Environmentalists are already hoping that the Senate tackles both energy and climate change this fall, rather than simply dealing with the clean energy bits (which are popular) and punting on the climate-change stuff (which isn’t so popular).
Here’s another reason greens will want to make sure they go together. Beefing up the nation’s electricity-transmission system to make renewable energy a reality could backfire and make coal an even more widespread source of electricity—unless carbon emissions are reined in at the same time.
That’s one of the findings from a new report from Duke University’s Climate Change Policy Partnership, “Electrical Transmission: Barriers and Policy Solutions.”
The report starts with the conventional wisdom—America’s creaky power network is one of the biggest obstacles to a clean-energy revolution—and offers a few suggestions for how to fix it.
Those include more federal funding and oversight for “balkanized” transmission systems, a national power grid modeled on President Eisenhower’s national freeway system, and more protections for folks who invest in the power network.
But it also includes that key warning—power systems, once built, are agnostic, and can carry both “clean” and “dirty” electricity:
The impact of a national transmission grid would not be limited to renewable energy. Expanding transmission capability enables the utilization of low-cost remote energy resources to satisfy high-price demand at locations that currently lack sufficient energy resources. Because coal is a low-cost fuel, the regions that rely heavily on coal for electricity generation tend to have relatively low marginal generation costs. Without a constraint on carbon emissions, it is possible that a national grid will increase the power flows from remote coal-fired plants to urban centers. The increased emissions from the increase in coal-fired sources may offset the emissions reductions from enabled renewable sources (Vajjhala, Paul, Sweeney, & Palmer, 2008). In the near term, if a specific transmission line is required to carry only or mostly renewable electricity, it will be difficult to justify the transmission project financially.
Plenty of high-profile people, from President Obama to former vice president Al Gore, have called transmission the key to more clean energy. But without simultaneous action to tackle greenhouse-gas emissions, more transmission might just be the key to more energy—clean or otherwise.