Fighting for America's Energy Independence (Page 2)

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.

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