Power Hungry (11 page)

PHOTO 4
The Wizard of Menlo Park next to his original dynamo at Orange, New Jersey, 1906

Source
: Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-93698.

Though the scale of what happened at 255–257 Pearl Street may seem downright puny, the conveniences and necessities of the modern world—lights, air conditioning, television, heart monitors, cell phones, iPods, and a panoply of other gizmos—were all made possible by the work that Edison pioneered at those two long-gone buildings near the southern tip of Manhattan. And though much of the world has undergone radical change since Edison began selling the juice from that power plant back in 1882, one crucial element of the electricity-generation business has not changed at all: coal.

At Pearl Street, Edison's Jumbo generators were driven by coal-fired boilers. Today, coal continues to play a central role in the global electric
sector. In fact, no other fuel comes close. In 2006, coal provided 41 percent of the world's total electricity, with the next biggest share of the market belonging to natural gas, with 20.1 percent. From Pearl Street to the present day, coal has always been an essential element in electricity production. And electricity means prosperity.

Source
: BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2008,
http://www.bp.com/liveassets/bp_internet/globalbp/globalbp_uk_english/reports_and_publications/statistical_energy_review_2008/STAGING/local_assets/downloads/pdf/statistical_review_of_world_energy_full_review_2008.pdf
.

The world's thirst for prosperity has led to huge increases in electricity demand. Between 1990 and 2007, electricity generation jumped by 67.8 percent. During that same time frame, demand for oil increased by 25.3 percent and coal demand increased by 42.5 percent.
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Despite the soaring demand for electricity—and the coal needed to produce it—there is a growing chorus of voices calling for an end to the use of coal. And while that may be a laudable goal, it raises an obvious question: If not coal, then what?

There's an old saw about the garbage business: Everybody wants their trash picked up, but nobody wants it put down. The same thing is true about the coal industry, the red-headed bastard stepchild of the modern energy business.

Everybody wants electricity—and all of the conveniences of modern life that come with it. But few people, particularly in wealthy countries like the United States, want that juice to be manufactured from coal. There's nothing new in that attitude. For the three centuries or so that humans have been using coal in significant quantities, the black fuel has always engendered an intense love-hate relationship. Coal heated people's homes and fueled the factories of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England, but it also made parts of the country, particularly the smog-ruined cities, nearly uninhabitable. In London in 1812, a combination of coal smoke and fog became so dense that, according to one report, “for the greater part of the day it was impossible to read or write at a window without artificial light. Persons in the streets could scarcely be seen in the forenoon at two yards distance.”
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In 1952, a killer smog in London caused more than 4,000 premature deaths.
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And the problems with coal-related pollution continue to this day, particularly in China. In Datong, known as the “City of Coal,” the air pollution on some winter days is so bad that “even during the daytime, people drive with their lights on.”
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Nor is it just Datong. In 2007, the World Bank reported that sixteen of the twenty most polluted cities in the world are located in China, and much of that air pollution is due to the country's heavy reliance on coal.
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Coal is under attack. In September 2008, Al Gore encouraged activists to engage in civil disobedience to keep new coal-fired power plants that did not meet certain standards from being built. “If you're a young person looking at the future of this planet and looking at what is being done right now, and not done, I believe we have reached the stage where it is time for civil disobedience to prevent the construction of new coal plants that do not have carbon capture and sequestration,” he said.
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A few weeks after Gore's declaration, anti-coal activists got a boost when a huge coal-ash holding pond failed at a power plant operated by the Tennessee Valley Authority. The resulting spill flooded more than 300 acres with coal ash contaminated with a variety of heavy metals, including
arsenic, lead, barium, chromium, and manganese.
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In December 2008, James Hansen, the high-profile NASA scientist who is closely aligned with former vice president Al Gore on the issue of global warming, sent an open letter to President-Elect Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, in which he called coal-fired power plants “factories of death.”
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Two months later, Hansen wrote an opinion piece for Britain's
Guardian
newspaper in which he said that “coal is the single greatest threat to civilization and all life on our planet.”
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Source
: International Energy Agency,
Key World Energy Statistics 2008
, 24, and
World Energy Outlook 2008
, 507.

