| ? | home | about | productions | partners | fw channel | contact |
|
| ?FocusWest > Energy > |
|
Transcript: Alternative energy Alternative energy covers everything from traditional sources like wind, solar, and hydropower to futuristic sources like hydrogen. But like fossil fuels and nuclear, alternatives have their limitations and environmental impacts. These are selections from the whole transcript. Some comments will also occur on other themed pages because they cover more than one topic. Corbin McNeill: But the, the reality is, is that we are going to have to produce more energy in a growing economic environment and clearly we have to balance environmental concerns with price concerns, with other social aspects that we have. If energy prices continue to rise as the Senator has indicated then in fact we're going to have to subsidize some people of low income in order to provide them the same quality of living that everybody else has. And while conservation can in fact and should be a part, green power should be a part, we need a diversity of energy sources that meet environmental concerns, that meet national security concerns, which may not be a regional problem here, but clearly a national energy policy is one thing that national politicians have to concern themselves with and we must have economic, a system that supports the economic advantage that the United States has in the world environment because we have low energy costs and its one of our competitive advantages in the world economy. Michael Grainey: I guess I have to note a voice of skepticism. I worked for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for 7 years, so I'm certainly not a rabid anti-nuclear person. But I've been hearing talk for 25 years about a new generation of nuclear reactors -- new, safer, less expensive, more efficient generation -- and we haven't seen any. We haven't seen one new nuclear power plant since Three Mile Island, and I'd be very surprised if we see a new generation anytime soon. I think we really need to focus instead on renewable energy resources like wind, solar, geothermal biomass. We have limited federal budgets, in the history of energy in this country has been it does need federal support it needs federal support for exploration in the case of fossil fuels for development, for technology, and I see the, the energy bill pending before Congress as not providing enough of the support that it needs for renewable resources to make them more competitive. Wind is essentially competitive now in many circumstances with natural gas and other fuels, but we need continued federal support there. Given the fact we have limited federal funds I think putting much money into new nuclear research at the expense of those renewable energy resources is a mistake. Michael Grainey: The cleanup costs of that reactor ran into the hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars if not billions of dollars to that utility, lost to the damage caused by the meltdown. I think that there's certainly not a utility in the United States that's been willing to take that kind of risk since then and for a new generation of reactors I think it's going to be a very hard sale. You know I think we also need to recognize that any resource has environmental impacts, even renewable energy, and I admit that, that there's adverse impacts. I think there's less and I think they're easier to control, but they all have impacts and I think that's why energy efficiency is really fundamental. Whatever resource we use we need to use wisely. Corbin McNeill: The issue is not so much in the United States as it is on an international scale because you have the underdeveloped region of the world as they come up to the same electricity consumption standard that the developed countries have, they have energy needs that far, far, far outweigh the energy needs of the United States. And too they are not all susceptible to using solar voltaic they're not all in wind areas, they are going to have to have a diversity of sources and, and some of that has got to be nuclear or in fact you are not going to be able to have the international climate environment change the way the international policy agents would like it to be done. Corbin McNeill: The public opposition, we're running into public opposition in putting windmills on one of the islands off the Massachusetts coast I mean. Ralph Cavanagh: But 160 megawatts of wind just went into operation in the San Francisco Bay area. Ralph Cavanagh: The . . . you can't site anything [everything??]; there is a palpable difference. Corbin McNeill: There, there, there is, but I am going to bet you that you are going to run out of places to put windmills in within 10 years. Michael Grainey: I don't think so. We've had just sited 300 megawatts on the Oregon/Washington border. We've been approached by two developers in Oregon who want to . . . megawatts site. Corbin McNeill: If you put all of your eggs in one basket, whether it's natural gas, coal, nuclear, wind. I'll give a nice example here. Part of the California energy crisis was in fact a failure of renewables -- the lack of rainfall and snowfall in the Northwest created a shortage of available hydropower. The city of Fairbanks, Alaska, has a very unreliable power supply today, and if you want to build a big system of renewables you've got to have an energy storage mechanism. Well, the city of