Nuclear power is gain­ing a lot of hype lately as an answer to US energy needs. Pro­po­nents of nuclear power are extolling the abil­ity of nuclear gen­er­a­tors to pro­duce ter­awatts of power with­out car­bon emis­sions and that this will reduce our depen­dence on for­eign resources and thereby improve national secu­rity.
As energy demands increase around the globe more and more nations are look­ing to nuclear power as an answer. After a decades old ban, nuclear sup­plier coun­tries are reach­ing an accord with India open­ing the atomic reac­tor mar­ket worth tens of bil­lions of dol­lars to com­pa­nies like France’s state-controlled Areva, West­ing­house and Gen­eral Elec­tric of the U.S. to Russia’s Rosatom.
Elec­tric­ity pro­duc­tion pro­duces approx­i­mately 40% of the world’s car­bon emis­sions the other 60% com­ing from other sources. Con­vert­ing all fos­sil fuel pow­ered plants to nuclear energy would require an increase from 443 oper­at­ing plants to 4,316 nuclear power plants by 2050 at a cost of $14.4 tril­lion. Here is the real kicker, accord­ing to “Ura­nium Min­ing, Pro­cess­ing and Nuclear Energy Review”, a draft report pre­pared for the Aus­tralia gov­ern­ment, using only 1,587 nuclear reac­tor gen­er­a­tors would use all known ura­nium deposits in less than 40 years. Nuclear is not a renew­able energy.
Nor would invest­ing in nuclear power by any means reduce US depen­dence upon for­eign resources. The US, the largest power con­sumer in the world using half again as much power as China, has a third the ura­nium reserves of Canada and one sev­enth those of Aus­tralia. Even a nuclear pow­ered US would be heav­ily depen­dent upon for­eign resources.
There is also the mat­ter of car­bon neu­tral­ity and nuclear power and the min­ing of ura­nium, just like coal, pro­duces car­bon emis­sions. Dur­ing the life­time of a nuclear power plant, roughly 40 years, the dis­posal of radioac­tive waste, decom­mis­sion­ing, and other con­tin­ued main­te­nance adds both car­bon emis­sions and cost.
The num­bers quoted in the draft report above are based upon cur­rent energy demands. How­ever, investor owned util­i­ties and power gen­er­a­tors do not oper­ate on zero growth, quite the con­trary they required sus­tained annual growth of 2, 3 or 5% to jus­tify plac­ing cap­i­tal into an indus­try. Using the ‘Rule of 72’ the expo­nen­tial growth to main­tain a 5% annual increase means that power con­sump­tion must dou­ble every four­teen years.
Dou­bling means just that, instead of 4,316 nuclear power plants by 2050, the world would require twice as many plants every four­teen years! In other words, ura­nium sup­plies would be depleted even sooner and the infra­struc­ture wasted.
There is no sub­sti­tute for con­ser­va­tion and there is no time left to waste to con­vert to and improve upon exist­ing renew­able sources. Car­bon emit­ted today will last 100 years and only then dis­si­pate to about 37% of its orig­i­nal con­cen­tra­tion. Plant­ing trees can help but even a total ces­sa­tion of car­bon pol­lu­tion would not clear the planet of what has already been pro­duced.
The sun pro­duces, each day, enough energy to run our planet through both solar and wind tech­nolo­gies. It just makes sense to invest our time, energy and resources into sus­tain­able and renew­able resources. The last thing we want is to fight wars over uranium.

In 1992 elec­tric­ity began to be viewed less as an essen­tial ser­vice and more as a com­mod­ity when dereg­u­la­tion was enacted with the pas­sage of the Energy Pol­icy Act. Pre­vi­ously, pub­lic and investor owned util­i­ties con­trolled power gen­er­a­tion, trans­mis­sion and dis­tri­b­u­tion within a set region. The Energy Pol­icy Act, how­ever, allowed for the trad­ing of elec­tric­ity over wide geo­graphic areas, known as long dis­tance “wheel­ing”, to the high­est bid­der. The promise of dereg­u­la­tion was that com­pe­ti­tion in a free mar­ket would keep elec­tric rates low.

After four years of lit­i­ga­tion, in 2000, FERC Order 888 went into effect man­dat­ing the wheel­ing of elec­tric power over long dis­tances. The ‘sin­gle machine’ grid, how­ever, was never designed to man­age this type of ‘trad­ing’. Elec­tric­ity trad­ing jumped imme­di­ately upon enact­ment of Order 888 and so did dan­ger­ous lev­els of trans­mis­sion line con­ges­tion. Trans­mis­sion load­ing relief pro­ce­dures (TLRs) increased by 6 times within a month and the promised lower rates have in fact risen sig­nif­i­cantly since 2000 in dereg­u­lated states.

Another con­se­quence of dereg­u­la­tion was that no incen­tive remained to build new power gen­er­a­tion plants. In fact, investor owned util­i­ties prof­ited from elec­tric­ity short­ages and as we learned from the Enron cat­a­stro­phe actu­ally induced arti­fi­cial short­ages to drive up whole­sale prices. A Decem­ber 2001, Wall Street Jour­nal arti­cle noted, “The prof­its on the trades… of cubic feet of gas it didn’t extract or burn, of kilowatt-hours it didn’t gen­er­ate, and of fiber-optic lines it didn’t light… sent Enron’s rev­enues soaring.”

Today, there is con­cern about legit­i­mate elec­tric­ity short­ages across the US. Along the West Coast, Bon­neville Power Author­ity is warn­ing that it may not be able to meet load demands as early as 2011. In South­ern Cal­i­for­nia, San Diego Gas & Elec­tric is propos­ing a 150 mile, $1.4B fos­sil fuel cor­ri­dor through sen­si­tive state parks and for­est land. The line, which con­nects coal pow­ered plants in Mex­ico, is to avert pro­jected rolling black­outs by 2013.

