Government: The Solution or the Problem?
By: Kenneth J. Reuter Jr., Guest Contributor
The world is consuming electricity at an accelerated rate. You can’t go anywhere in your house without finding some device requiring electricity. Driving somewhere? It’s everywhere in your car, the windows, seats, nav systems, engine controls- they all require electricity. Trains, planes and automobiles will not function without electricity. HVAC systems, even those involving gas and oil burners, require electricity to properly regulate temperature, fans, pumps and fuel consumption. Behind every electrically driven device lies a network of generation, transmission and distribution systems. Nothing electric works without all three.
Our modern life needs an ever-growing amount of electricity. How are these increased demands being met? What role should ‘government’ play in all this? Are current policies providing a supply solution or are they becoming more of the problem? This article is focused on generation as ‘the’ most controversial component of the electricity equation.
Everyone agrees that we want clean air, water and an environment that promotes good health and welfare. That is obvious. What is missing from many of the conversations about the environment is the ‘how.’ How will we provide an abundance of electricity without creating adverse environmental consequences? Political rhetoric has manifested into ‘The Green New Deal’ or ‘War on Fossil Fuels.’ Many of the most boisterous voices, who seem to own the microphone, have little to no technical background to solve such challenges nor do they outline a strategic course necessary to arrive at a good result. A veritable verbal freight train racing uncontrollably towards an unidentified solution.
We need a fact-based strategy for how to arrive at a sound destination. Instead, we are speeding to build costly Offshore Wind Farms and other non-dispatchable generation, such as solar, while simultaneously racing to shut down existing coal plants, which produce a quarter of all electric generation in the United States. These same policies are pushing EV mandates and seek to abolish gas stoves and appliances without consideration of the environmental cost of the mining and earth carving required to facilitate their unrealistic objectives.
There is a relatively clean and viable option to replace the more polluting coal fired generation plants. It is the natural gas-fired combined cycle turbine configuration. The technology is proven, refined, safe, and produces a fraction of the pollutants found in a coal fired base plant. Currently, natural gas contributes over 35% of electric generation in the United States and is uber-abundant in our own country.
Equally promising is the cleanest of all the electric generation options – nuclear power. Nuclear power contributes approximately 20% of electric generation in the US today. We are making great strides in this technology to make it safer and a more flexible component of our electric generation. Today’s engineering is focused on making nuclear options very safe compared to the older designs which dot our landscapes. The SMR or Small Modular Reactor is small and can be factory built and shipped to a generation site. Engineers are working vigorously to refine their design and make them marketable.
In short, there are options advancing at an accelerated rate that must be considered for the long term, as opposed to relying on extremely costly, non-dispatchable generation whose capacity is intermittent and less predictive. Before prioritizing the development of very expensive Offshore Wind farms, or mandating what kind of car we must drive, government should devise a longer term, forward thinking electric generation strategy aimed at insuring abundant clean energy carefully and systematically thought through. You won’t find this in the current government solutions, which are not based on the reality of balancing both current and developing technology. Remember: technology must drive change and evolution. Not government mandates!!
Kenneth Reuter Jr. has worked for the past 40 years in the electric industry and now consults globally through his business, Resilience Energy.