The Plan for Replacing Fossil Fuels

Whether they realize it or not, policymakers dealing with energy and climate issues are now deeply engaged in the wedges game. What is the wedges game? It is a useful way of thinking about how to replace energy technologies that produce greenhouse emissions with less-harmful alternatives.

Princeton professors Robert Socolow and Stephen Pacala first introduced the concept several years ago, and it has really taken off. The basic concept is this: we have an industrial society built on a shaky foundation of fossil fuels that must be replaced. There is no one technology that can substitute directly for fossil fuels, but by combining technologies and new lifestyle choices, we can ramp down our emissions to a safe level. Each option is termed a "climate stabilization wedge" because it will help reduce greenhouse gas emissions and stabilize the climate.

Wedges include solar power, wind power, more efficient appliances, green buildings, coal-plant carbon capture and storage, public transportation, auto fuel efficiency, nuclear power and so on. Socolow and Pacala have turned their idea into an actual role-playing game that is being adapted for use in schools.

The wedges game certainly has all the elements of a fast-paced, exciting game: you have to keep the atmospheric CO2 concentration under 450 ppm, but your society is now on track to double its carbon emissions in the next 50 years. If you fail, your planet may lose its Arctic ice cap, which is likely to tip the climate into runaway heating mode and destroy human civilization. If it were just a game, it would be lots of fun, but unfortunately, it is very real.

Richard Richels, a senior engineer at the Electric Power Research Institute, thinks that the wedges idea is useful for helping people to understand that there is no silver bullet solution to the climate-energy crisis. However, Richels is concerned that letting participants just choose the wedges they like best does not consider real-world cost factors.

"You've got to get the economics in there," he said. "If the train is really going to leave the station on this issue, the price of the ride is going to have to be affordable." But who determines what is affordable and feasible?

We can find an answer to that question by comparing the public impact of two recent studies that assess the feasibility of different kinds of climate wedges. In early February, the American Solar Energy Society (ASES) released a study showing how the energy efficiency and renewable energy wedges together can reduce US emissions enough to meet the goal of keeping CO2 under 450-500 ppm.

Two weeks later, the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) released an assessment of carbon reduction wedges for the utility industry that snipped out only tiny slices for increases in efficiency and renewables, while chopping out big fat wedges for new nuclear plants and coal-carbon capture and storage. Both the EPRI and the ASES studies focus on emissions reductions that can be achieved by 2030.

While the EPRI study was covered in the New York Times and elsewhere, the ASES study was covered by only two news organizations, The Daily Camera out of Boulder, Colorado, and my article at Truthout, also reprinted by AlterNet.

Neither the EPRI study nor the ASES study considers the economic costs of its scenarios in a comprehensive way. Each relies instead on the independent judgment of experts in their fields about what is achievable both technically and economically.

The difference in their assessments of renewable energy is striking. EPRI allows renewable energy to grow from today's 1.6 percent to only 6.7 percent of our electric energy portfolio by 2030. ASES says it can grow much more -- to 40 percent by 2030.

I emailed Charles Kutscher, editor of the ASES report, to ask him why he thinks the EPRI report downplays renewables so heavily. His answer is worth quoting in full:

There is an old saying that the challenge in predicting the future is that it "isn't what it used to be." EPRI sees a mix of fossil, nuclear, and renewables that does not depart greatly from what we have today. To them the future is basically what it used to be.

In his book, Energy Autonomy, Hermann Scheer lists a number of technological and economic assumptions that many people mistakenly embrace. One is "the functional priority placed on existing energy supply structures.'" As he puts it, "This premise turns the status quo into the standard for determining how much renewable energy can be tolerated.'"

In support of this premise, EPRI used very low cost estimates for carbon-free alternatives to renewables. For example, slide presentations on the EPRI web give a levelized cost of electricity for nuclear power as under 5 cents per kWh. Back in 1996, the California Energy Commission estimated the cost of nuclear power at 11.1 to 14.5 cents per kWh."