Infrastructure Megaprojects: Energy

Without energy, nothing happens. That's not a hyperbole; nothing happens if there's not energy. No water is pumped, no food is moved to market, no computers or lights turn on, and come winter we all freeze to death. It seems fitting to start our megaprojects list here.

Electricity is our most efficient means of moving energy from place to place. There are many ways of generating electricity, but most have significant downsides. Fossil fuels pollute to varying degrees, and need continuous exploration to find new sources. (The negative effects of fracking for this purpose are tremendous. But that's another post.) Wind and photovoltaic solar cells are weather-dependent, and thus unreliable for continuous demand. Hydroelectric dams can only be put in a few places.

There are only two developed means of generation which are both emission-free and weather-independent. The first is nuclear. A well-designed and well-maintained nuclear plant is one of the safest means of power generation ever conceived. Adding up all the deaths due to nuclear accidents, those numbers don't come close to the damage of coal plants. Most nuclear accidents in the world have been due to old designs that were not properly fail-safe; there are vastly better designs now. Spent fuel rods can be reprocessed, eliminating most of the waste disposal concerns. And research into thorium reactors could further enhance both safety and pollution concerns.

But there's an even better way. Solar thermal power is completely pollution-free. It has all the upsides of a large-scale photovoltaic plant, and none of the down-sides. It can run at night, doesn't require complex chemical processes to build, and has no lifetime constraint. Right now there are about 1.5 gigawatts of installed solar thermal power in the US, with another 4 GW in planning.

Average electricity consumption in the US is on the order of 500 GW, about two-thirds of which is fossil fuel based. A large solar thermal plant can generate ~300 MW, so about a thousand solar thermal plants could eliminate fossil fuel plants entirely. Cost of construction for solar thermal plants is about $5500/kW, meaning it would cost ~$2 trillion to get the grid entirely off fossil fuels. That's a lot of money, but it's only about 4x the cost of the interstate system. Divide it up over 40 years, and we're talking about $50 billion a year. That's significant, but it's only about 1.5% of federal spending. What we would gain would be far greater than what we would lose.

Ecological benefits are obvious: our particulate and carbon emissions go way down. Economic benefits are high as well, as our fossil fuels now become something we can sell on the world market, rather than something we must burn here just to keep our civilization going. We'd become a huge supplier worldwide, greatly increasing our soft power. Along with this, we should improve our infrastructure links to Canada and Mexico, allowing us to become a net exporter of electricity and helping improve those countries as well.

Now, that's just the macro picture. There would clearly need to be a robust program in place to retrain whatever workers were displaced by the shift. And there would be second-order effects as electricity prices drop, possibly shutting down other plants. There's no changing one thing without changing fifty others, and we'd want to minimize the overall damage as much as possible. But once the shift was over, having a large, distributed, clean, free source of electricity would make the United States and our neighbors far better countries to live in.