ENERGY / NEW CHALLENGES : Gulf Crisis Spurs Interest in Renewable Sources of Electricity : Solar, wind, geothermal and other methods are already producing a small percentage of the nation’s power.
Ever since Iraq overran the rich oil fields of Kuwait, the phone in Kathleen Flanigan’s Westwood office has not stopped ringing.
“People keep calling just to ask about our technology,” explains the spokeswoman for one of the country’s most successful solar power producers, Los Angeles’ Luz International. “It’s really picked up since Aug. 2.”
There is no doubt that the Iraqi invasion and the subsequent energy crisis have focused new public attention on renewable energies--technologies such as solar, wind, geothermal, biomass and hydroelectric that generate electricity without the environmental side effects of most fossil fuels.
But, although producers of renewable energy are grateful for the new attention, many are irritated that the public still thinks renewable energy is only a dream for the future.
“It’s out there already,” Flanigan says. “And it does work.”
Despite sharp cutbacks in federal research and tax support for renewable energy technologies, most of them have left the laboratory and are out in the field generating electricity.
Nationwide, 5% of current production of electricity and one-third of all new power capacity installed since 1985 has come from solar, wind, geothermal and biomass facilities. In California, a full 12% of the state’s electricity needs are already provided by these sources.
All the same, although industry advocates and producers are proud of their progress in the past few years, they point to technological, government and business challenges that will confront each of the new technologies in the coming decade.
Solar
Solar technologies can generally be divided into two groups: solar thermal systems, which use sunlight to heat water or other fluids, and photovoltaic technologies that convert the sun’s light directly into electricity.
In the 1980s, solar thermal technologies made the leap from small, modular units designed to heat individual buildings to large, commercial electricity-generating systems.
Luz International has had the greatest success with such systems, using acres of concave mirrors in the Mojave desert to heat a special conducting fluid that then superheats water to spin steam turbines. Luz supplies a total of 354 megawatts of power to Southern California Edison, enough electricity to meet the needs of half a million residential customers.
As it unveiled a new 80-megawatt plant last month, Luz reported that its costs have fallen from 24 cents per kilowatt hour in 1984 to 8 cents today--a price that is becoming competitive with gas, oil and nuclear power, which cost between 3 and 7 cents per kilowatt hour.
But, although solar thermal power has enjoyed some commercial success, it represents only about 0.1% of U.S. electric consumption and is not expected to climb much higher. Experts agree that the real advances for solar power will come in the second area of solar technology, photovoltaics.
Photovoltaic technology uses mirrors to concentrate photons of sunlight onto silicon cells. The impact of the photons shakes loose silicon electrons, whose movement generates electric current.
Although the cost of photovoltaics has fallen from $1.50 to 30 cents per kilowatt hour over the last decade, photovoltaic systems remain much more costly than other energy sources. Still, photovoltaic technology is so promising that the government is concentrating most of its solar research dollars on it.
But solar shares a problem with other renewable energy systems: Although they are usually cheap to operate, they are expensive to build. This is because the resources--sunlight, subterranean water, wind--cost almost nothing, but the high-tech facilities that change them into electricity are expensive. Facilities that use fossil fuels, on the other hand, are cheap to build but require a continuous supply of costly oil, gas or coal.
Until recently, hefty federal tax credits helped investors overcome the steep start-up costs of building solar facilities. But the last of the credits expired at the start of the new fiscal year and Congress has no plans to reinstate them. Scott Sklar, president of the Solar Energy Industries Assn., says the industry is working with lending institutions to develop new financing strategies.
Wind
Wind energy got an undeservedly bad name in the 1970s, proponents insist. As investors rushed to take advantage of the tax shelter the federal government offered for renewables, many projects were rushed to completion. “The technology simply wasn’t ready,” says Randall Swisher, president of the Washington-based American Wind Energy Assn. “We moved wind into manufacturing too rapidly.”
But in the mid-1980s, after making small but crucial improvements, such as washing the turbine blades periodically to remove insects, the industry got back on its feet. Now California’s 15,000 wind turbines operate reliably enough to provide 1,500 megawatts of power to the state, enough to supply the residential needs of the City of San Francisco.
As with solar, the coming challenges for wind power are not primarily technological but commercial. In 10 to 20 years, Swisher estimates, wind power could go from supplying 0.2% of the nation’s electric needs to a full 10%.
But Tom Besich, power contracts manager for Southern California Edison, says that despite its competitive costs (about 7 cents per kilowatt hour), wind is unlikely to get much larger, in part because residents find the turbines unsightly and in part because the power source is not sufficiently reliable. “The problem is that wind isn’t predictable. The wind just doesn’t blow when you need it,” he says.
Geothermal
Geothermal technologies, which use the heat of the Earth’s molten core to generate electricity, are also operating commercially in California. The largest system is at The Geysers, a sprawling facility 90 miles north of San Francisco in Sonoma and Lake counties, that generates 1,350 megawatts of electricity for Pacific Gas & Electric.
It is the second-largest source of renewable energy for California and the cheapest--it costs PG&E; only 2 1/2 cents per kilowatt hour, far less than the 6 to 8 cents it costs for natural gas or oil.
But geothermal still supplies less than 0.3% of the nation’s electric power and is not expected to grow much more. One reason is that there are not many regions of the country where the Earth’s crust is thin enough to make geothermal development possible. Scientists say that, although geothermal technology is not very complicated, the largest problem remains drilling, which is exceedingly expensive.
Biomass
Technologies that fall into this category are a hodgepodge ranging from plants that burn wood, agricultural and municipal waste to high-tech facilities that gasify shrubs. Some, built on top of landfills, create electricity from the methane gas that rises off buried garbage.
Taken together, biomass technologies form the largest source of renewable energy in the United States--a full 5% of national electric use.
But environmentalists have mixed feelings about biomass. Because it is based on combustion--the same process that generates heat from coal, gas and oil--it creates more pollution than other sources of renewable energy.
Nonetheless, it is gaining popularity in many areas of the country that have large and steady supplies of organic wastes. And its low capital costs make it one of the cheapest, ranging from 3 to 8 cents per kilowatt hour.
Hydroelectric
Hydroelectric power remains the oldest source of electricity from renewable energy in the United States and is a close second to biomass in national output, supplying about 4.8% of U.S. energy needs. It is also one of the cheapest sources of electricity, costing about 2 cents per kilowatt hour.
But hydroelectric power generation has fallen out of favor in recent years, particularly among environmentalists. Many are concerned about disrupting local fish migration and causing erosion.
The Energy Department says more than 180 hydroelectric projects will come up for relicensing in the next five years, and officials expect opposition from residents who would prefer to return dammed areas to their natural states. Nonetheless, the department says only 5% of the dams in the United States are used for power generation and many more could be tapped for energy without increasing environmental risks to the surrounding areas.
