Climate Progress

The Bush administration has signed off on a stunning new report, “20% Wind Energy by 2030: Increasing Wind Energy’s Contribution to U.S. Electricity Supply.”

I am working on a big wind article for mid-week, but here are the key conclusions of what is easily the most comprehensive and credible report released on windpower in a decade:

• Annual installations need to increase by only a factor of three from current levels by 2018.
• Costs of integrating intermittent wind power into the grid are modest. 20 percent wind can be reliably integrated into the grid for less than 0.5 cents per kWh.
• No material constraints currently exist. Although demand for copper, fiberglass and other raw materials will increase, achieving 20 percent wind is not limited by the availability of raw materials.
• This would require 300,000 MW of wind, delivering electricity for about 6 to 8.5 cents per kilowatt hour, unsubsidized (i.e. no federal tax credit) and including the cost of transmission to access existing power lines within 500 miles of wind resource [new nuclear is currently about 15 cents/kwh (see here)].
• The 20% Wind Scenario could require an incremental investment of as little as $43 billion NPV [net present value] more than the base-case no new Wind Scenario. This would represent less than 0.06 cent (6 one-hundredths of 1 cent) per kilowatt-hour of total generation by 2030, or roughly 50 cents per month per household.

The benefits the country gets for this small incremental investment are staggering:

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McCain’s cost-containment strategy for his climate policy is a fraud. It substitutes a huge amount of low cost, phony emissions reductions both here and abroad — called offsets — for actual domestic emissions reductions. Offsets are “credits for reductions made from sectors of the economy outside the trading system.”

Such an offset strategy is little more than rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, and would “involve substantial issuance of credits that do not represent real emissions reductions,” according to a recent analysis by Stanford. Ironically, one of the carbon offsets that McCain explicitly cites, no till farming, does not actually offset carbon emissions, according to the latest science.

KEEPING CARBON COSTS LOW

Every major cap & trade bill needs a strategy to keep the cost of the emissions permits as low as possible to minimize economic pain and to stop politicians from trying to undo the entire system, by, say … oh, just hypothetically now … demanding a carbon price holiday whenever prices get too high or the economy starts to slow (see “McCain reveals cynicism, hypocrisy with call for summer gas-tax holiday, energy budget freeze.”)

Progressives like Sen. Obama typically embrace aggressive clean energy deployment strategies as well as smarter regulations that promote efficiency (see “Could a President Obama or Clinton stop global warming?“). Sen. McCain, like most conservatives, does not support such strategies and indeed has routinely oppose them (see Part 1). Unfortunately, without such policies, the price for carbon could easily reach hundreds of dollars per metric ton (as I explain in “No Climate for Old Men“), causing economic harm and a political backlash.

Another strategy for cost containment is a safety valve, a ceiling on the permit price. A safety valid is a terrible idea that undermines the whole point of a cap & trade (see here and here). Fortunately, McCain opposes a safety valve, as he explains in the newly released “Q&A: John McCain’s Climate Platform.” You can also read his new talking points and fact sheet and the speech itself. But the “Q&A” is the most important of all those.

This leaves McCain very few options if he wants a bill that keeps costs low. Sadly, he takes absolutely the worst possible option — unlimited offsets.

A TITANIC EMBRACE OF OFFSETS

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Suppose the leaders of this country were wise enough to put a moratorium on traditional coal (the most urgent climate policy needed, as discussed in Part 4)? How will we meet our steadily growing demand for carbon-free power over the next decade? And to get on the 450 ppm path, we don’t just need to stop U.S. emissions from rising — we should return to 1990 levels (or lower) by 2020.

NUCLEAR: Nuclear is an obvious possibility, beloved of conservative Francophiles like McCain and Gingrich, but energy realists understand that it is very unlikely new nuclear plants could deliver many kilowatt-hours of electricity by 2018, let alone affordable kWhs. Indeed, back in August, Tulsa World reported (here):

American Electric Power Co. isn’t planning to build any new nuclear power plants because delays will push operational starts to 2020, CEO Michael Morris said Tuesday….

Builders would also have to queue for certain parts and face “realistic” costs of about $4,000 a kilowatt, he said….

“I’m not convinced we’ll see a new nuclear station before probably the 2020 timeline,” Morris said.

And that in spite of the amazing subsidies and huge loan guarantees for nuclear power in the 2005 energy bill (see here).