Fairbanks, Alaska just put in a large battery. It takes up a whole building; it lasts for seven minutes. Corbin McNeill: You know in transition so that if you have to have base load thermal source of energy you cannot build a system in reality today maybe for another 100 years that's totally based on renewable sources. Corbin McNeill: And, but, but you also need to understand that the more you build alternate sources of you know a windmill in the United States has a capacity factor of about 18-20 percent which means you need to build five times as many. Ralph Cavanagh: Oh no, no, northwest, here in the northwest they're at 35%. Corbin McNeill: Sorry 35% on a nationwide basis it's like 18% and which means that you need to build three to five times more generating capacity than you need in a thermal plant and, and the result of that is, is that you escalate the cost with time and while you have to take into account the environmental differences. Ralph Cavanagh: And the fuel cost in wind, which isn't any. Corbin McNeill: Well you're correct, but in fact what I'm saying is that you cannot build a system fully on variable sources of . . . Ralph Cavanagh: You need a portfolio. Corbin McNeill: You're exactly right, you need a portfolio. Ralph Cavanagh: The great exception was the Northwest Power Act where Congress actually set up a system for letting the winners and losers emerge on their merits, but that's rare. And I'm just saying we don't have unlimited money in this society; we actually do have to pick the best buys, and the question for nuclear's going to be at the end of the day: can it do all the things Corbin describes better than alternatives? And there are alternatives and we'll see. Jim McClure: Well, there's another side to that, and that is as far as I was concerned I was quite willing that we put money into research and development of a lot of different kinds of technologies because we didn't know which one would have the best pay-off. The very point you're trying to make is what I in the Congress and many other Congressmen tried to, to implement. Wind wouldn't be where it is today if we hadn't been supporting investment in wind technology. Jim McClure: Well and that's a false one because there are things we can do in our technology to consume those products which are of proliferation risk. When we abandoned reprocessing as a, as a policy and we did that in the early 1980s in this country we, we locked the door against creating the means by which we took care of those radioactive wastes in a more economic and environmentally efficient way. And there, there's a place where public policy closed its door on investment in technology where we should've opened the door, left it open. Not to say we shouldn't put more money into, into biomass, into geothermal, into wind energy. Wind energy is today a marginal winner; it's not the sole source nor the sole answer, but it would never have gotten there without the investment of federal research dollars. Joan Cartan-Hansen: Well, we value where we put our money, we hope so at least. Green Power -- Oregon has put a huge amount of money toward it, they've put their money where their mouth is, they're putting tax dollars to support green power. Is that what the rest of us should do? Jim McClure: Some of it. Some of it. Like everything else, you point to the failures unless you're trying some things that fail you'll never know whether they would've succeeded. Michael Grainey: You know utility programs have been a big part and as part of the issue was raised earlier about how utilities can finance conservation and be against their own interests, one of the ways we dealt with that was with the public purpose charge that was imposed on all utility customers regardless of who your utility is it's a 3% charge on your utility bill that funds energy conservation and renewable resources. And that replaces it's about the level of the utility programs that they were in the past and that's about $50 million a year. So that's an important part although its just one piece of the effort for energy conservation and renewable resources in Oregon. Mark Maher: And if we're going to smaller, more locally distributed resources it's going to be "not build in my backyard again" the arguments we'll have to go through. If we continue with wind development the sites will get further and further away from existing infrastructure and transmission is going to become a major cost component of that too and so that's an issue we're looking hard at how, how can we minimize the cost of that transmission. Large coal plant development they tend to be mind mouth plants and they're far from grids also so as we look at that portfolio development the transmission component becomes a pretty large player in there. Even though transmission is probably what 10% of a rate payer's bill it's, it's the environmental, social impacts also that transmission bring along with it. Kathryn McCarthy: I would certainly agree with that. It's interesting somebody I think maybe it was you Joan who had mentioned green power, and I would argue that nuclear is green power because it is an environmentally benign energy source . . . gases and I think more and more environmentalists are starting to realize that. Ralph Cavanagh: Or dependent on utility contracts to do anything and so I think as, as the public tries to sort out how is this going to play out, what's going to