Hawaii
Energy Policy Forum > 2002
Articles
Fighting for America's Energy Independence
Matt Bivens
The Nation
April 8, 2002
Byron Dorgan, a North Dakota Democrat, took
to the Senate floor on February 27 with an impassioned plea
for a small
federal subsidy that has fueled an explosion of activity
in the wind-power industry. "Congress is messing around
back and forth, stuttering, and not getting it done," Dorgan
complained. The so-called wind production tax credit (PTC)
Dorgan was championing is tiny as subsidies go -- over a
decade it has cost roughly $55 million -- and remarkably
effective. Wind is the fastest-growing energy industry in
the world, and last year was the US wind-power industry's
best ever, with power capacity equivalent to that of roughly
six coal-fired power plants coming online -- minus coal's
pollution. "The exciting thing is, [wind-power growth]
is happening all over the country -- it's not just California," says
Christine Real de Azua, a spokeswoman for the American Wind
Energy Association.
Nevertheless, the wind PTC struggled
to get a proper hearing. Finally, on March 8, Congress approved
a meager two-year
extension, which wind's supporters had tacked onto the unemployment
insurance bill. That's a short time frame for investors to
do much planning, though, so Dorgan and others continue to
push for at least a five-year extension. Judged just on its
merits, this would probably pass with bipartisan support.
But Congress is tentatively committed to gargantuan new subsidies
to coal, oil, gas and nuclear power -- the only disagreement
so far is exactly how obscenely enormous they will be. So
the five-year wind PTC will be held hostage, to provide green
window dressing for less admirable legislation. The Republican
energy plan, touted in the President's State of the Union
address, would dole out $35.6 billion over ten years -- or
about $125 per American -- to the oil, gas, coal and nuclear
industries. The Democratic Senate energy bill is larded with
almost as many tax-funded mega-giveaways to polluters. By
contrast, the wind PTC has, to date, cost every American
about 19 cents. The good news is that wind power and other
renewables don't have to depend on federal leadership. An
energy revolution of wind, solar and clean-burning hydrogen
fuels is fast approaching -- thanks to engineers and entrepreneurs,
farsighted state governments and business realities: Renewables
have been steadily dropping in price. They are winning victories
in the marketplace even while swimming against the federal
riptide of subsidies to Big Oil and King Coal.
'Greenery,
Market Forces, Innovation' America is the Persian Gulf of
wind. The Energy Department estimates that wind in
the Dakotas alone could meet two-thirds of America's electricity
needs; Texas could meet the last one-third. But there are
good winds across America -- in a ranking of the top states
for wind, California, the wind-power poster-child, comes
in at a lowly seventeenth. Solar power is equally bountiful:
The Union of Concerned Scientists says 100 square miles in
Nevada could produce enough solar electricity to power the
nation. Worldwide, solar -- like wind -- is experiencing
growth rates reminiscent of the computer industry. Germany
has harnessed a world-leading 6,000 megawatts of wind power
-- roughly equal to twenty coal-fired power plants -- and
has decided to phase out nuclear power entirely by 2025.
Japan and Germany are putting photovoltaic solar panels on
thousands of roofs, while Spain and the Philippines last
year agreed to bring solar electricity to 400,000 rural Filipinos.
A similar program has been under way in South Africa since
1999, with Nelson Mandela's vocal support. And Ireland just
announced what will be the world's largest offshore wind
park.
Eddie O'Connor, managing director of Ireland's utility
Eirtricity, says offshore wind could provide two-thirds of
Europe's electricity
by 2020. "The resource is there, the technology is proven,
the costs continue to drop -- all that is needed is the political
will to see it happen," O'Connor says. Most important,
wind and solar power can now be efficiently stored by using
them to create hydrogen, a fuel that generates only drinkable
water as waste. Electricity generated from wind or sunlight
can be used to zap water -- "electrolyze" it --
to harvest the H from H2O. That hydrogen can then be used
in fuel cells to produce heat and electricity or to power
automobiles. Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute envisions
wind farms producing electricity by day and hydrogen for
cars by night. "None of this is as pie-in-the-sky as
it sounds," reported Fortune magazine in November 2001. "Potent
commercial forces are bringing the hydrogen economy along
faster than anyone thought possible only a few years ago."
