Better power lines, dammit!

Steam pollution

The Times' Matthew Wald finds that warming rivers may hamper the water cooling on which all steam-generating reactors depend:

 Using computer projections of climate change possible outcomes, the researchers wrote that generating capacity in the United States could fall 4.4 to 16 percent on hot days from 2031 to 2060. And the number of days when river water is at a temperature that is now considered extremely high will be triple the number today, on average, they said.

But here's the spit-take moment:

It found that in addition to making electricity harder to generate, warm weather would make peaks in electricity demand even higher. That would raise costs, it said, because utilities might need more generating stations that would run for only a few hours a year, during the peak summer demand periods.

It also pointed out that if rainfall patterns changed, hydroelectric dams would be less productive.

The solutions to this problem are not obvious. Wind generation might not help much, because the wind usually does not blow much in hot weather. Solar photovoltaic cells could help, but they do not generate much in the last hour before sunset, and not at all after that. That is the period in which many utilities experience peak demand, as people return home from work and turn on air-conditioners, television sets and ovens.

Mr. Wald is talking about the energy of the future -- two to four decades out, no less! -- but assuming we will still be saddled with the same inefficient power grid in which -- due to technology, local energy monopolies, and a Balkanized regulatory environment -- power is mostly generated and consumed within a couple hundred mile radius.

Make it easy to exchange power over a few thousand miles, practical with the current lines, or even further, with HVDC upgrades, and you do have an easy solution to peak demand at sunset -- get the power from somewhere it's not sunset. Spread your turbines over a wider area so that torpid spells idle only a fraction of them. Build your nuclear plants in cooler climes and send the power southward (or northward, as the case may be.) And so on.

Seems like a pretty obvious solution to me -- and one that happens to involve opening up local monopolies to competition and simplifying and streamlining local regulations. Seems like Heartland would want to get right on that. Perhaps they're a bit preoccupied.

Nuclear reality check

The Economist muses over the impact of Fukshima and the nuclear big picture:

And if the blow is harder than the previous one, the recipient is less robust than it once was. In liberalised energy markets, building nuclear power plants is no longer a commercially feasible option: they are simply too expensive. Existing reactors can be run very profitably; their capacity can be upgraded and their lives extended. But forecast reductions in the capital costs of new reactors in America and Europe have failed to materialise and construction periods have lengthened. Nobody will now build one without some form of subsidy to finance it or a promise of a favourable deal for selling the electricity. And at the same time as the cost of new nuclear plants has become prohibitive in much of the world, worries about the dark side of nuclear power are resurgent, thanks to what is happening in Iran.

After reading Burton Richer's incredible "Beyond Smoke and Mirrors" (which I hope to formally review pretty soon) I had a rekindled enthusiasm for nuclear energy. The problems of disposal can be greatly mitigated by running fuel through plants twice, albeit at the cost of a greater threat of nuclear proliferation if the stuff goes wandering. The actual threat posed by plant malfunctions to human safety is minimal, far less than that of just the deaths caused by inhaling the smoke from burning oil or coal. Nuclear is readily scalable with many promising technologies on the horizon. But for those hoping for modular reactors or micro reactors or molten sodium reactors or thorium on a white horse, another article in the review points to an important problem, beyond a nervous public or heavy-handed regulation, a problem that I, for one, had failed to consider:

Such homogeneity in a 70-year-old high-technology enterprise is remarkable. Seven decades after the Wright brothers’ first flight there were warplanes that could travel at three times the speed of sound, rockets that could send men to the moon, airliner fleets that carried hundreds of thousands of passengers a day, helicopters that could land on top of skyscrapers. Include unmanned spacecraft, and there really were flights a billion times as long as the Wright brothers’ first and lasting for years. But aircraft were capable of diversity and evolution and could be developed cheaply by small teams of engineers. It is estimated that during the 1920s and 1930s some 100,000 types of aircraft were tried out.

Developing a nuclear reactor, on the other hand, has never been a matter for barnstorming experimentation, partly because of the risks and partly because of the links to the technologies of the bomb.

