Here in America we flip the switch and the lights come on. When there are major power outages, it makes national news. Utility companies across the nation try to keep their customers satisfied with cheap, dependable power. And all too often, that power is coal.
Coal is bad for several major reasons. First, the mining--whether deep shaft or mountain-top removal--is harmful to people and the environment. Second, endless coal trains rumble across the nation west to east, to feed the coal power plants generating electricity. Those diesel train engines are not environmentally friendly. Third, when burned, coal releases a number of nasties that harm those downwind. It releases mercury, causes acid rain and respiratory problems, and creates the "solar dimming" phenomenon that obscured the sun in Beijing, until China shut down factories for the Olympics.
Last and worst, coal releases prodigious amounts of carbon dioxide gas when burned, such that if coal burning worldwide isn't soon curtailed and eventually ended, nothing else we do to stop green house gas emissions will matter. That is the scale of the threat coal has for earth today.
Let's return to electric power generation. Juneau, Alaska is in the news because the isolated city uses hydroelectric power exclusively, and an avalanche destroyed the transmission towers and lines from the dam to the city. It will take three months to rebuild, during which time the city is getting by with expensive fossil-fueled generators. The cost is so great that people voluntarily reduced power consumption in ways that would be unthinkable to most Americans: candlelight in the evening, hanging out the wash in a cloudy wet climate, doing without appliances.
The people of Juneau know they will return soon to their non-polluting power supply. Moving to the lower 48, most areas are on THE GRID, the network of electric transmission lines that covers the nation. A variety of power sources feed the grid and there is some ability to move that power around should any specific source fail.
Most of us have no idea how the grid actually works. It is a part of the infrastructure as significant as roads and as ubiquitous, but as long as the power lines don't run through our backyards, we ignore them. We ignore them until there is an avalanche, or more commonly, an ice storm, that can take down neighborhood lines and giant towers in just hours, affecting hundreds of thousands of households. Many towns have had to get by with emergency generators and public shelters for weeks at a time while repairs were made to restore electric power.
The grid may be interconnected, but the utility services that run the power plants are discrete entities. In Iowa, there are many rural electric cooperatives supplying power to farms and small towns. Numerous cities have their own municipal electric services which are also not-for-profit. Then there are the publicly owned and traded power companies serving many cities and rural areas as well.
The map of service coverage in Iowa recently published by the Des Moines Register (April 27, 2008) shows two public companies, each as several large "blobs" of service area with tentacles snaking out into rural areas otherwise served by the co-ops. There is no smooth geographical demarcation of their territory, and the tentacles of each snake around and past each other.
The map also shows a few small "blobs" of service areas scattered about the state representing service by municipal utilities. I happen to live in one of those places, but my natural gas service is provided by one of the for-profit utilities.
Taken together, these electric utilities obtain most of their energy from burning coal, with lesser amounts from natural gas plants and nuclear plants. Wind farms are developing wonderfully well and are expected to become a significant part of the mix in the near future. It can't happen too rapidly!
As naturally occurring resources go, Iowa's abundant wind power is equivalent to Juneau's hydro power. Water behind a dam is stored power. Until wind power storage technology is adequately developed, it isn't possible today to use wind as the only source for electricity. As wind farms become more numerous and geographically distributed, the power they supply to the grid, as a whole, will have smaller variation. Wind speeds at a variety of locales will average out.
Which brings us back to coal and the challenge all Iowa electric utilities face: how to transition from fossil fuels to renewables without dallying around for 50 or 100 years doing it. Iowa is colder in winter than Juneau, and far hotter in the summer. Instead of 30,000 people, we have about three million. What to do? There is a lot that can be done, and the more one searches for ways, the more opportunities are found. A subsequent post will share what I have been learning.
Meanwhile, the first step is to understand where electric power comes from in your town, your county, your state, your nation. Then, goals must be set in terms of emissions reductions and when those must be achieved. This may change as more scientific information becomes available. For the last couple of decades, the science emerging by the month only shows an increasingly urgent global situation. We aren't in a position to choose the pace of change that suits us. Like the avalanche near Juneau, nature has spoken. The atmosphere is more fragile and in worse shape than we ever thought possible just a decade ago--or just a year ago.
Concurrently with the above steps of understanding status and goals for electric power, we can be building and start implementing our arsenal of alternatives to fossil fuels and ways of reducing power consumption. The good news is, we may not have to use only candles at night or hang laundry on the back porch to keep it out of the rain, as in Juneau. Provided we act now.
Thanks for explaining the power generation issue-- as best any one can understand this tangled issue. I live in Wesr Virginia where our land is being recontoured by mountaintop removal. Where we once had mountains, we now have golf courses but no one to use them? We also have wind farms and they are magnificent; but people have found a way to criticize them. First, there wasn't enough wind for our local utilities to feel it worth the effort so out-of-state utilities moved in to use our wind for their gain. It's a shame that even gas and electricity has to be "transmitted" all over the country rather than put to local use.
What has happened to conservation of energy? I keep my usage to a minimum and I go through regular bouts with both the gas and electric companies because I "should" be using more gas or electricity.
Posted by: Carol Clevenger | May 05, 2008 at 05:51 AM