In July 2009, environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wrote a piece for the
Financial Times
in which he said that the United States must end its “dependence on deadly, destructive coal.” Kennedy pointed out that coal has caused acid rain and that the widespread use of mountaintop-removal mining has “buried 2,000 miles of rivers and streams, and will soon have flattened an area the size of Delaware.”
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The litany of problems caused by coal mining, coal transport, and coal combustion could fill an entire bookshelf, or maybe even a small library. Acid rain, airborne particulates, water pollution, and air pollution are just a few of the issues. Coal-fired power plants are the largest emitters of mercury in the United States, pumping some 96,000 pounds of
mercury into the air each year.
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Most humans who encounter the metal released by the power plants do so by eating fish caught from bodies of water that have been affected by airborne mercury. Mercury is a neurotoxin that is particularly harmful when ingested by pregnant women, children, and the elderly.
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Mercury exposure has been linked to higher risks for autism, impaired cognition, and neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's disease.
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Source
: BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2009,
http://www.bp.com/liveassets/bp_internet/globalbp/globalbp_uk_english/reports_and_publications/statistical_energy_review_2008/STAGING/local_assets/2009_downloads/renewables_section_2009.pdf
.

In addition to mercury, U.S. coal plants annually release about 176,000 pounds of lead, 161,000 pounds of chromium, and 100,000 pounds of arsenic—all of which are extremely damaging to humans if they are ingested. In addition, those plants produce some 130 million tons of solid waste, a category that includes both ash and scrubber sludge, the material that is produced by the plants' air pollution control equipment. That volume of material is about three times as much as all of the municipal garbage produced in the United States every year.
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And in the wake of the massive coal-ash spill in Tennessee, that gargantuan volume of waste has started getting the kind of regulatory scrutiny it deserves.

There's no question that other sources of energy—particularly nuclear and natural gas—can provide large amounts of electric power without putting pollutants into the atmosphere. The problem with replacing coal with something else—anything else—is, once again, an issue of scale. On an average day, the world consumes about 66.3 million barrels of oil equivalent in the form of coal. Though coal surely deserves much of the criticism that it gets, it has become the de facto standard for electricity
generation, particularly in the world's most populous countries. Finally, production of the world's coal is not controlled by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) or any similar entity.

Those attributes, combined with the world's insatiable demand for electricity, are driving demand. Between 2007 and 2008, global coal use increased by about 800 million barrels of oil equivalent.
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That increase—which works out to some 2.2 million barrels of oil equivalent per day—is about twenty-five times as much energy as that produced by all the solar panels and wind turbines in the United States in 2008.

The world's developing countries are using their coal for electricity generation, and that electricity is propelling economic growth around the world, particularly in rapidly developing countries such as China, Indonesia, and Malaysia. Between 1990 and 2008, electricity generation in those three countries jumped by more than 300 percent. The five countries with the biggest increases in electricity generation during that time included China (452 percent increase), Indonesia (353 percent), United Arab Emirates (352 percent), Malaysia (321 percent), and Qatar (307 percent).
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Those are astounding rates of increase, particularly when you consider that between 1990 and 2008, global electricity generation increased by just 70 percent and U.S. electric output rose by 35.5 percent.
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The close correlation between electricity use and economic growth has become so obvious that it is accepted as fact. Investment bankers in the United States and elsewhere use China's electricity-production data as a barometer of that country's industrial output.
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The five countries with the highest per-capita rates of electricity consumption are Iceland, Norway, Finland, Canada, and Qatar—all of which are among the world's wealthiest countries on a per-capita basis. Conversely, the countries and territories with the lowest electricity consumption—Gaza, Chad, Burundi, Central African Republic, and Rwanda—are among the poorest.
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