Power Plant Efficiency Hasn’t Improved Since 1957
Editor’s Note: Today we are happy to bring to you a guest post from Sean Casten, CEO and President of Recycled Energy Development.
Americans have a habit of framing our scientific history as a series of Great Inventors, from Eli Whitney to Thomas Edison to Afrika Bambaataa. The history books say each was prodded by Adam Smith’s invisible hand to come up with the great technological advances that have made our country a home of innovation.
There’s a problem with this mythology: sometimes there’s no invisible hand. Sometimes short-sighted government regulations give preference to bad technologies over good ones — stifling innovation and blinding us to our own ability to make progress.
Nowhere is this mythology more evident than in our energy system, the most heavily regulated and subsidized industry in the country. A host of bad regulations have made this system grossly inefficient, contributing both to global warming and to high power costs.
- » See also: Group Buying = Lowest Price for Solar. Ever.
- » Get CleanTechnica by RSS or sign up by email.
The US today converts fossil fuel into electricity at 33% efficiency, throwing away two-thirds of every unit of fuel we burn in cooling towers and smoke stacks. That’s the same conversion efficiency we had last year. That’s the same efficiency we had in 1980. In fact, you have to go all the way back to 1957 to find a year when the electric sector wasted more energy than they do today.
During the same period, we’ve seen automobile fuel economy skyrocket (especially on a horsepower-adjusted basis). We’ve seen massive increases in the efficiency of our electric appliances. We’ve even seen boring old steam boiler efficiency increases with modern controls, recuperators and preheaters. And yet the efficiency of electricity generation is stagnant.
It’s not stagnant because we’ve hit any fundamental limit. Indeed, studies by the US Department of Energy and Environmental Protection Agency have identified a whopping 200,000 MW of potential (that’s 20% of the peak power demand of the US) for proven technologies that either recover waste energy from industrials and/or cogenerate heat and electricity from a single fuel source.
The worst of these technologies is twice as fuel efficient as the current electric grid. Fully deploying that potential would not only cut CO2 emissions by 20% — about the same as if we took every passenger car off the road — but would also cut our energy costs, simply by burning less fuel. And those are just the technologies we’ve taken the time to quantify.
So what’s holding these technologies back? Nothing more than our regulatory paradigm.
A couple of examples:
- Our century-old electric regulatory model pays utilities a return on their capital investment, but compels them to pass along all operating costs to consumers at zero mark-up. This creates a great incentive to build capital-intensive boondoggles. It completely isolates electric utilities from the economic principles that drive “normal” businesses, wherein capital and operating cost reductions are a route to greater profits. This has conspired to make our electric sector openly hostile to efficient power generation. It explains why their efficiency hasn’t moved since 1957, and why that sector now accounts for 42% of US CO2 emissions.
- The Clean Air Act mandates end-of-pipe pollution control technologies that universally impose
additional parasitic loads on industrials and power plants to run baghouses, catalyst beds, electro-static precipitators and any number of other technologies. All these parasitic mandates have the perverse consequence that our environmental policy mandates reduction in criteria pollution and mandates increases in CO2 emissions. Worse, a facility that has the temerity to improve the energy efficiency of their process will almost certainly trigger New Source Review, under which they will have to come into compliance with new, more stringent permits than the one they currently operate under. These two features of the Clean Air Act conspire to make many industrials openly fearful many otherwise sensible steps to lower their greenhouse-gas signature (and lower their operating expense.)
None of this is to suggest that we should not continue to pursue technological revolutions, of course. But if those technologies bring about cheaper, cleaner, more efficient energy, they will find themselves blocked by precisely the same regulations that are keeping existing technologies out of the market. Technology is important — but regulatory reform to remove our barriers to energy efficiency is the critical path.
Related Posts on Energy Efficiency
- 7 Ways to Save Energy by Saving Water
- Toyota’s New Hybrid Travels Twice as Far
- Trucks Reduce Emissions by 83%
As a power plant operator I can say that efficiency is considered every day. Every operator continually comes up with more efficient ways to do his work and passes it on to others.