As for the $4,000 a kw capital cost — and the related electricity price of about 10 cents per kwh — mid-2007 has already turned into the “good old days” for nukes. Utilities are now telling regulators that nukes will cost 50% to 100% more than the AEP estimate, as I’ll report in a couple of weeks.

One very good source of apples-to-apples comparisons of different types of low- and zero-carbon electricity generation is the modeling work done for the California Public Utility Commission (CPUC) on how to comply with the AB32 law (California’s Global Warming Solutions Act), online here. AB32 requires a reduction in statewide greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. The most valuable document is probably the “Generation Costs,” although the slides for the recent May 6th presentation are fascinating.

The research for the CPUC puts the cost of power from new nuclear plants at 15.2 cents per kWh. It also puts the cost of coal gasification with carbon capture and storage at 16.9 cents per kWh. In any case, given its immature state and the mismanaged federal effort (see “In seeming flipflop, Bush drops mismanaged ‘NeverGen’ clean coal project“), coal with CCS won’t be providing much power by 2020. At this point, it would even be pure speculation to say that coal with CCS will be one of the low-cost options in the 2020s.

So what do we do in the near term to meet the projected 1% annual increase in demand over the next decade while simultaneously reducing carbon emissions? There are only three plausible options, and we’ll need them all:

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For the rest of their lives, high school students in Greensburg, KS will remember two things about this last year of their life. Most memorable will be the date 5-4-07, when a 205-mph, F-5 tornado tore through their community and changed everything about their lives. And it will be pretty hard to forget that in remembrance, the President of the United States handed them their diploma at graduation.

For a wider eco-conscious community in this country, the aftermath will be remembered as the first time a U.S. town has been built (or rebuilt) entirely green, and done under national attention. From the wreckage, Greensburg is emerging as a pioneer in community-scale green building and eco-development, symbolizing in sorts a better hope for tomorrow. Greensburg has become, metaphorically, the ultimate Green Town.

Last week CBS’s Early Morning Show ran a special series on the recovery effort, and you can also track the town on its Kiowa County-Greensburg (KS) Recovery blog, where you’ll encounter an overwhelming sense of community, enduring spirit, determination and pride in the green reconstruction.

So, Greensburg, Kansas One Year Post-Disaster? Going green and going strong.

Related posts:

• Greening Greensburg, KS: A Closer Look, Part I
• Greening Greensburg, KS: A Closer Look, Part II

First John McCain and now Newt Gingrich turn out to love the cheese-eating surrender monkeys. Better start checking them both for U.S. flag lapel pins!

On the Hugh Hewitt show (see here), Gingrich dissed the new ad he made with Speaker Pelosi on climate and offered “real solutions:”

HH: Now can I ping you a little bit, Mr. Speaker? You made the ad with Nancy Pelosi, and I think that campaign is asking Americans to suspend critical thinking, not that I’m on one side or the other.

NG: Well…

HH: I just think thirty second ads on something that complicated asks…it’s not the way to debate this, because it almost makes it impregnable to debate. Did you consider the downside of doing the ad with her?

NG: Yeah, we spent six weeks thinking about that decision, and I do a newsletter every week. You can go to xxx.xxxx.xxx [sorry, for some reason, my PC just refused to copy that link], my first name, and sign up for it. It comes out for free. Over 700,000 people get it. And next week will be on energy policy and environmental policy. And I’m going to outline a stunningly different view than Al Gore and Nancy Pelosi. But my message to conservatives is you’ve got to get on the stage and debate. You can’t stand off-stage and scream no. And I’m perfectly happy, if you’ll look at the ad carefully, we said this was a topic we disagree on a lot of issue. But we agree we should try to solve this. And I’m perfectly happy to offer real solutions, and I’ll give you one example.

HH: Go ahead.

NG: If the United States produced the same percent of electricity from nuclear power as France, we would take two billion, two hundred million tons of carbon a year out of the atmosphere. And by that one step, we would be 15% better than the Kyoto goals.

Now, we’ve already seen that if we did what France does — and yes, it boggles the mind that two leading Freedom-fry eating conservatives are publicly advocating doing just that — we’d need, say 600 to 700 nukes by 2050, depending on whether we embrace electricity as a transportation fuel [See “McCain calls for 700+ new nuclear plants (and seven Yucca mountains) costing $4 trillion“].

