The Hill – Christine Todd Whitman: Nuclear power needs to remain central to our energy mix
Source: The Hill, 11/15/2011
ASP board member former Governor Christine Todd Whitman is a featured author.
Excerpt:
“Today, the U.S. is undergoing a decisive change in how we use and produce energy. A green revolution is seeing wind and solar power grow at unprecedented rates. In the first five months of 2011, wind generation had grown by 35 percent, and solar generation grew by 49 percent over the same time period in 2010. Coal generation, for comparison, saw a 5 percent decrease in that same timespan.
This is being accompanied by the shale gas revolution, in which new the new technologies of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” are used to extract natural gas from shale rock formations. It has caused natural-gas production to jump 15 percent since 2005, and has caused experts to increase estimates of gas reserves to say that the United States has more than a century’s worth of reserves.
These technological advances can help to wean America off Middle East oil, create new American jobs and ensure stable energy prices.
However, this revolution in electricity production faces significant hurdles to continued growth. Renewable power suffers from problems of intermittency; it is very difficult to predict how much the wind will blow or how strong the sun will shine. The American electricity grid — built to connect massive, centralized, “always on” power plants to consumers — is unable to handle the unpredictability that a substantial increase in renewable power would bring. Natural gas, too, faces economic hurdles — it has a history of rapid and extreme price fluctuations that have made utilities reluctant to rely on it…
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