An American Way for a Zero Carbon Future

By

Roy Morrison, Director, Office for Sustainability, Southern New Hampshire University

If we’re concerned about global warming, endless wars for oil, nuclear proliferation, and our economic future then we need to face four very convenient truths.

Combining four very American enthusiasms: the automobile, electricity, free renewable fuel, and market opportunities, makes a zero carbon future ours for the taking.

That’s right. In this zero carbon future we can drive with no gas and no pollution, turn on our computers to connect us to a smart global grid, and get checks in the mail every month for our troubles.

The technologies are at hand or need just the slightest push. New plug-in electric cars using lithium-ion batteries will be charged at night from a renewable grid and help provide peak daytime power while we’re at work. This is doable. Just a small percentage of our millions of cars can give us much of the energy needed to balance and stabilize a renewable energy grid system.

Copious wind resources on farm and ranch land from the Dakotas to Texas will be combined with solar electric concentrators and PV panels from the South West and local PV arrays covering our roofs and parking lots. DC power lines, underground if necessary, will facilitate moving the power to where it’s needed.

The system will be integrated and coordinated through a smart electric grid using real time price control to optimize energy use and energy generation. We’ll buy power  when it’s cheap, and sell it back into the grid when it’s expensive.

By using renewable energy hedges, like the one negotiated between Southern New Hampshire University and PPM Energy, every energy consumer and car and PV panel owner will have a profitable stake in our common renewable energy future. We can use our energy purchases and investments in plug in vehicles and photovoltaics to fix our net annual energy expenses for a generation, and receive monthly income for buying our grid tied cars and home PV systems.

We don’t need to subsidize nukes and watch more countries build bombs while we pile up the waste.  We don’t need to subsidize corn ethanol and turn food for a hungry world into fuel that raises food prices for the poor and does little to reduce net carbon. We don’t need to lop off the top of our mountains and subsidize “clean coal”, or try to capture and inject carbon dioxide into the ground in the hopes it will stay there for five-hundred years. We don’t have to send our kids and loved ones to fight wars for oil when we have more than enough energy from the sun and wind.

And yes there’s more. Combined heat and power that turns every heating system into a micro-generator, and district heating from existing urban power plants should play a part. Compressed air, capacitors, and flywheels can help balance the renewable grid. We need to adopt high efficiency standards and zero pollution industrial ecological practices using “waste” from one process as input for another. We can use duck weed and water hyacinths fed by our sewage plants and agricultural runoff to produce enormous amounts of biomass for bio-fuels.

We can make the whole thing work rather painlessly by phasing out income taxes, abolishing the IRS, and phasing in ecological consumption taxes on all goods and services. If something pollutes more, it will cost more. If something pollutes les, it will cost less. The market price, not just regulation will tell us what to do.

Wake up America. Let’s use our cars, electricity, free renewable fuel, and the market to build a zero carbon, sustainable, and peaceful future.
________________________

Roy Morison is Director of the Office for Sustainability at Southern New Hampshire University. His latest book is Markets, Democracy & Survival available online at www.RMAenergy.net. He can be contacted at <sustainability@snhu.edu>. www.roymorrison.net

Fact check:

1. Renewable Resource Technologies and Potential:
 A.. Excellent summary discussion of  technologies and U.S. renewable resource potential and plans to integrate and coordinate renewabletems is
Carbon-Free and Nuclear Free: A Roadmap for U.S. Energy Policy by Arjun Makhijani, Ph.D.   http://wwww.ieer.org

i. Solar (From Page 43):
The semi-arid and deserareas in the Southwest and West not only have the greatest incident energy, but also the greatest number of cloudless days. Those regions are therefore excellent candidates for central station solar PV, especially since this technology, unlike fossil fuel and nuclear plants, does not require cooling water. At 15 percent efficiency, a square meter of land with insolation at about seven kilowatt hours per square meter would generate about 400 kilowatt hours per year. Hence, an amount equal to about a trillion kilowatt hours – one-fourth of today’s annual electricity output – could be produced on about 650,000 acres – a square with a side of just over 30 miles. With ancillary facilities, it would be a square with a side of about 35 miles.

        ii. Wind:  (From page 31-32)

Table 3-3: Wind Energy Potential in the Top 20 Contiguous States, in Billion Kilowatt Hours/Year
State Wind potential

North Dakota 1,210  Texas 1,190 Kansas 1,070 South Dakota 1,030 Montana 1,020
Nebraska 868 Wyoming 747 Oklahoma 725 Minnesota 657 Iowa 551 Colorado 481
New Mexico 435 Idaho 73 Michigan 65 New York 62 Illinois 61 California 59
Wisconsin 58 Maine 56Missouri 52

Total 10,470

U.S. elec. generation, 2005:  4,000 (rounded)

Potential percent of 2005 generation 261 percent

Wind energy generation, 2006 about 30 (0.7 percent)

Sources: AWEA 2006b; EIA AER 2006 Table 8.2a, AWEA 2007, and EIA AEO 2006 Table 16.
Note: For wind class category 3 and higher. Land use exclusions such as national parks, urban areas, etc., have been factored in to the estimate.

