On March 11, 2011, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant north of Tokyo was hit by a wall of water 43 feet high that destroyed or disabled enough equipment to cause three reactors to melt down.

Two years later, the people of Japan are bouncing back. The nuclear industry, not so much.

The United States has not (yet) built a new nuclear reactor since 1996 — new U.S. nuclear capacity has essentially flatlined. The U.S. still has far more nuclear power generation than any other country, though China, Russia, India, and Korea are actively constructing new reactors. A few U.S. building permits have trickled in since 2007, when an energy bill with incentives for new nuclear plants passed Congress. The Wall Street Journal reported in December that:

The first newly licensed nuclear-power plant to be built in the U.S. in decades, the Vogtle project in Georgia, has run into construction problems and may be falling years behind schedule, according to an engineering expert advising the state.

Nuclear power may continue to be a small wedge of our energy pie, but it is still not going to be more than a small wedge of the solution to human-caused climate change. Here’s why.

COST

A new nuclear reactor will set you back a cool $10 billion or more. The Department of Energy is promoting a plan to build as many as 50 small modular reactors per year starting in 2040. Constructed in factories, these reactors would cost “only” $3-5 billion each.

But before they even get to building a new reactor, the nuclear industry has relied upon about ten times as much in federal subsidies compared to those reluctantly offered to renewable energy developers. This is important to keep in mind as the industry complains about wind energy subsidies lowering electricity prices.

One of the arguments the nuclear industry has made over the last several decades is that though it is expensive right now, once the industry learns how to construct plants again, the financial structure changes as costs drop. This appears to be the opposite of true: Nuclear power has a negative learning curve.

Average and min/max reactor construction costs per year of completion date for US and France versus cumulative capacity completed.

Nuclear power has always been very expensive, and will continue to be staggeringly so, especially if we are to build in safety and redundancy measures needed to avoid future Fukushimas.

SAFETY

Japan faces combined clean up and compensation costs at Fukushima estimated to reach $500 billion. The timeline for decommissioning the ruined plant is 30-40 years. There is a $6 million robot deployed to inspect the damaged hallways that got lost in the plant and has not been seen for 17 months. And the cost estimates are just guesswork:

Read more

By Felix Kramer and Max Baumhefner, via Switchboard

When it comes to consumer products, environmentalists generally don’t encourage people to buy new and buy now. But that’s what we’re about to do because electric cars are significantly cleaner than gasoline vehicles, and driving one can save you serious cash at the pump.

Perhaps you’ve already thought about buying an electric car, but dismissed the idea for one reason or another. Let’s look at some common misconceptions, and offer some good reasons why you might want to reconsider:

“I should drive my current car into the ground.”

“Hold on,” you say to yourself, “I already own a car that gets 25 miles a gallon. I want to get my money’s worth from the investment.” The sooner you start saving gas, the better it is for the planet and your pocketbook. There’s no use in throwing good money after bad at the pump, and the sooner you sell your current car, the less money you’ll lose to depreciation.

“I’d just be switching my pollution from the tailpipe to the power plant.”

If you want to go green, driving on electricity is a clear winner. Using today’s average American electricity mix of natural gas, coal, nuclear, hydro, wind, geothermal, and solar, an electric car emits half the amount of climate-changing carbon pollution per mile as the average new vehicle. In states with cleaner mixes, such as California, it’s only a quarter as much. To find out how clean your electric car would be today, plug your zip code into the EPA’s “Beyond Tailpipe Emissions Calculator.” You should also know that, because old coal plants are increasingly being retired and replaced by cleaner and renewable resources, plug-in cars are the only cars that become cleaner as they age.

“What I save on gas, I’ll pay in electricity.”

