Better technology, we are told, is the solution to our fossil fuel problems. Right now, wind and solar are too expensive and space-inefficient to cover more than a tiny fraction of our energy needs. Therefore, as time goes on and the researchers the government doesn't fire work their scientific voodoo, cheap, unlimited renewable energy will cover more and more of our power needs without causing any financial pain to the humble utility customer.
The only problem is that wind and solar, even if it becomes cheap and plentiful, aren't base load power sources.
What is base load? Wikipedia sums it up:
Power plants are designated base load based on their low cost generation, efficiency and safety at set outputs. Baseload power plants do not change production to match power consumption demands since it is always cheaper to run them rather than running high cost combined cycle plants or combustion turbines. Typically these plants are massive enough to provide a majority of the power used by a grid, making them slow to fire up and cool down. Thus, they are more effective when used continuously to cover the power baseload required by the grid.Each base load power plant on a grid is allotted a specific amount of the baseload power demand to handle. The base load power is determined by the Load Duration Curve of the system. For a typical power system, rule of thumb states that the base load power is usually 35-40% of the maximum load during the year.
Basically, wind and sun aren't automatically there when we need it. During a heatwave, when air conditioners are on full blast and the existing power grid creaks with stress, the wind isn't blowing. In the dead of winter, solar panels work only intermittently, only when the sun is out. Grid interoperability helps to a certain extent under the theory that it's usually windy or sunny somewhere, but there still has to be some sort of base load facility available, whether it's fancy new technology like pebble-bed nuclear or old-fashioned land-scarring and miner-killilng coal. Even hydropower is limited by things like winter snowpack and flood control.
The answer, it seems, should kill two birds with one stone. Hydrogen, the transport energy hype-fuel, requires a great deal of electricity to create by splitting water molecules. If renewables are sufficiently overbuilt, as they would have to be to maintain reliability, the inevitable and cost-free excess generation (i.e. wind power generated during pleasant fall night) would go to making hydrogen, filling our cars while funding peak capacity.
The only problem is that free-market economy gets in the way. The California Energy Crisis taught us that utilities, just like any other kind of company, want to save money by keeping excess inventory to a minimum. After deregulation, utilities in California played it close to the bone, and Enron traders took advantage of this by taking select transmission lines and smallish power plants off line just long enough to drive the spot market into a frenzy. Sure, the more redundancy and overcapacity built in to a renewables-heavy energy grid, the more hydrogen you can make, but the more hydrogen you make, the less you can charge for it.
Therefore, lower generation costs on their own will not raise the profile of renewables beyond their current speck-like presence on the nation's energy portfolio since they can't be relied upon to generate power as evenly as a power plant that takes a specified amount of fuel on one end and puts out a specified amount of power on the other. To expand renewables use in any meaningful way, utilities must solve the base load problem, which they won't do if they operate in a free-market system. Re-regulation would create monopolies bigger and badder than the old ones, since they would be responsible for making hydrogen - imagine a company with the combined pull of Duke Power and Exxon, or Exelon and ChevronTexaco. Granting power-selling licenses to companies only if they build a certain percent of overcapacity would create competition, but constant pressure to bring down the price of hydrogen for drivers would lead the government to shift costs to the utilities, which would then demand bailouts as often as the airlines.
Pretty depressing choices, eh?
If you have better ideas, the comments are there for you to use.
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