Environmental Benefits of Renewable Energy
Power plant air emissions are responsible for approximately one-third of nitrogen oxide emissions, two-thirds of sulfur dioxide emissions, and one-third of carbon dioxide emissions nationally. Renewables can avoid or reduce these air emissions, as well as reduce water consumption, thermal pollution, waste, noise, and adverse land-use impacts.
Moreover, renewables are sustainable energy resources: they avoid depletion of natural resources for future generations.
Renewables in a utility's generating mix can also reduce Clean Air Act compliance costs and make a region a more attractive place to do business by avoiding the imposition of costly emission-control measures in both the utility sector and in other industries and transportation. Under the Clean Air Act, emission reductions that are not achieved in one economic sector must come out of another.
Failure to capture cost-effective reductions in the utility sector will therefore require more stringent reductions from transportation and/or other industrial sectors, simply shifting rather than reducing costs. Because emission sources in those sectors are generally smaller and more numerous, they are generally more expensive to control. Moreover, most conventional emission-abatement measures in all sectors impose costs with no offsetting savings; renewables, on the other hand, produce fuel savings over their operating lives that cover some or all of their initial costs.
These environmental benefits can reduce the cost of complying with future environmental regulations as well. The science of environmental and health impacts of different pollutants develops unevenly. In addition, environmental regulators, faced with limited resources, must prioritize their activities. For these reasons, at any given moment environmental regulatory attention tends to be focused on a narrow range of environmental problems, or a single pollutant.
To meet incremental and piecemeal regulation of this kind, industry naturally turns to the compliance option with the lowest short-run incremental cost, most often a bolt-on technology designed solely to mitigate the problem at hand. That technology then becomes a sunk cost which does not enter into cost-effectiveness calculations for responding to the next priority pollutant. Renewables, by contrast, especially zero-emission technologies, avoid these kinds of costs once and for all.
The risks of future environmental regulatory costs are not insignificant or unexpected, especially with respect to fine particulates and carbon dioxide. A growing body of public health research has found that emissions of particulates smaller than 2.5 microns are a major cause of premature deaths from air pollution. As the scientific consensus grows, and the costs of inaction are more closely understood, the likelihood of future regulations increases.
The same is true of global warming gases, especially carbon dioxide. In July 1996, 134 nations, including the United States, agreed in Geneva to negotiate legally binding reductions on emissions of heat-trapping gases. These reductions will be negotiated in Kyoto in December 1997. The agreement was based on the fact that in 1995 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had reached several new areas of scientific consensus.
The panel concluded for the first time that global temperatures have risen and that human activities are having a discernible effect on the climate system. It projects adverse impacts from sea-level rise and coastal flooding; severe stress on forests, wetlands, and other systems; damage to human health; and dislocation of agriculture and commerce.
The panel's report also points out that early action may allow greater future flexibility in choosing strategies for stabilizing emissions of heat-trapping gases. Renewables are particularly valuable in mitigating these risks and, consequently, in mitigating the risk of future expenditures to reduce heat-trapping gas emissions by other means. Carbon emission controls are not available by any known technology, and while natural gas plants emit only about half as much carbon dioxide as coal, they still contribute significantly to the problem and offer no long-term solution.
Renewables, on the other hand, including sustainably managed biomass, result in virtually no net carbon emissions. The availability of significant quantities of zero-emitting renewables could help to mitigate the environmental impacts of energy use, now and in the years to come.
