Back to Work - Bill Clinton [63]
Besides ensuring the most efficient distribution of power across the nation as demand rises and falls in different places, a smart, connected power grid would enable utilities to reward customers willing to use power in off-peak hours, like washing and drying clothes late at night or early in the morning, when factories and office buildings are not up and running. Doing this nationwide would save all ratepayers money by reducing the need for extra power plants. An amazing amount of power plant capacity is idle most of the time. It’s built to make sure we don’t lose power on the hottest day of the year when everything that uses electricity is on. A smart grid and modern transmission lines could reduce the amount of excess capacity we need, saving money for businesses and consumers and creating jobs.
15. Geothermal energy, using underground heat, should be increased. Even with a superefficient system, we’ll still need a lot of power to sustain growth, so we need to maximize power generation from other domestic sources, including geothermal, solid waste, and natural gas. The United States already leads the world in geothermal capacity, with 3,100 megawatts, though Iceland and the Philippines generate a higher percentage of their electricity with it because of their unique geology. Because of stimulus funding, almost 8,000 megawatts of new geothermal capacity were added in 2010. With the tax incentives, the price of geothermal power, at three to five cents per kilowatt hour, is highly competitive. Because of the projects begun since 2009, employment related to the geothermal sector has more than doubled, exceeding fifty thousand jobs, with more on the way.
16. Not every community can develop geothermal power, but every community produces a lot of solid waste. We should turn more landfills into power generators. There are real benefits in converting solid waste into power: closing landfills; building recycling businesses in plastic, metal, glass, and organic fertilizer; and using the rest to provide steam heat to power factories or provide electricity for the grid. We could create jobs, improve public health, and free land for more productive purposes. Once the cost of a solid-waste plant is recovered, it’s a great source of cheap power.
For an initial investment of $600 million in 1972, the city of Gothenburg, Sweden, built an efficient waste-to-energy generator that now saves its more than 500,000 citizens $33.6 million a year, reduces CO2 emissions by 25 percent, and requires much less landfill space. São Paulo, Brazil, has power plants at the site of two of its large landfills. In India, New Delhi has just begun a large waste-to-energy project that my foundation’s Climate Initiative helped to develop. In the 1980s, when I was governor of Arkansas, we had a steel wire plant that weathered the big downturn in manufacturing solely because its energy costs were lower than those of its competitors. The energy came from the local landfill. We should do a lot more of this.
17. Develop our natural gas resources. Many old coal-fired plants are scheduled to be closed in the next few years. They’re big producers of carbon dioxide; the oldest 10 percent are responsible for about 40 percent of total CO2 emissions from coal plants. As we develop other sources of clean power, we should use natural gas as a bridge fuel. It’s the cleanest fossil fuel, more than 50 percent cleaner than coal in terms of greenhouse-gas emissions, 25 percent cleaner than oil when used in transportation, and only one-fourth as expensive. And new discoveries in the United States have given us a huge supply, enough for ninety years. I’d also like to see more natural-gas