Big Ideas in a Small World

 The French TGV is an all-electric high-speed rail (photo from http://e-sushi.fr/tag/tgv-sncf).  Will we see something similar in this country?  And will it even come to Long Island?

Last month, Long Island’s newspaper Newsday published an article about a proposed $105 billion project to bring high-speed rail to Long Island.  The rail would connect New York City to Boston by first traveling across Long Island and then crossing back to the mainland via a tunnel underneath the Long Island Sound. Zipping along for large stretches at speeds up to 200 mph, a train leaving Penn Station would arrive in Boston in one hour and 40 minutes.  The planners of this project are hoping that the proposed American Jobs Plan initiated by President Joe Biden will make the necessary funding available for the ambitious endeavor. There are definitely some pros and cons to consider given the size of the project, but it has support from politicians like Hartford mayor Luke Bronin, US Representative Tom Suozzi from Nassau County, and Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone (all Democrats). I am going to look at it here from the perspective of sustainability and addressing the climate crisis, and make three general points that come in to play in this proposal.  Based on these three points, I am going to conclude that this is not the best use of our resources as a whole, but that parts of it are worth looking into.  

1.  High-speed rail is a very good thing, when the train travels from city center to city center.  The obvious reason for this is that high-speed rail would obviate the need for short-distance commercial airplane flights. Air travel contributes 2% to the total carbon dioxide emissions, and it's going to be the most challenging aspect of our transportation system to eliminate emissions from.  A significant percentage of the fuel consumed in a given flight comes during takeoff and landing, and the shorter the distance of the flight, the higher that percentage becomes.  But if you can get from New York City to Boston in under two hours via train, without having to go through all the additional security measures and baggage checks and boarding processes that you need to do in airports, then flights from New York to Boston (or a number of other cities on the eastern seaboard) will not be necessary. Most train routes are completely electrified as it is, and if the electricity fueling high-speed rail comes from entirely green sources, then you can get from New York to Boston quickly without any carbon emissions.

2.  Anything that expands the suburbs will do more environmental harm than good — including, if implemented improperly, high-speed trains.  This is a point that needs to be made loudly, because the passage of even a watered down version of the American Jobs Plan will result in a lot of money getting thrown around for development and infrastructure. It’s important that this money gets spent the right way. Before I talk about this particular example, I need to point out for the sake of disclosure that I live in Ronkonkoma, about fifty miles east of Manhattan on Long Island. Ronkonkoma is the terminal station of one of the lines of the Long Island Railroad, and in this proposal it is slated to be the hub connecting Manhattan to New England via the high-speed rail. If the high-speed rail can connect New York City to Boston in under two hours, then it would connect New York City to Ronkonkoma in less than half an hour. Now you may think that a half-hour train ride from where I am to New York City would be a good thing, but here’s why it isn’t.  The part of Suffolk County that stretches out to the east from where I am is full of farmland and woods, and the amount of nature out here may surprise people living in the City or the more fully suburban Nassau County. But if people could commute from the more remote regions of Suffolk to New York City in less than an hour, developers will swallow up the Island’s remaining agricultural and open spaces very quickly. Land is a precious commodity.  Housing and businesses, the agriculture necessary to feed people, the generation of energy (renewable energy especially), and nature all need their space. Of these, the addition of housing and businesses doesn’t need to spread horizontally.  That is why the most sustainable way to develop is upward, not outward. But the demand to develop outward from New York City, including further and further eastward across Long Island, has remained steady and strong since the end of the Second World War.  And the pressure to keep spreading out has just been magnified enormously by the pandemic. Wise leaders will look for ways to resist that pressure.  Also keep in mind that forestland remains our best means of removing carbon dioxide from the air, so a truly effective plan to combat global warming will keep trees where they are.  In other words, we need to start making the most of the space we have already put into use.

3.  We should always look at multiple ways to achieve the desired outcomes, and compare them in terms of costs and less-desired outcomes.  The primary desired outcome is high-speed land transit from New York to Boston, but rapid trips from Eastern Long Island to New York City and to New England are also desired.  The benefits of the first outcome are obvious, but they can be accomplished on the existing Amtrak line without magnifying the cost significantly by digging a tunnel under the Long Island Sound.  The second outcome risks the undesired eventuality of the complete suburbanization of Long Island; justifying such a massive expense should require an air-tight plan to prevent that suburbanization from happening, and the burden of proof is on the planners.  You can (and should) certainly improve the performance of the Long Island Railroad, but the suggested proposal goes past the point where the combined financial and environmental costs outweigh the benefits.  As far as cutting travel time to New England is concerned, one possibility that seems to be getting overlooked is to improve the transportation of people and cars across the Long Island Sound by boat.  Electric ferries already do exist, as do high-speed ferries.  That means that it wouldn’t require any future innovation to ferry people and their cars across the Sound in substantially less time than it takes now (and than it takes to go from eastern Long Island to New England by car), and to do it cleanly.  A fleet of green high-speed ferries might not come cheap, but you’re comparing it to the cost of a high-speed rail tunnel under the Long Island Sound.  It also wouldn’t require major disruption within the town of Port Jefferson, the site of one of the ferries between Long Island and Connecticut, whose long-term resistance to big infrastructure projects is mentioned in the Newsday article.

