By as early as next year our demand for electricity will exceed reliable supply in New England, Texas and the West and, by 2011, in New York and the mid-Atlantic region. A failure of a power plant, or a summer-afternoon surge in the load, could make for a blackout or brownout. “There really isn’t any excess in the system,” says Rick P. Sergel, chief executive at the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC).
The phrase chickens coming home to roost springs to mind. The results won’t be any better on the US economy than on South Africa’s.
As a kid, I lived in Sao Paulo (Brazil) for a couple of years. We lived in a nice, rather fancy (by Brazilian standards) apartment complex, that, IIRC, had its own generator to supplement or replace the city grid. The power failed often (maybe once a week?), and not just 5-30 second flickers.
At that time, it was mainly an inconvenience, and meant most folks kept lots of flashlights handy.
Nowadays, in a world where so much more of our economy and the conveniences of life are driven by electricity, widespread and frequent blackouts would be quite problematic. Think of all the servers that power the 'net, for instance. Yes, in some cases, backup generators can be purchased and installed. But that strikes me as a rather inefficient way to increase electrical reliability for most folks.
The article is incoherent industry flacking. To summarize:
There’s only a couple years slack in current plants.
You can’t build new coal or nuke plants, but you can build new natural gas plants.
However, natural gas is expensive.
Wind, solar, and every other form of power generation don’t exist, I guess, because he doesn’t mention them.
Therefore, in a couple years, because everyone forgot to just pay the premium for fuel and build more natural gas plants, and other forms of generation don’t exist by omission, we’ll have daily brownouts.
The person who brought us this logical tour-de-force:
Mark P. Mills is a founding partner in Digital Power Capital, an energy tech venture fund, and writes the Energy Intelligence column for Forbes.com.
You can’t build new coal or nuke plants, but you can build new natural gas plants.
NIMBY. Again, are we disputing this?
However, natural gas is expensive.
And only going to get more so considering how inappropriately we are using it…
Wind, solar, and every other form of power generation don’t exist, I guess, because he doesn’t mention them.
You must have skipped right over this paragraph:
Ninety percent of electric power is fueled by nonrenewable coal, natural gas or nuclear power. Renewable sources will not cover the growth in demand. While wind is gaining ground (and now supplies 1% of power), hydro’s share (7%) is shrinking as dams are dismantled. Solar, at 0.01%, is an inconsequential contributor.
Taken in conjunction with this paragraph (emphasis mine):
Nukes produce 20% of U.S. electricity. But there hasn’t been a new nuclear plant started in three decades, and licenses are expiring on existing nukes. Opponents are fighting renewal of those licenses.
It would stand to reason that it is not unlikely that all the additional wind or solar power generation capacity being added over the next decade may not even equal the amount of nuclear generation capacity being lost, to say nothing of new construction.
Matters of scale. 760 gigawatts is kind of a lot.
Therefore, in a couple years, because everyone forgot to just pay the premium for fuel and build more natural gas plants, and other forms of generation don’t exist by omission, we’ll have daily brownouts.
We couldn’t build enough natural gas plants if we wanted, and we couldn’t afford it anyway. And we haven’t built up additional infrastructure. Given lead times, it’s already too late.
That author isn’t the one demonstrating a catastrophic lack of logical thinking.
Ban air conditioning unless you agree to a fission plant within meltdown-radius, and you may see much fewer opposition.
We could start by changing ridiculous waste like suit and jackets. It seems a lot of places are calibrated for men wearing layers and layers of clothing while the women wear skin-revealing dinner outfits and freeze at the AC.
Edit:
In honor of George Carlin we should fence a few rectangular states and build lots of nuclear plants there, wedged in between the sex offenders and violent criminals.
The whole nuclear thing bothers me. On the one hand, It’s very obviously 1000000x more efficient than any other method. On the other hand, my fiance’s aunt got cancer because she lived too close to Three Mile Island.
We should definitely:
A) Run around screaming the sky is falling.
B) Demand that people respond by doing whatever is most profitable for the person writing the article.
