Behind this summer’s hot weather lie lessons that both electricity consumers and power producers should take to heart. Among these, there’s the irony of the myth that the future lies with nuclear power. There’s the quite stunning value of the innovative Smart Grid that Chattanooga’s EPB is putting into place. There’s the distortion of TVA charging more for green energy. And there’s the neglected payoff of a concerted conservation, power-load-management ethic.
Each of these pieces, and the interplay among them, would make good sense if the pieces of our energy puzzle were put together in a cogent public policy that would give the public the information and price incentives that are necessary to close the loop. Problem is, there is no comprehensive plan in place to keep consumers aware of the forces that determine their energy bill and, more importantly, that should shape their energy future.
When nuclear tapers off
We can dive into this energy thicket on the news that TVA cannot use a large portion of its nuclear power to cope with the season’s highest air conditioning peak demands – precisely at the time when TVA and ratepayers would most want to benefit from peak nuclear production.
TVA cannot run its nuclear plants full throttle, officials say, because the water-cooling loop for its nuclear boilers and steam-driven turbines would discharge such a torrent of hot water to the Tennessee River that it would cause massive fish kills and damage the river’s ecological health.
That’s a further irony on the notion of that nuclear power is a painlessly cheap power to produce. Nuclear power is the cheapest power to produce, but only if we discount nuclear’s gargantuan multi-billion-dollar-per-unit construction costs, its environmental impact, and the still unsolved riddle of safe disposal of nuclear waste with a half-life of thousands of years.
Dirty, costly alternatives
Since TVA has to cut back energy production this week at its three nuclear units at Browns Ferry by one-third to one-half of capacity, for example, it is being forced to use dirty coal units; and/or to spend millions of dollars a week more on expensive peak power turbines fired by natural gas; and/or to purchase more expensive power from neighboring utilities with high-cost, surplus peak power.
Several ironies attend this dilemma. TVA’s use of its older coal-fired plants involves plants that have never been fitted with sulfur dioxide scrubbers (never mind the long-neglected 1977 amendments to the Clean Air Act that require scrubbers under New Source Review standards for such retrofitted old plants). These dirty old plants are cheaper only because their vast, lung-and-plant damaging pollution is simply shifted to the public’s health cost, rather than paid upfront out of TVA’s and ratepayers’ pockets.
If these plants properly had the legally mandated pollution scrubbers, they – like the nuclear plants whose construction and waste disposal costs and risks are not adequately considered – probably would cost about the same, if not more, than the green power for which TVA charges voluntary consumers a premium.
The dumb irony of this upside-down financial and environmental equation is mind-boggling. Why charge consumers more for using clean, green power than for dirty power or risky nuclear power. That makes no sense. The price incentive should be to purchase green power at lower costs, thus increasing its economy-of-scale factor, and accounting for the presently displaced costs for coal and nuclear. That that does not seem financially feasible is emblematic of this perverse paradigm, one built into the system simply by wrongly shifted environmental and public health costs.
The larger dynamic, fostered by EPB’s game-changing Smart Grid, makes it clear that the dawn of green power and small-generation/co-generation partners, where every consumer can use solar power and peak-power-use shifting strategies, is on the near horizon.
The Smart Grid future
The Smart Grid, a national model now nearing completion of the fiber-optic cable, Internet-connected infrastructure, will allow every EPB customer to remotely program and schedule energy-using systems and appliances in homes and businesses. We then will quickly learn to shift or cycle significant volumes of energy use to off-peak or interruptible hours, at new rates that reflect the lower cost at off-peak times to produce and purchase power. That will spur more focused energy conservation as well.
TVA plans to aid the Smart Grid – the EPB will be the largest utility in the country to introduce it – through parallel upgrades to the agency’s transmission system to smooth out energy-using bumps and peaks on a gridwide basis.
The convergence of these systems will jump-start time-of-use energy rates to smooth expensive power peaks, and reinforce the overall value of conservation basics, from insulation and high-efficiency appliances to advanced consumer co-generation strategies (i.e., solar and small-hydro interchange).
This won’t alter the current dilemma with summer air-conditioning, winter heating peaks, and the soon-to-arrive plug-in electric cars. But in just a few years, energy efficiency and green energy should assume a much more meaningful position, and more personal control of energy costs.