happen the big utilities of the west -- the Idaho Powers, the PacificCorps', Pacific Gas and Electric when it emerges from bankruptcy in the wreckage of the California restructuring -- what decisions they make, what incentives they face and how they figure out to bring their customers into some of this, that's why this is really going to play out and happily everybody has a hometown utility and sometimes the hometown utility's policies are a whole lot easier to influence as you know Senator then a distant capitals on the east coast. And I think all of us would encourage folks who care about these issues to learn more about what the local utility's doing, what is it investing in energy efficiency, what efforts is it making to tap into those opportunities that Peter Johnson identified. What renewable energy options is it seeking. What's its long-term perspective on nuclear and fossil? These issues are being played out in every hometown utility in the west and that's where the real action will be for the foreseeable future on all of this. Jim McClure: Yeah but there are other things, we touched a little bit I'm very, very strong in the future of hydrogen technology. And I think we will have a hydrogen economy sometime in the future. We'll depend a great deal upon electricity in order to do that however. I think fuel cells have a, a great promise, but they also have an energy feed stop that you've got to find and utilize so it, those are not total, total answers, but I look at the conservation ethic and we've gone through a great deal of that and yet I just picked up a, a magazine published in August of this year General Motors has now developed a 1,000 hp engine for an automobile. Isn't that great? I look at. Jim McClure: I, I look at, at all of the advertising for automobiles today and they're all on high performance, high horsepower and, and just a couple of footnotes about a couple of Japanese people that come up with what I predicted 50 years ago was going to be the or 30 years ago that was going to be the future and that was hybrid automobiles. There are two of them on the road today, one makes 60 miles to the gallon. Contrast that with General Motor's plans for a 1,000 hp engine in a Cadillac. Corbin McNeill: Senator, I'd only bring one point up -- hydrogen in itself is not an energy source; it is an energy carrier. Corbin McNeill: And you need basic energy sources whether it's some form of renewable energy, whether it's nuclear, whether it's coal and, and CO2 sequestration, you, you and not many people. Well I won't say not many but people tend not to understand that issue when they talk about hydro. Jim McClure: Well, we've talked mostly about electricity today because it, it is the energy's, it is the form of energy chosen most by people today in business or individual homes except for transportation and that's where hydrogen comes in because it becomes a transportation fuel as your fossil, liquid fossil fuels are and something we badly need. But electrical energy is the energy of choice today and that's why we're looking mostly at how, how you produce and distribute and price the availability of electrical energy. Ralph Cavanagh: There are a wealth of resources available to members of the public two, two things we talked a lot about today, one is use energy more efficiently where increasingly your local utility is helping and there are a wealth of options available to you and I, like Senator McClure, am a technology optimist in this though we're probably optimistic about slightly different technologies. On renewables, if you like renewables, you can invest in them directly through your, through your utility bill increasingly across the Northwest that's possible. There are institutions like the Bonneville Environmental Foundation that let you, if you want to wherever you are in the country simply buy out your pollution emissions associated with your electricity use if it's important to you as an ethical matter to do that. I do that, I encourage others to do it. Jude Noland: Just the only other thing I would say is this is such a complicated subject and issue people can start by actually reading their utility bill because nowadays your utility will usually tell you the where the power that you use comes from and gives you an option as Ralph mentioned that if you want to pay a little extra to buy wind power you can do that. So you can start by looking at your utility bill, try and understand what's in there and what your utility is doing. Lots of people spend time surfing the web there's lot of sources of energy information on the, on the internet, so start that way, find things that you're interested in and Google 'em. |
Navigation Links Video segments " "The Price of Power" [Windows Media format] Studio discussion " Nuclear " Gas Alternative Energy News Colorado senator launches campaign to extend wind tax credits Storm sends trees crashing down at USFS work center in Idaho Montana dam releases increased for sturgeon Powerful storm causes widespread power outages in Idaho Wind-energy industry powers up economy in northcentral Montana Wyoming's 2012 reclamation award goes to Dave Johnson mine Deep-pocketed group's lawsuits delay Wyoming wind project Boston company to build wind farm in Washington near Idaho border Surge of hydropower has BPA ordering wind farms to curb production Judge tells Idaho Public TV: Snake River dams need to go
|
?
