John Tierney: A Gift From the ’70s ... Energy Lessons
The presidential candidates claim to see America’s energy future, but their competing visions have a certain vintage quality. They’ve revived that classic debate: the hard path versus the soft path.
The soft path, as Amory Lovins defined it in the 1970s, is energy conservation and power from the sun, wind and plants — the technologies that Senator Barack Obamaemphasizes in his plan to reduce greenhouse emissions. Senator John McCain is more enthusiastic about building nuclear power plants, the quintessential hard path.
As a rule, it’s not a good idea to revive anything from the 1970s. But this debate is the exception, and not just because the threat of global warming has raised the stakes. The old lessons are as good a guide as any to the future, as William Tucker argues in “Terrestrial Energy,” his history of the hard-soft debate.
The initial debate over nuclear power seemed to end not long after the partial meltdown in 1979 of the reactor at Three Mile Island. Utilities canceled orders and stopped building reactors, partly because of public fears, but perhaps mainly because of rising costs. Mr. Lovins and his allies liked to say that nuclear power, once promoted as “too cheap to meter,” had now become “too expensive to matter.”
The soft path seemed to be the way to go, particularly when some of Mr. Lovins’s predictions about energy conservation came true. As Americans cut back in response to higher prices and new incentives, the growth in electricity demand slowed. Some public officials, most enthusiastically in California, told utilities to stop building large power plants. Instead, they subsidized wind farms and solar power, which were supposed to be cheap and plentiful alternatives once the technologies matured.
Instead, they remained so costly and scarce that Californians’ electricity rates were among the highest in America. They endured rolling blackouts in 2000 while paying astronomical prices for power from nuclear and fossil-fuel plants in other states. The crisis was attributed to price controls and Enron’s market manipulation, but the underlying problem was a shortage of power that forced the state to start building old-fashioned fossil-fuel plants for itself.
Meanwhile, there was a surprise on the hard path, too. Once utilities stopped building reactors, the share of electricity from nuclear power was projected to decline steadily as the oldest reactors were retired. But then several new “merchant energy” companies began assembling fleets of reactors sold off by local utilities. The new owners standardized operations, retrained workers and brought in human-factor engineers to redesign the famously indecipherable control panels.
Under the old owners, the reactors were balky white elephants operating only 60 percent of the time. ...
Read entire article at NYT
The soft path, as Amory Lovins defined it in the 1970s, is energy conservation and power from the sun, wind and plants — the technologies that Senator Barack Obamaemphasizes in his plan to reduce greenhouse emissions. Senator John McCain is more enthusiastic about building nuclear power plants, the quintessential hard path.
As a rule, it’s not a good idea to revive anything from the 1970s. But this debate is the exception, and not just because the threat of global warming has raised the stakes. The old lessons are as good a guide as any to the future, as William Tucker argues in “Terrestrial Energy,” his history of the hard-soft debate.
The initial debate over nuclear power seemed to end not long after the partial meltdown in 1979 of the reactor at Three Mile Island. Utilities canceled orders and stopped building reactors, partly because of public fears, but perhaps mainly because of rising costs. Mr. Lovins and his allies liked to say that nuclear power, once promoted as “too cheap to meter,” had now become “too expensive to matter.”
The soft path seemed to be the way to go, particularly when some of Mr. Lovins’s predictions about energy conservation came true. As Americans cut back in response to higher prices and new incentives, the growth in electricity demand slowed. Some public officials, most enthusiastically in California, told utilities to stop building large power plants. Instead, they subsidized wind farms and solar power, which were supposed to be cheap and plentiful alternatives once the technologies matured.
Instead, they remained so costly and scarce that Californians’ electricity rates were among the highest in America. They endured rolling blackouts in 2000 while paying astronomical prices for power from nuclear and fossil-fuel plants in other states. The crisis was attributed to price controls and Enron’s market manipulation, but the underlying problem was a shortage of power that forced the state to start building old-fashioned fossil-fuel plants for itself.
Meanwhile, there was a surprise on the hard path, too. Once utilities stopped building reactors, the share of electricity from nuclear power was projected to decline steadily as the oldest reactors were retired. But then several new “merchant energy” companies began assembling fleets of reactors sold off by local utilities. The new owners standardized operations, retrained workers and brought in human-factor engineers to redesign the famously indecipherable control panels.
Under the old owners, the reactors were balky white elephants operating only 60 percent of the time. ...