Clean power solutions sought

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Clean power solutions sought

Executives say the challenge is technological, not one of policy

By TOM FOWLER

2007 Houston Chronicle

Climate change may have topped the agenda for policymakers, but it should be looked at first and foremost as a technological challenge, power executives gathered in Houston said Thursday.

The current slate of power generation technologies are not ready to handle the demands that proposed greenhouse gas regulations are likely to put on them, said Jeff Sterba, chairman and CEO of power and gas supplier PNM Resources.

That means the industry and the government need to fund more research for cleaner power plant fuels and ways to clean or capture greenhouse gas emissions, he said.

"Yes, there are policy issues, but fundamentally it's a technology challenge," Sterba said at the Cambridge Energy Research Associates conference at the Westin Galleria.

The power industry is already putting significant money toward meeting the country's growing power needs, according to CERA managing director Lawrence Makovich, with close to $800 billion budgeted for the next 15 years. That includes $275 billion for new plants and $50 billion retrofitting existing plants to reduce emissions, not including carbon dioxide.

But that may not be enough to increase capacity while keeping greenhouse gases in check.

Sterba and other executives and analysts at the conference say there's a great deal of mis- information about clean energy technology, both its weaknesses and strengths.

Wind and nuclear power are attractive to many worried about greenhouse gases because they have zero emissions.

But wind power can't replace existing power sources fast enough, and its output tends to be intermittent, particularly because winds are slower during the hot weather when power demand peaks, a number of observers said.

"Some would like to think wind can take up the slack from coal, but you'd have to build something like 150,000 to 170,000 new wind turbines, taking up enough land for seven states of Rhode Island," said John Rice, CEO of GE's Infrastructure business, which includes the company's growing wind power business.

And nuclear construction won't come easy, given widespread opposition to it across the country, Sterba said.

Carbon sequestration, the process of injecting CO2 emissions from power plants into the ground for long-term storage, is often touted as a solution to power plant emissions, but its maturity is misunderstood by many, said Rob LaCount, a managing director with CERA.

Oil companies have been using it to improve recovery from older oil fields for years, but not on the scale that would be required to handle power plant output. It will be years before it will be reliable as a technology that can handle CO2 output from power plants, LaCount said.

Plug-in hybrid vehicles appear to be a promising solution in slashing greenhouse gas emissions from automobiles, many noted. Thierry Vandal, president and CEO of Hydro-Quebec, said he thought it would be a widely available option within a decade.

But Jim Press, Toyota's top U.S. executive, suggested the technology is "still premature."

In the case of one coal plant technology known as IGCC, which is significantly cleaner than the dominant technology, NRG Energy President and CEO David Crane believes the barriers have been overstated.

IGCC has been criticized as not ready for prime time because its makers won't guarantee their equipment's performance, the process can't handle the kind of coal used in Texas, and it's too expensive.

But Crane, whose company owns and operates 25 gigawatts of power generation, including plants around Houston, dismissed two of the three as myths. Mitsubishi just agreed to guarantee the performance of IGCC technology NRG will use in a planned New York plant, Crane said, and all kinds of coal are being used in IGCC plants. He conceded the facilities are still more costly, but that's just because each plant is built as a custom project and has yet to benefit from economies of scale.

New "smart meter" technologies that let homeowners and small businesses see their power usage costs in real time were also touted.

"It's not just a matter of changing the technology at the central power station," Sterba said. "We have to change consumer behavior, too."

Chronicle reporter Brett Clanton contributed to this story.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/headli...iz/4558313.html