But Gingrich’s final statement suggests

1. He wants to build 1400 nukes and shut down every last coal plant, every gas plant, and every refinery or (more likely)
2. He wants 400 nukes, he wants to shut down every coal plant, and he made a classic climate error and a classic energy mistake.

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A livable climate can (probably) survive the burning of almost all of the world’s conventional oil and gas — but not if we also burn even half the coal (see here and figure below).

So the top priority for any climate policy must be to stop the building of traditional coal plants — which is why that has become the top priority of NASA’s James Hansen (see here). The next priority is to replace existing coal plants with carbon free power, which could include coal with carbon capture and storage (CCS), as fast as possible. And that means a related priority is to encourage the introduction of CCS as quickly as possible, to see if that is a viable large-scale solution.

A climate policy that does not start by achieving at least the first goal, a moratorium on coal without CCS, must be labeled a failure. By that measure, the cap and trade system currently being employed by the Europeans looks to be a failure, as we’ll see.

So that means the first major climate policy we should adopt is not a cap & trade, but

Requiring all new coal power plants to meet an “emission performance” standard that limits CO2 emissions to levels achievable with CCS systems.

This is the 2007 recommendation of Ken Berlin and Robert M. Sussman in a Center for American Progress Report, Global Warming and the Future of Coal: The Path to Carbon Capture and Storage (summary here). It is also the goal of a bill introduced last month by Waxman and Markey, “Moratorium on Uncontrolled Power Plants Act” (see here).

[Yes, regular readers will note that this does represent a bit of a shift in my thinking — I once thought the most urgent climate policy was getting a price for carbon dioxide — but the recent news from Europe about the possible resurgence of coal power should change everyone’s thinking.]

NYT: “Despite Climate Worry, Europe Turns to Coal“

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So an industry CEO tells E&E News (here) that nuclear is the only non-carbon baseload power [not!] and that therefore nuclear is our only future and since the United States does such a great job of dealing with low-level radioactive waste, we should become the world’s repository.

That would be the logic of one Steve Creamer, CEO of EnergySolutions, “a full-service nuclear fuel cycle company” [in contrast to all of those “partial-service nuclear fuel cycle companies,” sometimes called electric utilities]. One of his website’s many warm-hearted front-page images is above (more here).

Why shouldn’t we take the world’s low-level radioactive waste, says Creamer, other countries take our recycled computers [!!], so it’s the perfect division of global labor:

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The Washington Post has a story on several communities in the U.S. that are including climate impact in their decision making. This is welcome news indeed. The story looks at King county in Washington applying emissions tests to public works projects, Massachusetts developer disclosure laws, and California’s attorney general suing companies for increasing emissions. The article goes on to point the finger at sprawl as something that must be reigned in, saying:

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“A nuke in every garage” is the GOP nominee’s energy and climate plan.

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) made a stunning statement on the radio show of climate change denier Glenn Beck this week:

… the French are able to generate 80% of their electricity with nuclear power. There’s no reason why America shouldn’t.

The Wonk Room, which has the audio, writes of the interview, “McCain Seemingly Agrees With Glenn Beck That Solutions To Climate Change Can Be Delayed. That is lame all by itself. But the statement quoted above is even more radical. McCain is repeating his little-noticed uber-Francophile statement from his big April 2007 speech on energy policy, “If France can produce 80% of its electricity with nuclear power, why can’t we?”

Why can’t we? Wrong question, Senator. The right question is — Why would we? Let’s do the math.

The U.S. has some one hundred nuclear reactors providing about nearly 100 Gigawatts of capacity (see here) and nearly 800,000 Gigawatt-hours of electricity, roughly 20% of total U.S. power. For the record, France has only 59 reactors, capacity of about 63 GW, generating 550,000 GW-hr (some of which is exported), covering nearly 80% of their usage (see here). [Note to Sen. McCain: France is a much smaller country than ours.]

WHAT WOULD IT TAKE FOR US TO BE 80% NUCLEAR?

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The California Energy Commission (CEC) last week adopted stricter energy efficiency standards for new construction. Known as Title 24, California’s standards seek to reduce heating, cooling, and electricity bills for consumers. Title 24 dates from the 1970s, but has been updated continuously since. Concern about natural gas availability and price has been one spur driving the standards (natural gas is heavily used for both heating and electricity generation in California).

Here are a few examples of changes. Because the standards are complex, changes cannot be reduced to a single number. For example, Air Conditioning standards get changed with the size of the unit, and window U-factors (rate of heat loss) vary with climate zone.

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