Britain
has already announced that every tenth car sold there by
decade's end must be powered by hydrogen or some other
zero-emissions fuel. Hydrogen fuel-cell systems can be found
across New York City -- from the CondÈ Nast building
to sewage treatment plants to a Central Park police station
-- and across America -- from a post office in Alaska to
the space shuttle. Automobile and oil companies have set
up well-funded hydrogen-fuels divisions, and major car companies
are racing to bring a hydrogen car to market. Toyota intends
to start selling one in January of next year. "Greenery,
market forces and innovation are reshaping our industry and
propelling us inexorably toward hydrogen energy," a
Texaco executive told Congress last year. The executive director
of advanced technology vehicles at General Motors agreed,
telling a petrochemicals conference, "Our long-term
vision is of a hydrogen economy."
No less a person than Henry Ford's great-grandson, Ford Motor
chairman William Ford, says hydrogen will put an end to "the
100-year reign of the internal-combustion engine." Costs
and True Costs Twenty years ago, a kilowatt-hour (kWh) from
sunlight cost about $2.50. Today's photovoltaics turn out
kilowatt-hours for 20-25 cents -- a tenfold drop in cost,
but still expensive. For this reason, solar is still dependent
on government support. The Energy Department has a much-ballyhooed "Million
Solar Roofs Initiative" -- but it has no real money.
Instead, solar is being brought in by innovative local governments,
especially in energy-anxious California. The Sacramento Municipal
Utility District leads the nation with ten megawatts of solar
power installed, and last year it tripled its staff and contractors
to reduce a six-month backlog of residents eager to buy its
subsidized solar roofs. San Francisco voters in November
approved a $100 million bond issue to install up to twenty
megawatts of solar roofs on schools and thirty megawatts
of windmills.
Wind is more competitive than solar; it once cost 40 cents
per kWh but is now routinely under 5 cents -- even without
the wind PTC of 1.7 cents per kWh. With the wind PTC, wind
power is competitive with energy from newly built and supersubsidized
coal (5 cents per kWh) and natural-gas plants (4 cents at
current low gas prices), and is cheaper than energy from
a new nuclear plant (7 cents per kWh). Those ballpark averages
come from the government's Energy Information Administration,
and they reflect what it would cost to set up a new power
plant from scratch and run it. If you leave aside the massive
construction costs of big polluting plants -- which isn't
a very helpful way to think about energy -- then coal, nuclear
power and gas are all in the 2-3 cents per kWh range. But
cents-per-kWh quotes are deceptive: They say nothing about
the economic and human costs of pollution-created problems.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) say
coal dust kills 2,000 miners each year and has cost taxpayers
more than $1 billion a year since the 1970s in related health
and pension benefits. The Justice Department has paid nearly
$200 million in compensation to about 2,000 uranium miners
and millers for their cancer (the mines fed nuclear weapons,
not just nuclear power). The government has also spent $1.48
billion cleaning up uranium mine tailings -- mounds of radioactive
slop left behind in places like Mexican Hat, Utah, and Ambrosia
Lake, New Mexico. And dozens of uranium and coal miners are
hurt and killed each year in accidents. There are other status
quo costs as well.
Last year we depended on foreigners for 55 percent of our
oil. As noted in a bill before Congress to drill in the Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge, America "spends over $100
billion per year for foreign energy and equally significant
amounts on our military presence in the Persian Gulf oil
arena." Status quo costs also include 1.56 billion metric
tons of carbon dioxide -- to say nothing of more poisonous
particulate matter -- put into our air in 2000 alone, just
by energy generation. That in turn drives health problems
like our asthma tragedy: Asthma affects every twentieth American,
including 5 million children. In 1998, the CDC says, asthma
killed more than 5,438, put a half-million people in hospitals
and led to 100 million days of restricted activity. The CDC
puts the asthma price tag for 1998 at $12.7 billion. Find
this dollars-and-cents stuff tedious?