On average US residential electricity rates, driving one of today’s electric cars is the equivalent of driving a 27 mile-per-gallon car on buck-a-gallon gasoline. It’s been that way for the last four decades, and is forecasted to stay that way for the next three decades. Experts basically throw up their hands when asked to predict the price of gas next year, let alone 30 years from now. One thing we do know: the price at the pump will jump up and down due to geopolitical events beyond our control. If you’re tired of that rollercoaster, call your local utility to ask about electricity rates designed for plug-in cars.

“I’ll hold off until prices go down and there are more places to charge.”

If you’re thinking you’d be better off waiting for a cheaper, better electric car, and a charging station on every block, consider the following:

Read more

By Evan Mills, via Property Casualty 360

Whatever insurers may think about the presence or causes of climate change, one thing is certain: the business climate is changing, rapidly.

New technologies are entering the market for saving and supplying cleaner energy in buildings, transport, and industry — and insureds are adopting these “green” technologies left and right. Renewable energy investment around the world topped $257 billion in 2011 (80% of the investment in fossil fuel capacity), approaching half of all new electrical generating capacity globally. Energy efficiency and “green-buildings” have also become multi-billion-dollar markets, and growth is showing no signs of slowing.

With this comes a need to assess and manage associated emerging risks, as well as be an early mover to capture business opportunities and stay in tune with customers who are increasingly “going green.”

Read Mills’ “From Risk to Opportunity 2012: The Greening of Insurance“

I have cataloged over 1100 climate-oriented activities conducted by 378 insurance entities in 51 countries. Surprisingly more are based in the U.S. than any other country, although some of the most concerted efforts are to be found elsewhere.

Care should be taken that these well-intended efforts to curb greenhouse-gas emissions don’t have inadvertent consequences. That said, some pundits have focused myopically on potential downsides, without considering the prospective co-benefits. For example, insurers have long found that facilities that institutionalize a “culture” of careful energy management experience fewer losses.

Read more

A new study out of Stanford University, scheduled to be published in the journal Energy Policy, argues that New York State can eliminate fossil fuels from its energy mix entirely by 2050.

Written by Mark Z. Jacobson and Mark A. Delucchi — who helped produce a similar plan for the world as a whole in 2009 — along with several other coworkers, the report suggests that New York State’s end-use power could be supplied by a mix of various forms of solar, wind power, and water-based and geothermal sources. That goal could be met as early as 2030, and all conventional fossil fuel generation would be phased out no later than 2050.

On the demand-side of the ledger, because renewables generally deliver power more efficiently — electric cars lose far less energy to waste heat than standard combustion engines, for example — the state’s end-use demand would be cut by roughly 37 percent. Efficiency updates would to buildings, infrastructure, etc. would make up the rest of the gap. By the report’s analysis, this would all cut the United State’s climate costs by about $3.2 billion a year by 2050.

The major points of the plan are:

Replace all fossil fuel electricity with solar, wind, and other renewables. This would include mostly offshore wind and some onshore, together supplying about half the state’s energy needs. Standard solar arrays and concentrated solar power systems, plus wide deployment of residential rooftop solar (a goal already getting a boost from third-party leasing, among other things) as well as commercial and governmental rooftop solar, would deliver another 38 percent of the state’s energy. A mix of hydroelectric, wave, tidal, and geothermal would fill in the rest. The offshore wind would arguably be the most dramatic project, requiring an area of ocean surface equivalent to about 4.6 percent of New York State’s land area.

Replace all combustion-driven transportation with electricity and hydrogen. Standard passenger cars would go electric, while most larger road vehicles, non-road machines, ships, and trains would be driven by hydrogen fuel cells and hydrogen combustion. Electricity and ground sources would provide heating and air conditioning, and electricity and hydrogen combustion would power industrial processes.

Efficiency retrofits to reduce energy demand. Residential, commercial, institutional, and government buildings would be updated with improved insulation, lighting, and heat and filtration systems. Solar power would be more broadly used for lighting, water heating, and passive seasonal heating and cooling. Future infrastructure would be framed towards encouraging public transit use and telecommuting.