It is clear that overall potential is vast – over two-and-a-half times total U.S.
electricity generation in the United States in 2005. The wind energy potential
in each one of the top six states – North Dakota, Texas, Kansas, South Dakota,Montana, Nebraska – is greater than the total nuclear electricity generation from  all 103 operating U.S. nuclear power plants. The wind energy resource is quite sufficient to supply the entire electricity requirement of the country for some time to come under any scenario, if total potential were the only consideration.Of course, it is not. Intermittency is a critical issue. Secondly, the geographic location of the wind resource is another potential constraint. It is concentrated in the Midwest and the Rocky Mountain states while the population of the UnitedStates is concentrated along the coasts. Figures 3-2(a) and 3-2(b) illustrate this issue; the former shows population density and the latter shows the map of wind energy.2 (see color insert) Tapping into a large amount of the high-density landbased wind resource will require transmission infrastructure to take the electricity to transmission system hubs from where it would be taken to population centers. Transmission corridors exist going eastwards and westwards from thecenter of the country. But the wind resource is dispersed and it must be deliveredto the hubs. Second, the capacity of some of the lines to carry the electricity would have to be expanded. The maps illustrate the importance of developing offshore wind energy resources, which are closer to the large population and
electricity consumption centers of the United States.

One advantage of the geographic concentration of wind resources in the continental United States is that much of it is located in the Midwestern Farm Belt.Since crops can be planted and cattle can graze right up to the wind turbine towers,wind farms are quite compatible with growing crops and ranching. They can provide a reliable and steady source of income to farmers and ranchers, insulating them, to some extent, from the vagaries of commodity markets.

A-1. For a European Renewable Grid model see work of Gregor Czisch

“Analysis:  A Super grid for Europe”  By STEFAN NICOLA
UPI Energy Correspondent Published: Nov. 2, 2007 at 10:39 AM

BERLIN, Nov. 2 (UPI) -- Europe’s electricity grids are old and often not capable of providing trans-border, much less trans-continent energy security. Yet one German energy expert has come up with a visionary scenario that would overhaul the grids, increase energy security and at the same time help avoid climate change.

Gregor Czisch’s dissertation has rattled the energy world. Its main claim: Given the political will, Europe could within a few years meet 100 percent of its electricity needs from renewable energy sources, at no cost difference to today’s fossil fuel-based system. The scenario includes the construction of a high-voltage direct current European super grid linking all countries in Europe, and the continent externally to Africa and the Middle East.

"We have the technical abilities to build such a super grid within three to five years," Czisch, an energy systems modeling expert at the University of Kassel, told United Press International in a telephone interview. "We just need to commit to this big long-term strategy."
http://www.upi.com/International_Security/Energy/Analysis/2007/11/02/analysis_a_super_grid_for_europe/5729/

.  B. National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) DOE
http://www.nrel.gov/  

Renewable Resources Could Provide 99 Percent of U.S. Electricity Generation
by 2020

Draft NREL report is available at: http://www.nirs.org/alternatives/factoid18.htm
The draft document had earlier been available for inspection at:
<http://www.nrel.gov/analysis/tech_potential/pdfs/tech_potential_table.pdf>

C. A Solar Grand Plan: Scientific American
By 2050 solar power could end US dependence on foreign oil and slash greenhouse gas emissions. Dec 16, 2007
www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=a-solar-grand-plan - 49k - Cached - Similar pages

D. Energy Storage Developments
Energy storage nears its day in the sun: Scientific American
Feb 22, 2008  www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=energy-storage-nears-its - 40k

D-1 Powering GM's Electric Vehicles By Kevin Bulli. MIT Technology Review  Thursday, January 11, 2007
“Recent advances in battery chemistry and systems design could lead to working prototypes by year's end.”
www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?ch=specialsections&sc=batteries&id=18054 -

E. Renewable energy hedges
SNHU Goes Carbon-Neutral; Southern New Hampshire University
SNHU Goes Carbon-Neutral. Saturday, May 19, 2007. SNHU Communications Office. Southern New Hampshire University is the first carbon-neutral university ...
www.snhu.edu/6886.asp - 16k
See also www.ecopowerhedge.com and  www.rmaenergy.net

F. Ecological Taxation
Markets, Democracy & Survival by Roy Morrison
www.rmaenergy.net

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