Students Telling Congress: Bring Solar and Wind Home

Part III of a three-part series on U.S. energy policy and student activism

Take a close look at the true costs that coal and nuclear power foist on society, and it becomes clear that neither is economically viable.

As we discussed in our first two articles, the external costs of coal power – in both environmental and social damage – and the rising capital costs of new nuclear plants suggest that the market is ripe for change.

There are increasingly affordable alternatives, and the 10,000 university and college students converging on Capitol Hill for Power Shift starting tomorrow will be talking about them as they knock on the doors of Congress.

In our final article looking at the energy policy issues students will be discussing, based on our U.S. Electricity Policy 2009 report, Quentin Gee and I investigate some interesting trends for renewable energy and the technology needed to make clean energy a national climate solution.

Solar and Wind: Cheaper and Cheaper

The prices for solar and wind power are dropping, making them increasingly competitive with coal. Both also have far fewer external environmental and social costs.

Investors are taking notice. In 2007, nuclear technology received zero dollars in private investment; the wind sector received $34 billion, about 47 percent of worldwide investment in renewable energy. In the United States, 42 percent of all newly installed capacity in 2008 was wind-generation.

Why so much investment? The wind industry has reported cost-competitiveness with other technologies, and as economies of scale improve and production ramps up, costs are likely to drop.

Solar’s costs are also falling and show little sign of slowing down. Just this week, First Solar announced it had broken the $1 per watt manufacturing cost barrier, and analysts suggest that several other companies are close.

The Department of Energy has a research and development goal of making solar cost-competitive with other technologies by 2015. Industry is optimistic about the possibility, predicting “grid parity” in some states by 2012 and in almost all states by 2016. This could be achieved even sooner. A new 10 MW plant in Nevada, for example, came in at a cost of 7.5 cents per kWh, 16% lower than the national average.

As with wind, solar is likely to get even cheaper as ingenuity and investment increase. In fact, silicon solar PV prices are likely to fall by 40% this year alone.

Renewable energy is clearly becoming available to aid in the phase-out of coal. In addition, other renewable energy sources, such as geothermal, biomass and co-generation, are expanding.

Challenges: The Grid

A common complaint against renewable technologies is that the aging power grid can’t handle them, and that the necessary infrastructure will take both time and money to build.

That argument ignores a number of important considerations.

First, blackouts and brownouts in recent years have shown that the grid needs work that will be expensive anyway. In the book Understanding Electric Power Systems, Jack Cassaza and Frank Delea point out that some key power transmission facilities are upwards of 75 years old and "needed maintenance has not been performed in recent years in order to cut costs."