rrbatch

Renewable Energy Is at the Center of the Presidential Debate

All - This debate neglects some important facts. See the paper by Robert Hirsch et al., "Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation, and Risk Management" written for the DoE National Energy Technology Lab and published in Feb 2005.

About 80% of US oil consumption is for transportation - autos, trucks, trains, aircraft, ships - with the vast majority for automobiles. (The other 20% goes to home heating, chemicals, road surfacing, etc.) There are roughly 200 million cars and light trucks on the road in the US today, and new sales in a good year might be 15 million. If everyone were required to buy a hybrid or CNG-powered vehicle, the replacement cycle would be at least 13 years, and hybrids might reduce oil consumption by 40% (my Ford Escape hybrid doesn't achieve that). I doubt that many people will be satisfied with all-electric cars that have a range <100 miles and a long recharge time. And there's no viable substitute for liquid fuels for aircraft. So we're stuck with heavy oil consumption for the foreseeable future - way beyond the tenure of a presidential term - mitigated only by more domestic production. Any politician or activist who continues to resist new domestic oil production (not just off shore, but ANWR, oil shale, oil sands, biofuels, synfuels, etc.) is extremely naive and unrealistic.

Nice to think about hundreds of square miles of solar panels in the AZ desert, or windmills down the spine of the midwest from Canada to Mexico - but who's going to build the transmission links to get this intermittent power to the east coast population centers? What are the transmission losses? Windmills work at about 30% utilization, and solar collectors at an average less than 50%, so we'll still need local power plants (coal or nuclear) to produce upward of 50% of base load. I for one trust a regulated industry to determine the most cost-effective solution (considering environmental costs and risks) than the government. Subsidies only distort the cost-benefit trade.

So I conclude that all sources of energy production are needed, as well as conservation, with the best solution for any given location determined by cost/benefit analysis and experience - free of subsidy. And the transition to new energy sources, new vehicles, and a new electric grid will take many decades and many $billions of investment, not the quick and cheap transition implied by earlier posts.

The investment opportunities? Maybe a few solar cell and windmill companies will succeed, but I'll put my bets on established suppliers (GE, Siemens, ABB, etc.) and forward-looking utilities who know how to deploy new generation and transmission alternatives (e.g. Excelon).