Outgrowing Hydroelectric Power

For decades, the climate and the terrain of the Pacific Northwest gave us the gift of clean, renewable hydroelectric power. It’s easy to forget that our hydropower infrastructure was built about 90 years ago by Seattle City Light and the Bonneville Power Authority. Thanks to renewable hydropower, we pay pennies per kilowatt-hour, while others pay much more.

So what are our options to get more power needed for population growth during increasingly unpredictable weather due to planet-wide climate change? Well, there’s nuclear, wind, solar, gravity-based generation (hydro), and maybe geothermal generation.

Texas planners are now confronted with the same dilemma. Their solution is to install renewables, mostly wind, with storage. They don’t want to repeat long, widespread blackouts in the winter of 2021 that directly led to the deaths of 240 people. Texas now leads the nation in installed wind power.

Then there’s nuclear energy, but we know this song. Remember when the Washington Public Power Supply System (WPPS: pronounced Whoops!) proposed building five nuclear power plants in the early 1980s? Ultimately, only one reactor was built, and it has been working well since it was turned on in 1987. WPPS itself disappeared. For financing, WPPS sold bonds, but their market timing was tragic. WPPS had to offer coupons as high as 15% because of the inflation and recession in the early 1980s. WPPS defaulted on much of this debt and disappeared just ahead of angry investors with pitchforks.

Pros: nuclear energy can provide stable, baseload electricity while creating jobs to build and operate the plants. Cons: recent experience in the state of Georgia shows that construction and certification of new reactors can take two to three times as long and cost three to four times more than estimated; nuclear plants are designed to be safe, but accidents still happen (Three Mile Island; Chernobyl; Fukushima); fuel can be purchased on the open market, but the sole provider for years has been — wait for it — Russia; and highly radioactive spent fuel is stored “safely on-site in barrels.”

Nuclear would not be my first choice. I include the trendy idea of small nuclear reactors that would be made in a factory and shipped to a customer. These have been in the press recently, not because there are happy customers, but because some of the start-up companies have run out of money.

As for fusion energy, until they can show me the neutrons, fusion power will always be, as has been said before, “20 years away.”

We do need more electricity. Expanding wind and solar continues to make sense, especially since the costs of these renewable sources continue to decline. Utility-scale renewable installations built these days usually include on-site battery storage, silencing “the wind-doesn’t-blow-sun-won’t-shine” critics.

Most new utility-scale wind and solar projects nowadays include enough battery storage for the entire plant for a day or more. A farm of lithium batteries at Moss Landing, California, can power an estimated 136,500 homes for several hours during periods of high demand.

Even better, a newer type of battery called a flow battery has emerged that is both safer and less expensive than lithium batteries. It works by storing electricity in a solution of metallic salt in one tank and releasing it by pumping it to another tank. I think of it as reversible rust. There is no lithium, cobalt, or any other expensive, rare or hazardous material. A 2-megawatt, 8-megawatt-hour (about enough for 500 homes) vanadium redox flow battery has been working well for the Snohomish County Utility District for several years now.