With some sort of large infrastructure package likely to get through Congress and reach President Biden’s desk, now is as good time as any to speculate and think big.  I like the ambition of the high-speed rail proposal.  But while I believe we can afford massive infrastructure investments, we can’t afford to have them come with significant negative consequences.  So we need to be careful and creative.  I think we can come up with some big ideas and big improvements, and make them happen in ways that will satisfy most people while helping us make our mark on the planet smaller instead of bigger.

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The Cost of Energy Transition, Part 3: In with the New

 The Alta Wind Energy Center in California, currently the country's largest wind farm.  (Photo from Wikipedia)

In a previous post, I talked about how transitioning to clean power generation over the next decade and a half will pose challenges that are more political than logistical.  I focused on the closing of existing plants in that post, but now I would like to delve into the cost of building clean energy, and how this cost compares to the cost of the existing fossil fuel infrastructure.  One company that compares relative costs is the financial advisement firm Lazard. Lazard issues a report on the levelized cost of energy every November.  The November 2020 publication includes updates on the price of coal, gas, solar, wind, and nuclear, and also has a section on the cost of battery storage.

Let's begin by looking at the very first graph, which lists the price of different forms of energy generation in units of dollars per megawatt-hour (MWh).  The price of rooftop residential solar ranges from $150-$227/MWh, while the price of rooftop commercial and industrial solar ranges from $74-$179/MWh.  These costs are actually pretty high, but the cost of utility scale solar range is only from $31-$42 per megawatt hour. The big difference comes simply from the economy of scale; the larger the assemblage of panels, the cheaper the cost per unit energy.  Wind power ranges from $26-$54/MWh. The orange diamond that says $86/MWh corresponds to offshore wind.  So wind is cheaper than solar in some places but more expensive in others. Offshore wind is noticeably more expensive than land-based wind, but it came down by $3 MWh relative to 2019 and could still be a very important contributor to the energy sector in coming years if the price continues to drop, or if the available land for generating energy is insufficient.  

How do these costs compare with more conventional forms of energy? Coal ranges from $65-$159/MWh.  This is generally more expensive than utility-scale solar or wind. But this is the cost of constructing new coal plants, compared to the cost of constructing new solar farms or new windmills.  Notice, however, the orange diamond that says $41/MWh. That's the cost of generating energy from a coal plant once the cost of the plant’s construction has been accounted for.  So on one hand, you do still need to consider the cost of stranding an operational coal plant. But I discussed this in the previous post post, and the cost is actually fairly manageable.  On the other hand, there are plenty of places where it would save money – right now – to replace the existing coal plant with a solar or wind farm.  That is an important factor to keep in consideration when deciding which coal plants to retire first, and how quickly.  Natural gas, looking specifically at the combined cycle, ranges from $44-$73/MWh. This is cheaper than coal, in continuation of a trend that's been going on for a decade.  New gas plants are mostly more expensive than new solar and wind farms.  But again, a rapid transition to clean energy will require replacing existing operational plants.

That brings us to nuclear power.  The cost of new nuclear power ranges from $129-$198/MWh.  If you scroll down four graphs to the unsubsidized levelized cost of storage, you'll see that wholesale photovoltaics plus storage costs $81-$140/MWh.  In other words, building a solar farm with battery storage today will generally cost quite a bit less per energy generated than building a new nuclear plant will. This does not bode well for nuclear power as a means of providing clean energy in the future.  But if you go back to the first graph and look at the diamond next to nuclear power, you'll see that nuclear power costs $29/MWh when you subtract the cost to build the plant. So nuclear plants are the most expensive power plants to build, but they’re actually cheap to maintain.  This suggests that existing nuclear power plants have a role to play in providing clean energy today.  Many of these plants are struggling, however, because it is very difficult for them to provide energy at a competitive price right now while the cost of construction is still being paid off. And a small number of plants, most notably Indian Point in upstate New York, have reached a point where it would take a major, costly structural overhaul to keep them running. But for the time being at least, existing nuclear plants are the cheapest source of zero-emission, non-intermittent energy.  The current administration has expressed a willingness to support taxpayer subsidies for existing nuclear plants to keep them from closing.  I think this is sensible, even if the burden of proof is now squarely on the nuclear industry where future energy generation is concerned.

To be fair, it’s important to acknowledge that intermittency (the inability of solar and wind farms to generate power at a constant rate) will require the introduction of a significant amount of battery storage as renewables gain a greater share of power generation.  The timing of this matters, as the cost of battery storage remains high but is heading downward.  Lazard estimated the cost of wholesale photovoltaics plus storage to be $102-$139/MWh in 2019 and $108-$140/MWh in 2018.  So the trend is in the right direction, but work needs to be done and time is short.  It’s important to get a real sense of how much battery storage will be needed and when as the energy market transitions.  A little bit of smart planning could make a huge difference in the overall cost of the clean energy transition.

So, from the perspective of somebody who believes that the climate crisis necessitates cleaning up all our energy use as quickly as possible, what should we do with this information?  I think the first step should be to declare a moratorium on the construction of any new power plants that emit any carbon dioxide.  This may sound controversial, but it's easily defensible given current energy economics.  Second, I think you can tip the markets in favor of cleaner energy by removing the subsidies on fossil fuels and replacing them with a carbon tax.  To avoid some serious economic and political risks, the tax would have to be balanced by a dividend so that it is revenue neutral.  That means, however, that the revenue necessary to clean up power generation would have to come from other sources.  I’ve already said in a few places that the Biden Administration will need to walk a tightrope to make this happen the right way.  But they can do this if they are smart.

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