Delucchi went into more detail with NY Times blogger Andrew Revkin on how the study’s authors think these goals could be hit in practical terms.

The plan also involves deploying a smart grid to manage these various energy sources, as well as integrating weather forecasting into operations. The researchers chose not to include natural gas since it remains an emitter of carbon dioxide and methane, and because the extraction of natural gas remains highly carbon-intensive. More interestingly, they decided not to include biofuels either, due to their inefficiency in comparison to electricity for transportation, the high land-use required to grow either corn or cellulosic feedstocks in comparison to land-use of wind, and because the agricultural production of biofuel crops offsets a lot of the carbon reduction and creates other pollution.

According to Stacy Clark at HuffPost, Jacobson estimated the total cost for the project at $600 billion — no small ask. However, Jacobson and his co-authors also estimate the project would create 4.5 million jobs during construction, and maintain 58,000 permanent jobs thereafter. Using rough metric’s economists have developed for estimating the financial value of a human life, as well as the costs to New York State from deaths due to pollution-induced illnesses, they also estimate the project would pay for itself in 17 years.

Let’s get started.

So the American Petroleum Institute is out with more ads that feature “person on the street” interviews with ordinary Americans. You know, the kind of folks that go to bed at night worried about those mean people in Washington threatening to take away the billions in tax breaks currently enjoyed by the fossil fuel industry.

Leaving aside the substance — that high gas prices are already enriching oil companies on top of their tax breaks, and the industry has enjoyed hundreds of billions in government support for a very long time — you have to wonder how ads like this get made in the first place. Do those folks really walk around on the street, and a camera pops up in front of them, and they blurt out deep-seated and authentic desires to protect aggrieved mega-corporations?

Greenpeace investigated this in 2011, and got some audio evidence of the direction these “people on the street” receive from the directors.

The people who appear in the ads are assured that : “... all they do is the director feeds them the lines and he talks them through it.” As a result, they end up saying crazy things like “I think taxing the oil and gas industry does nothing but harm the country” on national television.

So keep that in mind when you see the people in these ads: It’s more profiteering through puppeteering than any genuine concern about energy costs.

According to a new report, America broke records in terms of installed solar capacity last year, jumping to 11 percent of total global installations. [Greentech Media]

It may not compare to the German solar market. But the U.S. is definitely becoming a major force globally when it comes to new installations.

According to the 2012 Solar Market Insight report from GTM Research and the Solar Energy Industries Association, America installed 3,313 megawatts of solar capacity last year — accounting for 11 percent of total global installations. That’s up from 7 percent in 2011.

“From 2004 until 2010, America’s global share had been stuck in a tight band. The U.S. significantly broke that in 2012,” said Shayle Kann, vice president at GTM Research. “Our forecasts put us at 13 percent in 2013.”

In Nevada, federal and state officials announced the approval of the McCoy Solar Energy Project, the Desert Harvest Solar Farm, and the Searchlight Wind Energy Project. [San Jose Mercury News]

Following the worst drought in 50 years, US farmers are bracing for long-term challenges due to climate change like heat waves, droughts, and floods.[Global Post]

Supporters of a bill just introduced to the NC General Assembly that would repeal the state’s Renewable Energy Standard are unsure of its prospects for passage. [Charlotte Business Journal]

Four lawmakers who unveiled a proposal for pricing carbon are soliciting public comments for how big the tax should be and how best to rebate the money. [Washington Post]

Monarch butterfly migration plunged to its lowest level in decades, hastened by drought and record-breaking heat in North America. [New York Times]

Paul Ryan’s budget accuses two solar projects in Nevada and Arizona “ill-fated” but they’re actually success stories. [Washington Post]

President Obama asked Organizing for America to give lawmakers cover on potential action on climate change. [The Hill]

Bill McKibben makes the case that immigration reform will “help, not hurt, our environmental efforts” on climate change. [LA Times]