Paul Thissen: Innovation in Action

Introduction/Background

My recent editorial from the St Cloud Times, St Paul Villager, Brainerd Dispatch, etc. I will be interested to hear comments.

Rolf Westgard, St Paul (writer is a professional member of the Geological Society of America)

My Idea

In its latest Annual Energy Outlook, the U.S. Energy Information Administration(EIA) is forecasting that U.S. wind turbines will supply 101 billion kilowatt hours(bkwh) of electricity to our electric power grids in the year 2020. That is just 2.14% of total U.S. electric power supply of 4,723 bkwh projected for 2020.

Undeterred by this, our Minnesota legislature has passed SF0004, the Renewable Energy Standard Bill which requires our largest utility, Excel, to get 25% of its energy from wind turbines in the year 2020, ten times the average wind contribution estimated by the EIA.

There’s a reason for the caution about erratic and intermittent wind power by EIA’s analysts. Unlike conventional electricity fuel sources, coal, natural gas, and nuclear, which schedule their down time, wind turns itself on and off, whether the electric grids need it or not. Denmark’s electric grid is widely reported to get 20-30 percent of its fuel from wind energy. It doesn’t.

Denmark’s 5,300 turbines can produce 20 percent of Denmark’s total electric demand, but when they do, Denmark has to look around for somebody to buy it, as the grid can’t use most of the wind power at the time it is generated. Wind farms typically operate at about 25-30% of their total capacity, about one third of the 80 to 90% capacity factor of coal and nuclear.

Hundreds of giant corn to ethyl alcohol(ethanol) stills now dot our Midwest landscape. They use four tenths of a corn bushel to produce a gallon of ethanol which currently sells for $1.53/gallon. The raw corn alone for this ethanol gallon costs $1.50.

That’s before the costs of production and transportation. Even with a 30-35 cent benefit from selling by product animal feed, ethanol production doesn’t pencil out. This is a major reason why VeraSun, our largest independent ethanol producer, recently declared bankruptcy. And the wholesale price of a gallon of gasoline, which has 30% more energy than ethanol, is currently $1.09/gallon.

For ethanol to achieve 20% of our gasoline supply, a dream of state legislatures, would require our entire 10 billion bushel corn crop. Cellulosic ethanol is still a research project, and it is inherently more expensive than the corn product.

Another frequently ignored issue is the time required to bring forth a major new fuel to the world’s energy supply. Until the mid-19th Century, wood burning powered the world. Then coal gradually surpassed wood on into the first part of the 20th Century. Oil was discovered in the 1860s, but it was a century before it surpassed coal as our largest energy fuel. Trillions of dollars are invested in the world’s infrastructure to mine, process, and deliver coal and petroleum.

As Distinguished Professor Vaclav Smil of the University of Manitoba recently put it, “It is delusional to think that the United States can install in 10 years wind and solar generating capacity equivalent to that of thermal power plants that took nearly 60 years to construct.”

There is a role in our energy needs for alternatives like wind and biofuels; but the assumption that they will make a major near term supply contribution is distracting us from hard choices involving aggressive conservation and life style changes.

We do have a looming energy crisis. Coal is an increasing environmental problem, and oil supplies may well peak in the near future. We need to improve energy efficiency with upgraded buildings, high mileage vehicles, and electric public transport. The way we produce and transport food may have to be recast to avoid transporting so much of it for great distances. Funding and encouraging these efforts will require energy taxes, especially on gasoline.

Recent well intentioned statements that we can repower our electricity generation in a decade with alternatives are the kind of delusion that we cannot afford to harbor.

Resources

U.S. Energy Information Administration
Numerous peer reviewed technical papers