Consumers are struggling to pay for fuel at the gas pump and facing increased costs to keep the lights on and warm and cool their homes. The economic ripple effect of higher energy costs today could become a destructive wave in the months and years ahead.
The U.S. electric utility sectors in Utah - Rocky Mountain Power, city-owned electric departments and rural electric cooperatives - face the double-whammy of building new resources to cover potential shortages of electricity while simultaneously being asked to add and substitute renewable resources that are more costly than conventional coal-fired generation.
The critical need for new types of resources is real and looming. Demand for electricity, however, is rapidly outstripping supply. The North America Electric Reliability Corporation, which oversees reliability of the U.S. bulk power system, is projecting the Western United States will drop below reliable levels, risking blackouts in 2009 because of the lack of available generation.
Undermining reliability efforts, however, the global warming movement has stopped or delayed construction of almost every new coal-fired power plant.
Many believe renewable energy is the singular solution to our energy problems. The reality is that even greatly accelerated development of wind, solar and geothermal sources will barely keep pace with the need for new resources in the next 10 years and will still contribute less than 5 percent of our electricity needs.
Others advocate natural gas as the solution. Widespread reliance on natural gas-fired power plants for new base load generation and to replace existing coal-fired generation has two huge downsides for the United States.
Since the United States consumes more natural gas than it produces, further increasing natural gas reliance will both raise prices and our dependence on those same exporting countries that produce much of the world's supply of oil, Russia and Middle Eastern nations, threatening our economic and military security.
The only viable solution is to use a full portfolio of resources, including efficiency and viable renewables. Absent more coal-fired power plants and nuclear generation, however, we will not only find ourselves in an economy with spiraling prices, but major industries will flee U.S. borders for countries where electricity is available and affordable, and where foreign, unregulated utilities can spew emissions into the atmosphere further compounding global air pollution issues.
We will also adversely impact our own ability to fund research on technologies that in the next 50 years could revolutionize how we produce and use energy.
I believe in the coming years we'll find that California and Florida won't be swallowed up by the oceans as predicted by Al Gore, and cycles of climate heating and cooling on Earth will have continued as they have for millennia. If our economy is vibrant, we will also find the United States will have made progress to reduce pollutants in the atmosphere as we have for decades, and we will have discovered better ways to produce and use energy.
If we choose to eliminate coal and nuclear from our power mix, those who proclaim impending cataclysmic events because of CO2 in the atmosphere, and who blame Utahns and Americans in general for overconsuming, will have had their day, probably just not in the way they imagined.
People simply won't be able to afford much of anything, including newspapers.
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* MICHAEL PETERSON is executive director of the Utah Rural Electric Association.