The American Lung Association
cuts to the chase: A March 2001 literature review offers
solid evidence that power plants
are killing us off by the thousands. One study cited attributes
30,100 deaths every year to power plant emissions. While
we're on the subject of costs, consider that the cheapest
and safest form of alternative energy is -- using less. Vice
President Cheney says we will need 1,300 new (300 megawatt)
power plants, "more than one new plant per week, every
week for twenty years running." Put aside for a moment
that those plants could all be wind- or solar-powered, and
consider: Had Cheney consulted less with Enron and more with
the best government scientists, he'd know that a three-year
study found that an efficiency program could cut projected
electricity demand by 20-47 percent -- the equivalent of
from 265 to 610 of Cheney's plants. Bill Prindle, a buildings
expert with the Washington-based Alliance to Save Energy,
has a list of proven efficiencies that slim Cheney's 1,300
plants even further, to just 170. This is not about "conservation" --
i.e., living without air conditioning or making other virtuous
sacrifices -- but about "efficiency" -- high-tech
solutions like better lighting and appliances. Amory Lovins,
co-founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute, calls it installing "negawatts." "Negawatts" are
the cheapest, cleanest, most-quickly-installed -- and, by
the way, the most terrorist-proof -- of all energy sources.
As Lovins has noted, a 0.4 mile-per-gallon improvement in
the average vehicle would save as much oil each year as we'd
ever get from the Arctic refuge. The National Academy of
Sciences concluded in July 2001 that a 40-mpg average, nearly
double what we have now, is within quick reach. Efficiency
spending often pays for itself.
Cool Companies (www.coolcompanies.org),
set up by an efficiency advocacy group, offers such anecdotes
as one about a business
that invested $370,000 in improved lighting, saved $700,000
that year on its energy bill and also racked up productivity
gains of nearly $14 million over the same period. Unfortunately,
the market needs help -- education and a regulatory shove
-- to fully harvest similar savings. That's because those
who design and construct buildings rarely pay the light bill
or the salaries of future tenants. Builders are rewarded
for, and buyers are worried about, keeping initial costs
low -- which are easier to comparison-shop than future life-cycle
costs. An entrepreneur with a choice between wind for 3 cents
and coal for 2.9 cents would buy coal. But a responsible
society would crunch the numbers. Solar power and efficiency
do not have secret costs that include thousands of deaths,
millions of dollars in lost productivity, billions of dollars
sent to the world's oil dictatorships and tens of billions
spent policing the Persian Gulf. This doesn't mean we should
look with loathing upon the oil and coal industries -- after
all, they provide heat for our homes and fuel for our cars.
But it does mean we should question a government that ignores
cleaner alternatives and instead shovels our tax dollars
into pollution-creating furnaces.
Consider the billions of tax dollars we give to polluters
each year. This largesse is sprinkled throughout our tax
code in ways that thwart easy analysis. So estimates of the
subsidies for fossil fuels and nuclear power yield wildly
different numbers -- from the US Energy Information Administration's
conservative estimate of $2.7 billion in 1999 to guesstimates
as high as $80 billion a year. In search of less spongy data,
Norman Myers and Jennifer Kent wrote Perverse Subsidies,
which identified $21 billion the United States hands over
every year to fossil fuels and nuclear power. "If taxpayers
were aware that a good chunk of their taxes were going down
the rathole into these subsidies, they'd be marching on the
Mall," said Myers in an interview. "But it's hard
to get the message to the taxpayer because these subsidies
are so numerous and so varied, and some are so covert." Myers
and Kent also found that renewables get at best a tenth of
the subsidies the dinosaurs do. They calculate that the $90
million or so the United States spends on solar research
wouldn't be enough to pave two miles of Interstate highway.
