Over at Grist, Dave Roberts is publishing installments of an interesting conservation he had with The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal about Powering the Dream, Madrigal's new book on the history of green-energy technology.
Yesterday, Madrigal made a great, overarching point about the gap between environmentalists and clean-energy advocates, who in recent years increasingly have come together to fight climate change. But, as he said, the flexibility with which the two groups approach the relevant issues differs:
"People who have dealt with environmentalism on the land side of things tend to think in terms of conservation -- preserving that which exists. If you're on the energy side of things, it becomes immediately clear that if you want energy for human purposes, you have to take it from the environment one way or another. You have to be more pragmatic than when you're just buying land and keeping human beings out of it."
This is exactly the tension that's been playing out in New York state over natural gas and hydrofracking. In Washington, it's a no-brainer that natural gas is a step above coal or oil as a fuel source. Even Greenpeace says that natural gas needs to play a role in lowering carbon emissions. But in upstate New York, where people have to live with the impacts of hydrofracking, which threatens the quality of water and air, there's a strong push, rooted in more traditional environmental arguments, against natural-gas drilling.
Since the Japanese nuclear crisis began, another wrinkle to this debate has emerged as well. Indian Point Energy Center, which has two active and one idle nuclear reactor, is located 20 miles from New York City, and even within the current 10-mile evacuation radius, the population is dense enough that it'd be more or less impossible to effectively empty the area should the plant melt down. But the plant also provides a substantial portion of New York City's electricity -- Con Ed, the city's main electricity provider, says it's 30 percent. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has advocated for closing the plant but that would likely mean the city would depend even more heavily on natural gas for power. As Madrigal says, energy has to come from somewhere.
But part of the problem, of course, is how much energy we're using. Roberts brings up in today's installment a section of Madrigal's book that details how the electricity industry sold Americans on drawing on ever more current to power their daily lives. Here's Madrigal:
[Growing electricity use] "was all sustained by this dream that electrical power would continue to get cheaper and cheaper as it had from 1900 to 1960. We thought we could keep building bigger and bigger plants, largely nuclear plants, and the price of electricity was going to drop to one or two cents a kilowatt-hour.
It's not totally crazy. From the day these utility executives were born until the day it changed, the price of electricity had been dropping. The culture of utility engineers was grow and build, grow and build. They just could not imagine that the price of electricity would suddenly go up, that the scale of power plants would make them more, not less, expensive. It almost destroyed the entire utility industry of the U.S. in the 1970s."
This morning, I attended an event NYU's Wagner School of Public Service about New York City's sustainable grid (long story short: Renewable energy's not going to play a big role in the city's energy mix any time soon), and Joe Oates, a Con Ed VP for Energy Management, talked about the move in NYC from coal-fired power plants to plants that burned fuel oil. Again, the switch was motivated in part by environmental concerns: the pollution the coal plants created was a problem for air quality in the city. But almost as soon as Con Ed had converted its plants, Oates said, the 1970s oil crisis took hold, and the company almost went bankrupt as its production costs soared. Now? The plants use natural gas.
