion cubic meters by 2030. More than 60 percent of this demand must be filled by as yet undiscovered new wells. This would indicate that “peak gas” is just as likely as peak oil in the coming decades.
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The likely potential for a shortfall in oil and gas supplies underlines the importance of conserving coal for eventual conversion to liquid fuels for transportation and as chemical feedstock for plastics and other products now made from oil and gas. Again, an aggressive program of new nuclear construction will be the most important policy to assist in conserving coal and fossil fuels in general.

Smart meters, which allow time-of-use pricing for electricity, should become universal. This will allow utilities to charge more for electricity during peak loads and less when the demand is low. Note that smart meters do not result in lower energy use. They simply encourage consumers to change the time of day when they use electrical appliances. Instead of turning on the dishwasher at 8 p.m. during peak demand, a timer on the dishwasher could start it at 3 a.m. when the demand for electricity is low. This is a win-win for the utility and the customer. The utility does not need to build as much energy capacity because the peak demand is lowered, the customer doesn’t end up paying for additional plant capacity and gets a better price as a result of changing the time of consumption.

The price of gasoline and diesel oil in Europe is often more than double the price in North America, due entirely to a higher tax rate.
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This has resulted in an automobile fleet that gets much better mileage without compromising utility. Granted there are not as many 350-horsepower cars in Europe, although they are available. It’s just that the average consumer doesn’t want to pay that much for fuel, so only wealthy people tend to buy luxury vehicles. But it is impossible to avoid the argument that such high taxes are punitive, excessive, and even undemocratic. On the other hand, how else is it possible to get otherwise sane people to realize they don’t need 350 horsepower to get to work and back? In the U.S. and Canada the strategy is to legislate average fleet efficiency, with California, as usual, in the lead. America’s love affair with the automobile does not pass easily as it seems every improvement in efficiency is matched by an increase in horsepower.

One approach to reducing fuel consumption in cars is referred to as a
tax shift
. This means increasing taxes on environmentally destructive practices while adopting a tax-neutral policy of reducing income tax by the same amount. Many European countries, such as Sweden in particular, have adopted this approach with considerable success in reducing fuel consumption, traffic congestion, and air pollution.
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