In a comment to my last post, Ben Harris suggests that I read Cape Wind by Williams and Whitcomb. I haven’t read the book yet, but I did read up on Cape Wind.

The outcry against Cape Wind is a travesty. It comes down to an unpleasant choice of how we get the energy we need. We have to satisfy our rising energy needs somehow. If you’re opposed to using local energy sources to fulfill our energy needs, you have to be in favor of either reduction of our energy needs (which have been strictly increasing for all of recorded history) or getting the energy from somewhere else.

The first choice, reducing energy consumption, requires either widespread, voluntary efficiency gains among the populace, forced efficiency gains via government intervention, or the arrival of the hard times. I think it would be imprudent to plan on any of those events occurring. Our understanding of efficiency improvements falls vastly short of what we need. Even the NPR-listening Prius drivers among us are making decisions around the level of 20% improvements by 10% of the population, while the population continues to increase. We’re excited about skyscrapers with green roofs, which collect water for irrigation of the plants in the lobby, and building-integrated solar, which can supply maybe 1% of the heating and cooling requirements of the building. We’re not thinking about changes on the level of, “You don’t get to heat your house in the winter any more.”

Forced efficiency gains via government intervention seems equally unlikely to me. The current US administration argues about whether we should mandate minor increases in fuel efficiency, while allowing exemptions for vehicles over 6000 pounds. The most recent increase was from 21.6 mpg to 24 mpg, and it doesn’t take effect until 2011. 10% decrease mandated in 4 years, while our vehicle usage continues to increase? This will not solve the problem.

The arrival of the hard times may well solve the problem, but I would strongly prefer to avoid having to affiliate myself with a local warlord in order to get bread, watery gruel, and a burlap sack to keep me warm in the winter. I don’t think that constraining energy usage by simply failing to build more power plants, be they clean or dirty, is likely to be an optimal solution.

If we won’t reduce our energy consumption, we need to get more energy somewhere. There’s a temptation to think that we don’t need to get energy locally, but everywhere is local to someone. If we had an uninhabited Oil Planet, we would need only design a sturdy pipeline to connect the two planets (akin to the Moon Bomb). The location of the Oil Planet is currently unknown, and nobody wants a coal plant in their backyard any more than I do. At some level, we need to collect energy locally.

It’s reasonable to debate the resolution of “local.” Do I need to get all my energy from my state? My town? My house? My desk?

Right now, eastern Massachusetts imports the vast majority of its energy. In Boston, the major electricity source is the Mystic Generating Station in Everett (you know, the pixelated section on Google maps, just north of the river). According to the Energy Information Administration, the 2600 MW Everett plant currently runs off of natural gas from the Gulf Coast, Canada, and the Appalachian Basin. Additional natural gas in liquid form is brought from foreign sources to the LNG terminal in Everett. According to the EIA, we also burn coal from West Virginia and Colorado. Coal is burned in the Brayton Point plant in Somerset, Massachusetts.

The limited availability of fossil fuels, the pollutants released by their combustion, and my assumption that if I don’t want my tap water tainted with mercury runoff from strip-mining coal, the residents of West Virginia probably don’t either, lead me to believe that we need to look for local alternatives for energy.If you’re going to satisfy your energy needs locally, what’s the best choice?

In Massachusetts, we get about 40% of our electricity from natural gas, 50% from coal and petroleum-fired power plants, and 5% from nuclear power. The remaining 5% is from hydro, solar, and wind. Nationally, the percentages are similar, but more hydro and nuclear, less natural gas.

The non-renewable options aren’t pleasant. We don’t have coal, oil or gas– you have to go at least as far as western Pennsylvania to find it. Robert Milici of the USGS says of the areas east and north of the Appalachians that, “these provinces do not produce oil or gas and are not currently viewed as prospective for oil and gas.” The USGS only studies 5 major coal beds; nobody is digging up coal in Massachusetts.

Nuclear power is waning in New England. Since the 1991 shutdown of the 540 MW Rowe nuclear plant in western Massachusetts, there is only one nuclear power plant in the state (Pilgrim, nominally 690 MW, in Plymouth), and one just over the state line in Seabrook, New Hampshire. The Seabrook plant is larger, nominally 1150 MW. Another New England nuclear plant, the 900 MW Maine Yankee plant in Wiscasset, was shut down in 1997 due to lack of economic viability. The spent fuel rods are still there under armed guard, as they will likely remain until at least 2017. There are two plants, totaling around 2000 MW, operating in Connecticut and one 650 MW plant in southwestern Vermont. There are currently no new nuclear plants planned [PDF] for New England.

There’s not much opportunity for large hydropower in Massachusetts– we’re a mostly flat state, especially toward the eastern end. The Idaho National Laboratory puts its total estimate of hydropower potential in Massachusetts at 132 MW, which is about a third the size of Cape Wind. Furthermore, the estimate include sites like Moody Street in Waltham, that face worse public acceptance problems than Cape Wind.

That leaves solar and wind. Solar power is great, but New England is not particularly sunny, compared to, say, Arizona or New Mexico. Cape Wind is proposing a wind farm that peaks at 420 MW. According to the Prometheus Institute in Cambridge, total US installations of solar this year are around 120 MW, with the bulk of them in California and New Jersey. (Sorry, Keith, for using peak numbers– I know you find it galling. Post better comparisons in the comments or, better yet, start your own blog.) The point is that on the scale of renewable energy projects, the Cape Wind installation would be massive. (On the scale of coal fired power plants, which currently top out around 1500 MW, it would not be that big.)

In eastern Massachusetts, wind power is a good choice. From a power density perspective, the site chosen by Cape Wind is in a zone characterized as “excellent” by the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative (MTC, hereafter) and verified by the National Renewable Energy Lab. (Disclosure: the company for which I work has recently worked on a technology assessment for the MTC, and we may do more for them. However, I have not been personally involved in any of the work, it hasn’t involved wind, and I didn’t know that MTC had done this study until a few minutes ago.)

While I do agree with Robert Kennedy, Jr.’s assertion in the New York Times that the project ought not to be enabled by government subsidies of $241 million dollars, his characterization of Nantucket Sound as a pristine region is ridiculous. I’ve been there; what I recall was a bunch of champions from the Buzzards Bay Power Squadron running two-stroke engines at full throttle. Maybe if I had a compound in Hyannis like that of Mr. Kennedy, I would feel differently, but I’m in the same boat as the roughly 6.4 million non-Kennedy residents of Massachusetts.

Currently, opposing wind power in eastern Massachusetts is extremely likely to result in the construction of new fossil fuel power plants like the plant in Everett. The cost of wind power incurred on the neighborhood is different from the cost incurred by a coal plant. If your kid breathes enough crap out of a smokestack for long enough, your kid will die. I won’t say that the visual damage done by wind turbines is nothing, but if forced to make the choice, as we are, I think choosing your view at the price of the lungs of some kid growing up across the street from the Brayton Point plant in Somerset is unconscionable.

The state approved the Cape Wind project in March of 2007, though the project is in federal waters, so state review is less significant than federal review. The Boston Globe predicts federal review to be complete in mid-2008. I would be proud to live in the state that supported the first offshore wind farm in the nation.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 3rd, 2007 at 6:09 pm and is filed under Alternative energy, Cambridge, Cape Wind, Engineering, Green power, Hard times, Massachusetts, Renewable energy, Wind. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.