Every engineer who designs a product considers efficiency in his equations.
efficiency has vastly improved since 1957 and improves every day.
Wow, Mr. Graves hit it right on the nose me-thinks.
Right on!
This is exactly the sort of thing that neocons like to hear. regulation is important, its how you dont end up looking like china, and how you keep speculators from driving up the price of gas. however it must be done wisely. surely theirs a balance that can be met between progress and public health and saftey.
with all due respect to mister graves, there isnt really a ban, and oil companies are only drilling in 17% of the feilds they own. the rest is “stockpilled” I mean why would they be in such a big hurry to sell it all off? they just want to control the oil so that they can sell it at optimum prices for as long as possible. besides theirs more oil held up in trading than is currently in the strategic reserve. and as for nuclear, well urainium has to be mined as much as oil has to be pumped. the only difference is that nuclear energy is probly better for everybody.
That’s the same rhetoric conservatives have been feeding you the last 200 years.
Wake up. Smith was a shill for the reach and elite.
The problem is not government regulation, which a smoke screen, it’s that so many of your representatives are heavily invested in oil, and the profits made from it. Between that and their speculating friends, record breaking profits are stuffed into the hands of a few, while the vast majority of us suffer outrageous prices, and greatly hampered advances in technology, which, had they been pursued in the 1970’s like we should have, we would not be dependent on foreign oil / energy today.
The proper solution mature as a race and a civilization. is to Nationalize all infrastructure related resources. The alleged “bureaucrat waste” could not nearly exceed the ungodly profits and waste of energy futures speculation.
Marx was much more accurate. You government owns your media and you economy, the “liberal media” is not liberal at all. It is owned by 5 ultra conservative corporations, and is basically one big advertisement set up to make you consume, and believe that your government is not truly fascist.
Take it form me. I was a misguided republican for many years. Selfish, purposefully ignorant and mean. It’s the only way a person can live that duality.
Yes, deregulating energy is all we need to do to generate great efficiencies. Just ask Enron.
[...] Click here to view the source of this solar power [electricity, electrical [electrons flowing to pro... ‘power [electricity, electrical [electrons flowing to produce electricity] generation, energy, etc…] Plant Efficiency Hasn’t Improved Since 1957′ - brought to you by LumoSolar.com, your solar power [electricity, electrical [electrons flowing to produce electricity] generation, energy, etc…] & energy information resource! Everything you wanted to know about solar cells [batteries], solar panels [solar cells in an array], solar lighting [lumos], solar heating [hot water, furnace, etc...], the sun, the solar system [Sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Ceres, Asteroid Belt, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto/Charon, Eris, Kuiper Belt, Trans-Neptunian Objects, Interstellar Space], lumos, green technology (cause, really, technology is what keeps us going - that and the sun), solar rechargeable batteries, solar kit [do it yourself package]s, cooker [oven or similar cooking instrument]s, heaters, environmental [green, conservation, Earth]ism, alternative fuels, and more! LumoSolar, your internet solar resource center! Share This: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. [...]
I live in Texas and we have deregulated power. All it has brought us is higher costs and more pollution. All the for-profit power companies want to build coal fired power plants in order to maximize profits. Deregulation is not the answer. We need all power companies to be not-for-profit. Then reinvestment into better technologies, rather than share-holders, could occur.
One word: Enron.
Thanks for playing, but deregulation was tried, and it failed miserably.
The author of this article needs to hit the economics books again. Adam Smith favored deregulation, not regulations. The idea of the invisible hand is that a competitive free market economy (unregulated) would automatically correct problems in the economy and inspire people to come up with new ideas and innovations. Also, saying that fuel economies in automobiles have skyrocketed over the last 50 years is a huge stretch. Improved? Yes. Skyrocketed? Not even close.