1990 by 2020? Forget it, says EPRI

The brightest scientific minds behind America's power companies today acknowledged that they haven't yet come up with a silver bullet for CO2 reduction.

And they warned that billions of dollars of new investment in R&D would be needed if the U.S. power industry is to even come close to meeting significant emissions reduction targets.

California pledged late last year to lower its greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, and federal legislation being drafted in Washington is contemplating the same.

But today, at a press conference at the offices of the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) in Palo Alto, California, Michael Miller, director of EPRI's environmental research, told reporters the target doesn't look achievable by the deadline.

The EPRI think tank modeled what it thought was aggressive U.S. uptake of carbon reduction strategies, including:

• 30% lowered annual load growth rates for electricity, bringing annual growth from 1.4% today to 1.1%
• The addition of 70 GW of renewable energy by 2030
• 64 GW of new nuclear energy coming online by 2030
• Efficiency increases of existing coal and natural gas power plants by 46%-49% by 2030
• Plug-in hybrids becoming 10% of new vehicle sales by 2017, with +2%/yr thereafter, and
• Distributed energy resources becoming 5% of base load in 2030

And despite these efforts requiring a minimum of $2B a year more in R&D spending above current levels, Miller said the institute's modeling didn't show big enough reductions in time.

"Even with these aggressive assumptions, we still wouldn't make 1990 levels by 2020," he said.

Why? ERPI researchers think the U.S. would miss the target mostly because of the apparent difficulty in introducing carbon sequestration at today's power plants before 2020.

"Many technologies exist, but aren't economically viable," said George Offen, EPRI's senior technical leader of air emissions and combustion product management.

He pointed to high costs, as well as energy loss of up to 33% from each power plant just to power CO2 sequestration processes—which, today, involve passing flue stack gases through sprayed liquids or permeable membranes, or converting them to solids.

EPRI researchers investigating ways to sequester CO2 are currently involved in a small 5 MW-scale coal plant pilot project. But the institute said it isn't sure that today's coal plants could be outfitted with carbon capture technology.

"In most cases, the retrofit of an existing coal plant to capture and store CO2 would involve significant re-engineering and construction costs that will likely be comparable to building a new coal plant with [sequestration] from scratch," EPRI said in a statement.

The EPRI findings were a bucket of icy water in the face of the green euphoria leading up to Earth Day.

While EPRI's marketing materials claims it conducts research in over 80 different fields spanning "virtually ever aspect of electric power generation, environment, power delivery and energy use," Miller and other presenters acknowledged to the Cleantech Group that the institute doesn't study solar innovations in any depth. Or wind. Or algae for CO2 sequestration.

Why? EPRI is funded by America's power companies, which help set its research agenda.

EPRI was founded in the early 1970s, following Senate hearings on the lack of R&D funding supporting the power industry. All sectors of the U.S. electricity industry voluntarily pooled their funds to form EPRI and begin one of the first industry-wide collaborative R&D programs in the world.

So it became less and less surprising as EPRI's press conference went on that there was conspicuously little discussion of solar, biofuels and other renewables. [ed.: That said, tidal and wave power are researched by EPRI, and the insitute's ocean energy leader Roger Bedard is well regarded in ocean energy circles.]

EPRI concluded that the U.S. electricity sector will need all of the following technology advancements to significantly reduce CO2 emissions over the coming decades:

1. Smart grids and communications infrastructures to enable end-use efficiency and demand response, distributed generation, and plug-in electric vehicles
2. A grid infrastructure with the capacity and reliability to operate with 20-30% intermittent renewables in specific regions
3. Significant expansion of nuclear energy, along with a viable strategy for managing spent fuel, and
4. Commercial-scale coal-based generation units operating with 90+% CO2 capture and storage

In a sad EPRI footnote, Chauncey Starr, 95, founder and President Emeritus of EPRI, died earlier this week in his home in Atherton, California—a day after attending a celebration in his honor at the institute.

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