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3 | Bringing It All Back Home
- University of New Hampshire Press
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49 3 bringing it all back home CLEAN TECH IN ACTION Electricity, without question, has brought humankind enormous benefits: light and appropriately moderated heating and cooling, refrigeration, cleaning , extraordinary power and flexibility in manufacturing the many products upon which we rely to make life more manageable and pleasant, and, in recent years, the ability to gain access to knowledge and to communicate at speeds and in ways that were undreamed of only a generation ago. Thomas Edison’s first power plant, coal fired, was built in downtown Manhattan in 1882 and provided electricity for lightbulbs. Aside from electric power, it also generated, from the start, an enormous burden of air pollution, which made local residents very upset. As we have seen, the constituents of the pollution from fossil-fuel-fired electric power plants not only substantially drive climate change but also seriously degrade the quality of life for many that it doesn’t kill outright. One of the first things that Edison and his contemporaries, the barons of the early electric utility industry, discovered was that the best way for them to deliver their product and at the same time maximize the return on their capital was to build big power plants, often on the outskirts of towns and cities to minimize air pollution’s toll on urban residents, and then send the power down transmission lines to their customers. Later, industries that had initially planned to create their own power on-site to drive their manufacturing facilities found that electricity provided by these utilities had become the cheapest option for them. Henry Ford’s adoption of the assembly line as the basis for his production could not have occurred without the provision of massive amounts of cheap electricity. Thus the utility grid, consisting of power plants plus the transmission and distribution systems, was born. There are several models around the world for how the grid is managed. a newer world 50 In much of the world, investor-owned utilities have sway. Nationalized power companies also have an enormous presence. Cooperatives and municipally owned and operated utilities are another means for delivering power. Given the critical importance of electricity in our developed economies and in the rapidly emerging economies of India, China, Brazil, and others, whatever the entity delivering electricity wants from central and state governments it very often gets, including rate increases. Aside from the pollution and the undue political influence that enormous utilities may have in countries around the world, one of the big problems with the central power plant paradigm is that an enormous portion of the energy that goes into firing the boilers for the steam turbines that drive the generators is lost as heat. How much? Nearly two-thirds in the case of conventional power plants, whether they be fossil fuel or nuclear. Another several percentage points of power are lost in transmission and distribution. Figure 3.1 shows, in quadrillion Btu of energy, how much energy in the United States flows to electricity generation in total, and how much is measured as “conversion losses.” After this, another 7 percent of the energy that remains as electricity is lost in transmission and distribution.1 This illustrates the situation in the United States, but the percentages for the losses are essentially the same all over the world. If central, thermal power plants were more efficient, then obviously they would produce far less carbon dioxide and conventional air pollutants. Strangely, though, these power plants have not measurably improved their efficiency since the time, well over a hundred years ago, of Edison’s first dynamo , as they were called back then. If our systems for delivering power were more efficient, the dire health impacts of air and water pollution, for instance, would be greatly diminished . A group of distinguished economists has quantified the “gross external damages” for the United States from an array of critical industries, including power production. For coal-fired electricity, the damage is more than $50 billion a year. That is more than the value added to the economy from the use of coal for electricity.2 Another terrible financial burden to the world’s economies is the cost of fossil fuel subsidies. These supports increase the purchasing power of consumers in many of the world’s poorest regions but at the same time skew the price [3.140.188.16] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 22:19 GMT) bringing it all back home 51 of these commodities. The world spends over $550 billion annually...