Trans­mis­sion lines take years to com­plete and cost $1M per mile. In cities like Chicago and New York the cost can be $10M per mile. Wheel­ing losses, the inef­fi­ciency of elec­tri­cal trans­mis­sion is almost 10% glob­ally equal­ing the com­bined energy demands of Ger­many, France and the UK. These costs, the time required and wheel­ing losses are some of the rea­sons New York City is installing more dis­trib­uted CHP generation.

Com­bined heat and power (CHP) gen­er­a­tors cap­ture the heat nor­mally lost in the pro­duc­tion of elec­tric­ity and use it to heat build­ings, dis­tricts or neigh­bor­hoods where the gen­er­a­tors are installed. The Chris­t­ian Sci­ence Mon­i­tor recently wrote, “A typ­i­cal elec­tric plant uses only one-third of its fuel’s energy to push tur­bines. The other two-thirds are lost as waste heat. Boil­ers, on the other hand, can achieve up to 85 per­cent effi­ciency. By com­bin­ing both processes, CHP can cap­ture between 70 and 80 per­cent of the energy in the fuel. The­o­ret­i­cally, cogen­er­a­tion deliv­ers the same energy as sep­a­rate gen­er­a­tion, but with half the fuel and emis­sions. Because of close prox­im­ity to the end-user, rel­a­tively lit­tle elec­tric­ity is lost in transmission.”

Reli­a­bil­ity of elec­tric ser­vice is another pri­mary ben­e­fit of dis­trib­uted gen­er­a­tion. Dur­ing the 1998 ice storm in Canada hun­dreds of trans­mis­sion tow­ers buck­led leav­ing over 4 mil­lion peo­ple in Canada and parts of the US with­out power. Mul­ti­ple deaths were reported, many from hypother­mia. Power was restored fairly quickly to urban areas how­ever almost 700,000 rural res­i­dents were with­out power in the mid­dle of win­ter for over three weeks.

CHP gen­er­a­tors require fos­sil fuels but renew­able dis­trib­uted power gen­er­a­tors like small wind and solar are viable and once installed not depen­dent upon the vagaries of for­eign pol­icy, mar­ket demands, reg­u­la­tory actions or the expense of main­tain­ing a decay­ing grid to allow for long dis­tance com­modi­ties trading.

Iron­i­cally, decen­tral­iz­ing may be forced by the con­se­quences of energy dereg­u­la­tion and the free mar­ket the­ory so depen­dent upon cen­tral­iza­tion. An arti­cle dis­cussing bar­ri­ers to cen­tral­ized wind energy in Energy Biz Mag­a­zine states, “Fed­eral Energy Reg­u­la­tory Com­mis­sion Chair Joseph Kel­li­her said it would require strong regional power grids. Today, there are more than 500 trans­mis­sion own­ers, ‘500 sets of hands pulling the levers for those 500 machines,’ he said, in a per­sonal inter­view. Coör­di­nat­ing an array of rel­a­tively small gen­er­a­tors spread over a vast expanse for the ben­e­fit of far off urban cen­ters will require com­plex coör­di­na­tion, some­thing made dif­fi­cult by today’s Balka­nized grid. Fur­ther­more, while annual invest­ment in trans­mis­sion has dou­bled since 2002, Kel­li­her said, it is ‘still not adequate’.”

Rural Amer­ica includ­ing the South­ern Ore­gon coast is uniquely suited to deploy­ment of wide scale dis­trib­uted energy to relieve already con­gested trans­mis­sion lines. The cap­i­tal costs of installing dis­trib­uted gen­er­a­tors at the local, neigh­bor­hood and dis­trict level are sig­nif­i­cantly less than the stan­dard cen­tral­ized model. The value of energy inde­pen­dence for rural com­mu­ni­ties is priceless.

Car­bon taxes are spo­ken of more and more as a way to moti­vate renew­able clean energy and storage.

OTTAWA — Lib­eral Leader Stephane Dion has embraced the idea of a national consumer-based car­bon tax as part of a way to fight global warming.

In a speech in Van­cou­ver Fri­day, Dion said it would have to be revenue-neutral like the new sys­tem in British Colum­bia, where car­bon taxes col­lected on gas, propane and other fos­sil fuels are returned to cor­po­ra­tions and indi­vid­u­als through income tax cuts and credits.

“We can talk about what the best model for putting a price on car­bon across Canada might be — but the fact is we need to just do it,” Dion said. “That is what this provin­cial gov­ern­ment has done, and that is what a Lib­eral gov­ern­ment will do.”

Pro­posed car­bon taxes and the off­set­ting car­bon cred­its are cre­at­ing a new realm of invest­ment strate­gies as well. Nev­er­the­less, the goal of reduc­ing car­bon emis­sions and clean­ing up the planet can­not be met too soon or taken too seriously.

Mean­while the Los Ange­les Depart­ment of Water and Power is propos­ing another rate increase of 9% to cover the cost of main­tain­ing the infrastructure.

Los Ange­les will suf­fer more black­outs unless the city upgrades its elec­tri­cal infra­struc­ture, the Depart­ment of Water and Power will make the pitch again today to raise rates.

Last fall, the City Coun­cil sent back the rate pro­posal amid ques­tions on how the money would be spent.

But this time the util­ity appears to have more sup­port, and Mayor Anto­nio Vil­laraigosa has urged the coun­cil to hike elec­tric rates by 9 per­cent over three years and water rates by 6percent over two years.

The elec­tri­cal grid infra­struc­ture is in dire need of repair and I have seen cost esti­mates in the tril­lions of dol­lars for world­wide upgrades. This is one of the rea­sons, I believe, that decen­tral­ized energy is now com­ing to the forefront.