I don’t think you realize how little external radiation release there was at Three Mile Island. In other words, bullshit.
We should definitely:
A) Run around screaming the sky is falling.
B) Demand that people respond by doing whatever is most profitable for the person writing the article.
It’s actually too late for A or B. What’s left is the economic exercise of calculating how big of a hit the economy will take over the next decade. There are no gigawatt fairies waiting in the wings.
In the absence of any real investment in new energy forms, one of these days we’re just going to have to bite the bullet and build a lot of new fission plants. It will then turn out the bullet doesn’t really taste that bad anyway, but this will only happen after some of these brownout and blackout sieges change people’s minds from “not in my back yard” to “power no matter what”.
On the one hand fission power can now be extremely safe with the new plant designs, and it has always been cleaner than fossil fuel, even in terms of radiation release (coal mining releases much more radiation than do nuclear plants). On the other hand, I’ve never had much faith in the industry to run itself properly, so we will take our chances, not so much on new Chernobyls, which should (hopefully) be impossible, but on many smaller radiation leaks caused by oversights in releasing wastes and so on.
Whoops, I missed the wind estimate. Still don’t see an overall impact number though. Also, “opponents are fighting license renewal for some nuclear plants” is not logically equivalent to “X amount of nuclear power is going to go offline.”
Judging by poking around the internet, building natural gas power plants takes around 24 months, so assuming that’s right I find it a little hard to believe its too late. I also find it amusing that we flat out “can’t afford more natural gas plants”, even though no cost estimates are provided and the article itself projects 10x cost runups in electricity prices due to shortfalls - really, it’s more expensive than that?
Take what industry flacks tell you with a grain of salt, whether they’re qualified (though what being a physicist has to do with energy industry economics I have no idea) or not.
Finally, even assuming the premises of the the article, it does beg the question of what exactly the industry has been doing this whole time.
That’s a bit of an unfair statement when you know “the industry” has been trying to build various types of power plants over the years that have been stopped by environmental groups rallying the NIMBY crowd and other members of the public.
The article is exagerrating the risk, but only in the sense that it is making some assumptions about what is going to happen in the next few years. It’s a classic “if we don’t do anything this will happen” argument which ignores that we are doing things already. It’s also painting with a broad brush, in that it refers to “the West” while ignoring that the west includes the Pacific Northwest, which has no power issues.
That all said, there has been talk among various sources that our power system is reaching a maximium level, at least in some regions. We don’t have a true national power system, but more of a series of regional systems with some links between them. Some of those regions haven’t done much, if any, expansion of their capacity in 25 years.
Here’s where I’m playing devils advocate, ironically. I’m sure there are 30-40 year old, previous generation plants that should go offline over the next decade or two. And, in many cases, I don’t see how you extend the lifetime further without multiple offline years for extensive work. Stuff doesn’t last forever.
Judging by poking around the internet, building natural gas power plants takes around 24 months, so assuming that’s right I find it a little hard to believe its too late. I also find it amusing that we flat out “can’t afford more natural gas plants”, even though no cost estimates are provided and the article itself projects 10x cost runups in electricity prices due to shortfalls - really, it’s more expensive than that?
Again, buying natural gas seems a lot cheaper than a 10x runup in electricity prices from shortages. The suppliers may be scum, but that’s no change from today. :)
If the power industry has been betting it all on coal and losing litigation around it that’d explain the article, but that also doesn’t make me think they’re very wise.
I don’t understand all the hubbub with nuclear power in the modern world. It feels like most of the detractors are simply straw manning arguments against 40-year old technology. It’s like putting forth the Penny-Farthing as evidence that bicycles are inefficient and dangerous and should no longer be built.
Bicycles don’t generate radioactive toxic waste that needs to be buried miles below the surface for millennia. I’m pretty sure that’s where the concern with nuclear power lies. That, and the off chance it could accidentally irradiate vast areas of land.
All that being said I’m in favor of nuclear power, as our current energy solutions are also destroying the planet.