Wind and solar, not without their disadvantages compared to nuclear power and energy sources, have this great advantage; they are relatively safe and easy to tinker with. There are hundreds if not thousands of designs of solar panels and wind turbines, at every stage of development. You will never be able to build and test 100,000 different types of nuclear energy generation, not if your regulators were raving Randian paleolibertarians. If you don't like the shape of your wind turbine you can radically redesign it and throw it up in the wind and see what it does; will you ever be able to do that with a nuclear reactor? And if not, what can we reasonable expect in the coming decades except that renewable technology will continue to advance and nuclear will be (at best, if the public's fears can be allayed) a bridge technology on the way to a low-carbon future?

Bad climate policy? Yale study fingers public opinion, not political stonewalling, for many of the defects

Deniers have failed to persuade others, but continue to amp up their own convictions

The Yale Project on Climate Change Communications' recent survey had a lot of bad news for deniers -- most people believe climate change is real, and dangerous, and support an international treaty to cut greenhouse gas emissions. But like their prior, "Six Americas" survey, the news is not all good.  People support measures to address global warming, but not the right ones.

All numbers that follow take combine the "strongly support" and "somewhat support" for the sum of those polled.

Make us virtuous

Q174. Sign an international treaty that requires the United States to cut its emissions of carbon dioxide 90% by the year 2050.

Support: 65%(!)

Regulation Ho!


Q125. Regulations requiring any new home to be more energy efficient. This would increase the initial cost by about $7,500, but save about $17,000 in utility bills over 30 years.

Support: 71%


Q127. Changing your county’s zoning rules to promote the construction of more energy-efficient
apartment buildings, instead of less efficient single-family homes.

Support: 52%

Q173. Require electric utilities to produce at least 20% of their electricity from wind, solar, or other renewable energy sources, even if it cost the average household an extra $100 a year.

Support: 67%

Q128. Changing your county’s zoning rules to require that neighborhoods have a mix of housing, offices, industry, schools, and stores close together, to encourage walking and decrease the need for
a car.

Support: 58%

Complicate all the tax codes!

Q180. Provide tax rebates for people who purchase energy-efficient vehicles or solar panels.

Support: 82%

More government spending!

Q131. Constructing bike paths and installing bike lanes on city streets.

Support: 78%

Q132. Increasing the availability of public transportation in your county.

Supoort: 82%

Q179. Fund more research into renewable energy sources, such as solar and wind power.

Support: 84%


But not yet

Q181. Increase taxes on gasoline by 25 cents per gallon and return the revenues to taxpayers by reducing the federal income tax.

Support: 32%


Q122. A $1.50 fee added to your monthly electric utility bill to fund local programs to save energy.

Support: 48%


Q124. A 10-cent fee added to each gallon of gasoline you buy, to fund local programs to improve public transportation.

Support: 28%


Q126. A $5-a-month increase in property taxes, to provide funding to help homeowners make energy-efficiency improvements to their homes (such as replacing old, inefficient furnaces, water heaters, air conditioners, and insulation).

Support: 49%

Q130. A $5-a-month increase in property taxes, to provide funding to homeowners that install solar panels.

Support: 43%


If you care about this issue, and don't want to rip your hair out in frustration at those numbers, you are already bald. People want 90% cuts in emissions, but they don't support an extra $1.50 a month on their gas bill to save energy. They are all for more spending on alternative energy, but all against  a $0.25/gallon gas tax completely refunded via income tax cuts. They reject an extra $5 a month in property taxes, but support a regulatory burden of $7,500 for every new home.

Regulations and government research grants are better than nothing but, as I've often argued here, they are far inferior to price signals via carbon taxes (I shudder to think the numbers a carbon taxes would have registered.) But clearly ten years of war, economic recession, spiraling debt, accelerating climate change, and the rise of the developing world have not changed the American public's "bread and circuses" approach -- we want everything, right now, and we don't want to pay anything for it.

We can needle Rick Perry all we want, but stupid policy comes ultimately not from stupid politicians, but from stupid voters. The main barrier to an effective climate change strategy is not deniers and not lukewarmers; it is the irrational, waffling, give-me-everything-and-charge-me-nothing public. In other words, it's us.