If changing the U.S. energy supply to be more secure and sustainable is like steering a massive ship, then the direction we set it on today won't be fully felt for 10 or 20 years.
The National Research Council, the operating arm of the National Academies of Sciences and Engineering, on Monday released a report called "America's Energy Future" that seeks to focus the country's discussion on energy and draw attention to the most promising technologies.
One of the messages from the report is that long-term problems require sustained strategies and a break from business as usual. Technology has a big role to play, but none of the academic and business experts who authored the study expects a single fix.
"One of the committee's conclusions is that there is no technological 'silver bullet' at present that could transform the U.S. energy system through a substantial new source of clean and reasonably priced domestic energy. Instead, the transformation will require a balanced portfolio of existing (though perhaps modified) technologies, multiple new energy technologies, and new energy-efficiency and energy-use patterns," wrote Harold T. Shapiro, the chair of the committee on America's Energy Future.
Carbon-heavy: the source for energy in the U.S. The pie chart breaks out sources of electricity generation.
(Credit: Energy Information Administration, 2008.)Although there isn't one solution, certain technologies deserve more research than others, both in electricity and in transportation. Successful development and deployment of them can reduce greenhouse gases substantially in both sectors in the next 30 years using a portfolio approach.
In the short term, the study's authors concluded that efficiency is the easiest and lowest-cost option for "moderating" national demand for energy in the next decade.
Adopting existing building-efficiency products alone could potentially eliminate the need to build any new power plants, although some may be needed to address regional supply imbalances or upgrade existing power plants. Broadly applied in transportation, buildings, and industry, efficiency technologies could reduce energy use by 15 percent in 2020 and 30 percent by 2030, compared to the Energy Information Administration's "business as usual" reference scenario.
The U.S. has a number of good options for diversifying power generation as well but developing the products to do this will likely raise the price of electricity.
Because the U.S. has good resources, renewable energy from wind, solar, and geothermal could provide an additional 500 terawatt-hours per year by 2020 and 1,100 terawatt-hours per year by 2035. Total U.S. electricity consumption is now about 4,000 terawatt-hours per year.
Coal power plants with carbon capture and storage technology, where carbon dioxide would be stored underground, could replace the entire coal fleet by 2035 through retrofits or new construction. "Evolutionary nuclear technologies" could supply up to 850 terawatt-hours of electricity by 2035 by modifying existing plants and building new ones.
However, to take advantage of more renewable energy and run the system more efficiently will require modernizing the electricity system with smart-grid technologies, which the study says is "urgently needed."
Planning ahead
In assessing the transportation sector, the study's authors concluded that petroleum will continue to fuel the country's cars and trucks in the next three decades, although maintaining domestic petroleum production will be challenging. Once again, the best near-term option to cutting oil consumption is better vehicle efficiency.
Making liquid fuels from biomass, such as wood chips, and from coal with carbon capture and storage could replace about 15 percent of today's fuel consumption. But both approaches still have significant technical barriers. Also, there are potential environmental problems from using large amounts of land for biofuels and coal-to-liquid fuels would increase emissions without carbon capture and storage, according to the study.
Where your BTUs come from. This graphic shows the delivery of energy from primary fuel sources shown on the left.
(Credit: Lawrence Livermore Lab, Department of Energy)Meanwhile, making large numbers of electric light-duty vehicles will require advances in battery performance and fuel cells as well as smart-grid technologies to manage the demand.
The authors of "America's Future Energy" said that emerging technologies need to go through pilot tests in the next five years to demonstrate that they can be commercially viable and done at large scale 10 years from now.
The report said the most high-priority "demonstration stage" technologies are carbon capture and storage, evolutionary nuclear, cellulosic ethanol, and advanced light-duty vehicles. Long-term research and development is required for producing liquid fuels from renewable resources, advanced batteries and fuel cells, large-scale electricity storage, enhanced geothermal, and advanced solar photovoltaics.
To overcome technical and other barriers, the study said that policies and regulations and other incentives need to put in place.
"Actions taken between now and 2020 to develop and demonstrate several key technologies will largely determine options for many decades to come. Therefore, it is imperative that the technology development and demonstration activities identified in this report be started soon, even though some will be expensive and not all will be successful: some may fail, prove uneconomic, or be overtaken by better technologies," according to the report.
If you think the lack of technology is the reason we don't have more wind and solar power, think again.
The National Research Council on Monday published a report that finds that renewable energy sources--wind, solar, geothermal, wave, tidal, and biomass--could supply 10 percent of U.S. electricity supply in 2020 with existing technology. Today, renewable energies excluding hydro power are about 2.5 percent of the U.S. electricity mix.
Getting to 20 percent of U.S. electricity by 2035 is possible with sustained policies and investment, it said. To achieve more than 50 percent of electricity generation from renewable sources, excluding hydro power, beyond 2035 would require new scientific advances and dramatic changes in the power-generating industry, the report concludes.
The primary barriers to deeper penetration in the near and medium term are cost, policy, and insufficient transmission lines, the report finds.
More solar power in the cards?
(Credit: Martin LaMonica/CNET)The study, called "Electricity from Renewable Resources, Status, Prospects, and Impediments," was done to inform politicians on energy policy, which is in a crucial period. The House and Senate are considering bills to mandate more renewable energy and efficiency. The House bill includes regulations to cap greenhouse gas emissions. The National Research Council is the main operating agency of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering.
Of the technologies available, wind and solar offer the most potential in the U.S., which has good resources for both in different regions. Conventional geothermal and biomass resources are also ready for deployment. Enhanced geothermal--which involves fracturing rock underground and injecting water to heat it--and wave and tidal power are still not commercially available.
On-land wind farms could provide 10 percent to 20 percent of current electricity demand. The only technological improvements in the short term revolve around optimizing performance of components and better integrating wind into the grid.
Solar energy--both photovoltaic panels and concentrating solar power systems--"is capable, in principle, of providing enormous amounts of electricity without stress to the resource base."
To increase the penetration of renewable energy beyond 20 percent, the report says that energy storage technologies are required. Smart-grid technology to better manage the flow of energy from variable resources like the sun and wind is also necessary.
Technology, policy, capital
Costs for solar, wind, and other renewable energy sources are going down but are still more expensive than fossil fuel-derived electricity.
The report says that consistent policies, such as renewable portfolio standards, are required to attract investment in renewable energy, which should improve the technology and bring down costs. Attaching a price for releasing large amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere through carbon regulations will make cleaner forms of energy generation than fossil fuels more cost-competitive, it said.
"Currently, use of renewable resources for electricity generation generally incurs higher direct costs than those currently seen for fossil-based electricity generation, whose price does not now include the costs associated with carbon emissions and other unpriced externalities. Some form of market intervention or combination of incentives is thus required to enable renewable resources to contribute substantially to the national electrical energy generation mix," according to the report.
Another key challenge related to cost is industrial scale. Without an increase in manufacturing capacity for energy products, it will be difficult for renewable energy to move beyond single-digit contributions, the study said.
For example, a Department of Energy report calculated that to increase wind power to 20 percent of U.S. electricity would require construction of 100,000 wind turbines, an additional $100 billion of capital, and 140,000 workers in manufacturing and transmission upgrades.
On an environmental level, a significant barrier to wind and solar is conflict over how land is used for power plants and new transmissions lines.
The report says that investments in research and development are needed now to improve costs and for enabling technologies, such as storage and grid management. "Overall, technological developments and consistent policy will need to be coordinated with manufacturing capacity and access to capital in order to accelerate deployment of renewable electricity."
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