A comment on the Google energy plan worthy of your time

One of the best things about blogging is the feedback I receive from people who comment.  For those of you reading this, reading blogs without commenting deprives the blog from a vital piece of the equation they need to be robust.  I try to answer most comments to continue the dialogue. Every once in a while a comment is I think so important I will give its own post.  Such is the case with a comment that fellow security blogger, Bill Gross made on my post around Google's energy plan.

So without further adieu, here is Bill's comment:

This is a perspective piece -

Though I'm all for green electricity, I think that we need to put production in perspective.

Coal currently produces something like 45% our our electricity, and to IAEA, by 2050 it's target to produce close to 60%.
We can change this, but the role of wind and solar will will take a great deal of careful reworking of our "energy system".
Background:

Bulk Energy Production falls into two categories:
1) Base load energy - this is the minimum amount of energy needed on the grid over a period of time. If you charted a day's energy consumption, you will see peaks and valleys. Anything below the valley's is generally produced by bulk-load generators - nuclear, large scale coal, etc.

2) Peak load energy - provides the energy needed to meet the fluctuating demand on the grid. When someone turns on a light, there is a plant someplace generating 60 wats more electricity.
Base load plants generally cannot be peak load. It's hard to quickly change the power output of large facilities. Base load plants also produce the bulk of power, and hence tend to be plants with the lowest fuel costs. Base load plants operate at very high "capacity factors" - they run as hard as they can, for as long as they can - hence the desire to use low-cost fuel.
Peak load is generally provided by plants with higher fuel costs. They run at fairly low capacity factors - and hence they are not as hurt by high fuel costs.

That's all well and good, but how do wind and solar fit into the mix?

Good question. Both "fuel sources" are "intermittent" and cannot be relied on to provide a reliable source of energy. This is a byproduct of the fuel source reliability and the demand curve. Is the fuel source available when the demand is there?
Since we currently have no way to store bulk electricity, wind and solar cannot replace our current energy production capacity, per-se. IE, if you build 1MW of wind, you need to build 1MW of reliable production - because - what happens if the wind ain't blowing?

That said, most peak load in the US is produced by high carbon emitting production. To the extent that wind and solar can reduce the power requirements on these plants, we can reduce CO2 emissions, but we cannot eliminate the production capacity.
The last issue that needs to be addressed with wind and solar - moving the electricity from production to consumption - building high voltage is a tough problem, and very expensive. We'd need to solve that problem.

In general, wind is more reliable at night. What would be cool - charge your hybrids at night - we can increase the capacity factors of wind by using it while it's most abundant.

 

If like me you are interested in the energy problems we face as a country and "drill, baby, drill" is not a sound enough policy for you, Bill recommends this blog: neinuclearnotes.blogspot.com from the folks over at Nuclear Energy Institute.