Arthur T. Motta opines that in the courses he teaches at Penn State, they discuss the characteristics of an ideal electricity production portfolio for the United States and consider what form of energy policy would best achieve it. The class typically identifies the most important factors as cost, reliability of supply, public safety and environmental impact. Students also cite other characteristics, such as national security, domestic availability of fuels and technologies, and electric grid stability.Because no real-world energy source fulfills all of these characteristics (Fact Check: Nuclear fulfills all of the above, even costs if assessed properly), we have to make compromises to find an optimal combination of energy sources (allowing for misinformation in the assumptions made?). Ideally a well-designed national energy policy would give us a framework for making these choices by balancing short-term goals, such as cost, against long-term goals, such as environmental protection (Nuclear does!).
However, there really is no coherent long-term energy policy in the United States (because federal, state and local politicians have been pandering to their constituents to get elected by allowing wind and solar to creep into the energy alternatives in an attempt to provide grid-power, which they are inherently incapable of doing, and at a cost that is not supported by subsidies. Once the subsidies have been established, nuclear needs subsidies on top to compete). What exists instead is an ad hoc hodgepodge of subsidies, taxes and regulations differing across regions of the country, that, along with the free market, end up determining what energy sources are used for the production of electricity (Not true, the wind-solar subsidies encouraged by the Obama administration set up unjustified competition in wind and energy where costs to install and cost to`operate and maintain are very different and not considered in the comparison. In particular, we have no carbon tax to penalize carbon-emitting technologies (which should have been installed by Obama years ago to stabilize costs of natural gas and coal but fossil fuel industry applied pressure to postpone the discussion (until the next Republican Congress?)
As a result, long-term goals are often neglected. Under this ad hoc approach we currently reward some sources, such as renewables, for providing carbon-free electricity, but not others, such as hydroelectric and nuclear power. In my view this is wrongheaded and inconsistent. The United States would do better by following the example of New York, which recently decided to support nuclear power plants to keep them from closing because of competition from cheap natural gas (a wise step for a change). In the past decade U.S. domestic natural gas production has increased by 50 percent. Natural gas, which emits half as much carbon dioxide as coal when burned, is replacing coal for electricity generation. As a result, U.S. greenhouse gas emissions from electricity generation have actually decreased over the last decade, even as electricity consumption has increased (only in some sectors of the U.S.?).
At a recent Department of Energy summit on improving the economics of U.S. nuclear power plants, speakers noted that, along with cost, factors such as production of carbon-free electricity, reliability, grid stability and diversity of fuel supply should influence decisions about energy supply. But energy sources do not consistently receive credit for helping to attain these goals, and are not consistently penalized if they fail to do so, (but perhaps teh soalr and wind are not ready for Prime-Time (grid-support?)
The subsidies and tax credits mentioned above are a step in that direction, and have increased development of renewable energy sources, if justified, As a result, the percentage of electricity from renewables has significantly increased in recent years, which is great. Solar and wind together currently provide about five percent of U.S. electricity.
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