Reply #9: Nuclear and ethanol least effective climate change solutions [View All]

[kristopher]

Review of Solutions to Global Warming, Air Pollution, and Energy Security

Mark Z. Jacobson Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford,

Energy Environ. Sci., 2008, doi:10.1039/b809990C In press, October 30, 2008

Abstract
This paper reviews and ranks major proposed energy-related solutions to global warming, air pollution mortality, and energy security while considering other impacts of the proposed solutions, such as on water supply, land use, wildlife, resource availability, thermal pollution, water chemical pollution, nuclear proliferation, and undernutrition. Nine electric power sources and two liquid fuel options are considered. The electricity sources include solar-photovoltaics (PV), concentrated solar power (CSP), wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, wave, tidal, nuclear, and coal with carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology. The liquid fuel options include corn-E85 and cellulosic E85. To place the electric and liquid fuel sources on an equal footing, we examine their comparative abilities to address the problems mentioned by powering new-technology vehicles, including battery-electric vehicles (BEVs), hydrogen fuel cell vehicles (HFCVs), and flex-fuel vehicles run on E85. ...

Summary
This paper evaluated nine electric power sources (solar-PV, CSP, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, wave, tidal, nuclear, and coal with CCS) and two liquid fuel options (corn E85, cellulosic E85) in combination with three vehicle technologies (BEVs, HFCVs, and E85 vehicles) with respect to their effects on global-warming-relevant emissions, air pollution mortality, and several other factors.

Twelve combinations of energy source-vehicle type were considered in all. Among these, the highest-ranked (Tier 1 technologies) were wind-BEVs and wind-HFCVs.

Tier 2 technologies were CSP-BEVs, Geo-BEVs, PV-BEVs, tidal-BEVs, and wave-BEVs.

Tier 3 technologies were hydro-BEVs, nuclear-BEVs, and CCS-BEVs.

Tier 4 technologies were corn- and cellulosic-E85.

Wind-BEVs performed best in six out of 11 categories, including mortality, climate-relevant emissions, footprint, water consumption, effects on wildlife, thermal pollution, and water chemical pollution. The footprint area of wind-BEVs is 5.5-6 orders of magnitude less than that for E85 regardless of its source, 4 orders of magnitude less than those of CSP-BEVs or solar-BEVs, 3 orders of magnitude less than those of nuclear- or coal-BEVs, and 2-2.5 orders of magnitude less than those of geothermal, tidal, or wave BEVs.

The intermittency of wind, solar, and wave power can be reduced in several ways:
(1) interconnecting geographically-disperse intermittent sources through the transmission system,
(2) combining different intermittent sources (wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, tidal, and wave) to smooth out loads, using hydro to provide peaking and load balancing,
(3) using smart meters to provide electric power to electric vehicles at optimal times,
(4) storing wind energy in hydrogen, batteries, pumped hydroelectric power, compressed air, or a thermal storage medium, and
(5) forecasting weather to improve grid planning.

Although HFCVs are less efficient than BEVs, wind-HFCVs still provide a 39
greater benefit than any other vehicle technology aside from wind-BEVs. Wind-HFCVs are also the most reliable combination due to the low downtime of wind turbines, the distributed nature of turbines, and the ability of wind’s energy to be stored in hydrogen over time.

The Tier 2 combinations all provide outstanding benefits with respect to climate
and mortality. Among Tier 2 combinations, CSP-BEVs result in the lowest CO2e
emissions and mortality. Geothermal-BEVs requires the lowest array spacing among all options. Although PV-BEV result in slightly less climate benefit than CSP-BEVs, the resource for PVs is the largest among all technologies considered. Further, much of it can be implemented unobtrusively on rooftops. Underwater tidal powering BEVs is the least likely to be disrupted by terrorism or severe weather.

The Tier 3 technologies are less beneficial than the others. However,
hydroelectricity is an excellent load-balancer and cleaner than coal-CCS or nuclear with respect to CO2e and air pollution. As such, hydroelectricity is recommended ahead of these other Tier-3 power sources.

The Tier-4 technologies (cellulosic- and corn-E85) are not only the lowest in terms of ranking, but may worsen climate and air pollution problems. They also require significant land relative to other technologies Cellulosic-E85 may have a larger land footprint and higher upstream air pollution emissions than corn-E85. Mainly for this reason, it scored lower overall than corn-E85. Whereas cellulosic-E85 may cause the greatest average human mortality among all technologies, nuclear-BEVs cause the greatest upper-estimate risk of mortality due to the risk of nuclear attacks resulting from the spread of nuclear energy facilities that allows for the production of nuclear weapons. The largest consumer of water is corn-E85. The smallest consumers are wind-BEVs, tidal-BEVs, and wave-BEVs.

In sum, the use of wind, CSP, geothermal, tidal, solar, wave, and hydroelectric to provide electricity for BEVs and HFCVs result in the most benefit and least impact among the options considered. Coal-CCS and nuclear provide less benefit with greater negative impacts. The biofuel options provide no certain benefit and result in significant negative impacts. Because sufficient clean natural resources (e.g., wind, sunlight, hot water, ocean energy, gravitational energy) exists to power all energy for the world, the results here suggest that the diversion of attention to the less efficient or non-efficient options would represent an opportunity cost that will delay solutions to climate and air pollution health problems.

The relative ranking of each electricity-BEV option also applies to the electricity source when used to provide electricity for general purposes. The implementation of the recommended electricity options for providing vehicle and building electricity requires organization. Ideally, good locations of energy resources would be sited in advance and developed simultaneously with an interconnected transmission system. This requires cooperation at multiple levels of government. ...

http://www.rsc.org/delivery/_ArticleLinking/DisplayHTMLArticleforfree.cfm?JournalCode=EE&Year=2009&ManuscriptID=b809990c&Iss=Advance_Article

You may want to look at table 1.