RENEWABLE ELECTRIC GENERATION IN COMPETITIVE MARKETS (original) (raw)
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California (Green Energy Encyclopedia entry)
Green Energy, An A-to-Z Guide, edited by Dustin Mulvaney & Paul Robbins, 2010
This initial volume in the SAGE Series on Green Society provides an overview of the social and environmental dimensions of our energy system, and the key organizations, policy tools, and technologies that can help shape a green-energy economy. Each entry draws on scholarship from across numerous social sciences, natural and physical sciences, and engineering. The urgency of climate change underscores the importance of getting the right technologies, policies and incentives, and social checks-and-balances in place. This reference resource will prepare those with a sparking interest in the topic to participate in what will hopefully become an equitable and intergenerational conversation about the impacts of our energy consumption and how to make it cleaner and greener. Via its 150 signed entries, Green Energy: An A-to-Z Guide provides students, professors, and researchers an invaluable reference, presented in both print and electronic formats. Its clear and accessible writing style, together with vivid photos, numerous cross-references, extensive resource guide, and other pedagogical tools make it a valuable tool for the classroom as well as for research purposes.
Resource Conservation and Electrification in California, ICON, 15 (2009), 138-145.
At the turn of the twentieth century, engineers in the American state of California pioneered hydroelectric development on the rivers of the Sierra Nevada range that ran along the eastern border of the state, transmitting the electricity hundreds of miles to far-away coastal communities. The drive behind their efforts was, of course, economic and social development, the quest for progress that has so characterized western history during the past 200 years. Their efforts in this regard helped propel California into a technological and industrial development leadership position in the twentieth century. However, resource conservation also provided a significant impetus to California water power development and early twentieth-century debates on railway electrification and power interconnection, greatly influencing conservation ideology and practice on a national level for years to come.
Renewable Energy: Not Cheap, Not Green?
Strategic Planning for Energy and the Environment, 1998
A multi-billion-dollar government crusade to promote renewable energy for electricity generation, now in its third decade, has resulted in major economic costs and unintended environmental consequences. Even improved new generation renewable capacity is, on average, twice as expensive as new capacity from the most economical fossil-fuel alternative and triple the cost of surplus electricity. Solar power for bulk generation is substantially more uneconomic than the average; biomass, hydroelectric power, and geothermal projects are less uneconomic. Wind power is the closest to the double-triple rule. The uncompetitiveness of renewable generation explains the emphasis pro-renewable energy lobbyists on both the state and federal levels put on quota requirements, as well as continued or expanded subsidies. Yet every major renewable energy source has drawn criticism from leading environmental groups: hydro for river habitat destruction, wind for avian mortality, solar for desert overdevelopment, biomass for air emissions, and geothermal for depletion and toxic discharges. Current state and federal efforts to restructure the electricity industry are being politicized to foist a new round of involuntary commitments on ratepayers and taxpayers for politically favored renewables, particularly wind and solar. Yet new government subsidies for favored renewable technologies are likely to create few environmental benefits; increase electricity-generation overcapacity in most regions of the United States; raise electricity rates; and create new "environmental pressures," given the extra land and materials (compared with those needed for traditional technologies) it would take to significantly increase the capacity of wind and solar generation. Wind power is currently the environmentalists' favorite source of renewable energy and is thought be the most likely renewable energy source to replace fossil fuel in the generation of electricity in the 21st century. Hydropower has lost favor with environmentalists because of the damage it has done to river habitats and freshwater fish populations. Solar power, at least when relied on for central-station or grid electricity generation, is not environmentally benign on a total fuel cycle basis and is highly uneconomic, land intensive, and thus a fringe electric power source for the foreseeable future. Geothermal has turned out to be "depletable," with limited capacity, falling output, and modest new investment. Biomass is also uneconomic and an air-pollution-intensive renewable. Despite its revered status within the orthodox environmental community, wind power poses several major dilemmas. First, wind remains uneconomic despite heavy subsidies from ratepayers and taxpayers over the last two decades. Second, from an environmental viewpoint, wind farms are noisy, land intensive, unsightly, and hazardous to birds, including endangered species. With the National Audubon Society calling for a moratorium on new wind development in bird-sensitive areas, and an impending electricity industry restructuring that could force all generation resources to compete on a marginal cost basis, wind power is a problematic choice for future electricity generation without a new round of government subsidies and preferences. Because of the precarious economics of acceptable renewable energy, eco-energy planners have turned to taxpayer and ratepayer subsidies for energy conservation as an alternative way to constrain the use of fossil fuels. Yet fundamental problems exist here as well. Multi-billion-dollar taxpayer and ratepayer subsidies over two decades have resulted in severely diminished returns for future subsidized (and even nonsubsidized) conservation investments. The potential reduction of electricity prices due to the introduction of electricity industry restructuring threatens to lengthen the payout period of energy conservation investments and consequently worsen the problem. A major but largely unrecognized development in the public policy debate over taxpayer-or ratepayer-subsidized renewable generation and energy conservation has been the elevated role of natural gas in electricity generation. Not only is natural gas significantly cleaner burning and less expensive than a decade ago, it has increasingly become the "fuel of choice" for new generation capacity. The eco-energy planning agenda for electricity generation-developed with coal and fuel oil in mind-must now be reconsidered. Such a reconsideration places in question some of the most important public policy missions of government energy agencies, from the California Energy Commission (CEC) to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). This study has six parts. The first defines eco-energy planning and differentiates it from market-based energy environmentalism. The second details the economic and environmental problems of wind power, the most favored renewable energy alternative. The third presents the problems of the other major renewables, including "negawatts," the environmentalist euphemism for subsidized energy conservation. The fourth is a study of the major challenges to ecoenergy planning posed by the ongoing restructuring of the electricity industry. The fifth is a description of new developments with natural gas that have made it a benchmark for environmental comparison in the United States if not abroad. Finally, the author considers the public policy implications of the conclusions for the DOE, state public utility commissions, and state-level energy commissions. Eco-Energy Planning Eco-energy planning is a public policy paradigm favoring taxpayer and ratepayer subsidies and governmental mandates for renewable generation and energy conservation to promote "sustainable" energy development. With the end of energy shortages in the 1970s, the focus of federal energy policy shifted from price and allocation regulation to reducing fossilfuel consumption to address ozone formation, acid rain, and climate change. [1] The key assumption of eco-energy planning is that state and federal air-emission standards alone are inadequate to address the public policy issues described. The new (post-1980) mission of many state public utility commissions, the CEC, and the DOE has been to intervene in the market with incentives for renewable energy generation and conservation, particularly in the electricity-generation sector. Those government interventions or special preferences have included the following supply-side and demand-side alternatives: Supply side: [2] Problems of Wind Power Of immediate concern to eco-energy planning is wind power, beloved as a renewable resource with no air pollutants and considered worthy of regulatory preference and open-ended taxpayer and ratepayer subsidies. Despite decades of liberal subsidies, however, the cost of generating electricity from wind remains stubbornly uneconomical in an increasingly competitive electricity market. Many leading wind-power providers have encountered financial difficulty, and capacity retirements appear as likely as new projects in the United States without major new government subsidy. [6] On the environmental side, wind power is noisy, land-intensive, materials-intensive (concrete and steel, in particular), a visual blight, and a hazard to birds. The first four environmental problems could be ignored, but the indiscriminate killing of thousands of birds-including endangered species protected by federal law-has created controversy and confusion within the mainstream environmental community. Unfavorable Economics Relative prices tell us that wind power is more scarce than its primary fossil-fuel competitor for electricity generation-natural gas, used in modern, state-of-the-art facilities (known in the industry as combined-cycle plants). [7] That is because wind power's high up-front capital costs and erratic opportunity to convert wind to electricity (referred to as a low capacity factor in the trade) more than cancel out the fact that there is no energy cost for naturally blowing wind. [8] Low capacity factors, and still lower dependable on-peak capacity factors, are a source of wind power's cost problem. In California, for instance, where some 30 percent of the world's capacity and more than 90 percent of U.S. wind capacity is located, wind power operated at only 23 percent realized average capacity in 1994. [9] That compares with nuclear plants, with about a 75 percent average capacity factor; coal plants, with a 75 to 85 percent design capacity factor; and gas-fired combined-cycle plants, with a 95 percent average design capacity factor. [10] All those plants produce power around the clock. Wind does not blow around the clock to generate electricity, much less at peak speeds. Peak demand for electricity and peak wind speeds do not always coincide. [11] A study by San Diego Gas & Electric in August 1992 concluded that wind's dependable on-peak capacity was only 7.5 megawatts per 50 MW of nameplate capacity (a 15 percent factor). [12] The CEC consequently has recalculated the state's 1994 wind capacity from 1,812 MW to 333 MW, an 18 percent dependable capacity ratio. [13] The cost of wind power declined from around 25 cents per kilowatt-hour in the early 1980s to around 5-7 cents (constant dollars) in prime wind farm areas a decade later. [14] By the mid-1990s, wind advocates reported that a new generation of wind turbines had brought the cost down below 5 cents per kWh and even toward 4 cents per kWh in constant dollars. [15] A DOE estimate was 4.5 cents per kWh at ideal sites. [16] However, even at the low end of the cost estimate, the total cost of wind power was really around 6-7 cents per kWh when the production tax credit and other more subtle cost items were factored in, as discussed later. The all-inclusive price in the mid-1990s was approximately double the cost of new gasfired electricity generation-and triple the cost of existing underused generation. The total cost of wind...
Innovations: Technology, Governance, Globalization, 2009
Humans burn fossil fuels to provide energy for our needs, including heat, light, transportation, refrigeration, and industrial processes. Our continued dependence on combustion produces carbon dioxide, contributing to the increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the earth's atmosphere. Although energy efficiency alone will not likely be enough to reverse this trend, currently it is by far the fastest, cleanest, and cheapest energy resource available. This article will discuss how my colleagues and I have promoted energy efficiency over the last 40 years. Our efforts have involved thousands of people from many different areas of expertise. The work has proceeded in several areas: • Investigating the science and engineering of energy end-use • Assessing the potential and theoretical opportunities for energy efficiency • Developing analytic and economic models to quantify opportunities • Researching and developing new equipment and processes to bring these opportunities to fruition
Clean Energy Technology and Public Policy, PRP 173
2011
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California's Energy Future - The View to 2050 - eScholarship
2011
This report was prepared pursuant to a contract between the California Energy Commission (CEC) and the California Council on Science and Technology (CCST). It does not represent the views of the CEC, its employees, or the State of California. The CEC, the State of California, its employees, contractors, and subcontractors make no warranty, express or implied, and assume no legal liability for the information in this report; nor does any party represent that the use of this information will not infringe upon privately owned rights.