Meanwhile, the wind PTC costs us somewhere from 0.2 percent
to 0.025 percent of what the supersubsidized polluters pull
down. Critics of renewables have seized upon the wind PTC
to argue that wind is not "market ready." Fair
enough -- but then, what is? Apollo Projects House minority
leader Richard Gephardt called in January for "an 'Apollo
Project' to develop environmentally smart, renewable energy
solutions." Among other things, he proposed 100,000
hydrogen-fueled cars by 2010. Five days later, Gephardt gave
the Democratic response to the State of the Union address
and mumbled something unmemorable about energy. Democratic
Senator John Kerry and independent Jim Jeffords have called
for harvesting 20 percent of our energy from renewables by
2020, and Jeffords has offered an excellent bill to mandate
that. But the emerging "Senate energy bill" is
a much messier offering by Tom Daschle and Jeff Bingaman.
Already Daschle-Bingaman has declined to demand real fuel
efficiency, and had adopted a far less aggressive 10-percent-by-2020
renewables standard -- even while larding in so many new
subsidies for fossil fuels and nuclear power that Public
Citizen derides the bill as "Enron-influenced, Exelon-tested
and Exxon-approved." So the Democrats are slouching
timorously toward perhaps someday actually standing for something.
Gephardt is right, of course: We could still leap to the
front of this coming revolution. An Apollo Project for clean
and secure energy might, for example, put a hydrogen pump
next to every gasoline pump -- doing for hydrogen-fueled
cars what Eisenhower's Interstate highway system did for
gasoline cars. Estimates of the price tag for such a project
range from $20 billion to $100 billion. Or we could kick
off a renewables procurements policy.
The Institute for Energy
and Environmental Research suggests spending $20 billion
a year buying solar panels, fuel cells
and fuel-efficient vehicles for federal and local government
use -- as a way of pushing those technologies into true mass
production. A common response to such proposals is to tsk-tsk: "Prohibitively
expensive!" "The government can't pick winners!" But
we are already showering billions of dollars every year on
the dirty energies of yesteryear. Even if we don't want the
Apollo Project, shouldn't we be dismantling the Anti-Apollo
Project of perverse subsidies? Then again, if we ended the
subsidies to the dinosaurs, who would bankroll the GOP? In
2000, oil and gas gave $13 to presidential candidate George
Bush for every $1 to candidate Al Gore. Coal gave $9 out
of every $10 to Republicans. And according to the Center
for Public Integrity, the top 100 officials in the Bush White
House have the majority of their personal investments, up
to $144.6 million, sunk in the old-guard energy sector. The
Green Scissors Campaign, an alliance of environmentalists
and taxpayer watchdogs, parses the Bush-backed energy bill
giveaways: $21.2 billion for oil and gas, $5.8 billion for
coal, $5.9 billion for utilities and $2.7 billion for nuclear
power. That same oilman's orgy included, for green window
dressing, a wind PTC extension, but while the wind PTC couldn't
get a hearing on its own, nuclear power certainly could.
Last fall House Republicans worked furiously on legislation
that, in the event of a nuclear catastrophe, hands taxpayers
the bill.
This federal insurance program for nuclear power
was approved under rules that keep everyone anonymous --
rules usually
reserved for noncontroversial matters like renaming post
offices. A White House statement praised this sneaky vote: "To
assure the future of nuclear energy, [taxpayer-subsidized]
liability coverage must continue for nuclear activities." (In
other words: The White House concedes that nuclear power
can't survive in a free market.) This subsidy, the Price-Anderson
Act, awaits Senate action along with the rest of the subsidy
binge; it is already part of the Daschle-Bingaman bill. Arguably,
fossil fuels and nuclear deserve no subsidy at all. But with
the "free market" Republicans leading and the Democrats
meekly following, we encourage dangerous, dirty and terrorist-friendly
energy infrastructures (often in the name of security!).
That's not to suggest despair; from California to Europe,
renewables are emerging as the business and political favorites.
But it is to ask, impatiently, how much longer Americans
will be expected to overpay for energy -- in health costs,
environmental damages and misused taxes. The people of America
are being overcharged; it's time to ask for a refund.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Reproduction of material from any AlterNet.org pages without
written permission is strictly prohibited. (c) 2001 Independent
Media Institute. All rights reserved.
|
