We must start investing in energy alternatives in Maryland. But eliminating nuclear power and coal from the mix, as activists from Maryland Public Interest Research Group advocate, makes no sense.
A new report from Maryland PIRG says “clean energy” — mostly solar and wind, is cheaper and quicker to deploy than a new nuclear reactor, which will not be available until December 2015, and cleaner than coal.
But just because building a new reactor at Calvert Cliffs will take time is no reason to halt the expansion of relatively clean, safe and reliable nuclear power. The Public Service Commission has said Maryland could face rolling blackouts as soon as 2011. Those issues will only get worse as the population expands and demands the state develop a mix of resources.
Besides, it?s unclear just how reliable alternative energy sources will be and how much developing those resources will cost Marylanders. Activists often cite California, where per capita energy use has remained flat for the past 30 years, as an example to emulate. But state residents there face some of the highest electricity rates in the nation. And plans to rely on solar have fallen woefully short. As Max Schulz writes in “California?s Potemkin Environmentalism” in the spring 2008 issue of City Journal, Rancho Seco, site of one of the largest photovoltaic arrays in the world, “provides less than 4MW if electricity, or less than half of 1 percent of what the closed nuclear plant [where it is sited] optimally offered.”
Schulz also notes that up to 20 percent of California?s power comes from coal-burning plants outside of the state. So California hasn?t eliminated coal — just outsourced its pollution to neighboring states.
Other issues jeopardize MaryPIRGs plans to rely on alternative energy. Earlier this year Gov. Martin O?Malley rejected putting wind turbines on state land managed by the Department of Natural Resources, removing 449,000 acres for future use. Not all of those acres were suitable for wind farms. But the decision does not bode well for future wind projects if a few disgruntled residents who think turbines are ugly can thwart a supposed top priority of the administration. Those same aesthetic objectors also oppose new transmission lines — at least as critical, if not more so, as new sources of power — for the same reason.
Conservation is the cleanest, safest way to get cheap energy, but only if there are sources. Fundamental physics and political reality dictate PIRG?s chosen sources at best can provide only a small fraction of our needs.
So insteadof opposing nuclear and coal, we should embrace them as part of our long-term energy mix. Rejecting them only puts us in peril of rationing energy in years to come and as California already does — outsourcing our pollution to other states with less enlightened politics.
