Insight Web Extra
November 2009—Nuclear energy can provide the electricity needed to electrify the transport sector and “provide the cure to our national addiction to foreign oil,” according to NRG Energy CEO David Crane.
Crane made the remark last week in his testimony on the Kerry-Boxer climate bill (
S. 1733). Crane told the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee that strong and comprehensive climate change legislation would need “about 150” new nuclear plants in order to double the nuclear share of power production to 40 percent to meet future demand and realize carbon reduction benefits.
He also drew a connection between new nuclear plants and transforming the transport sector. “One-third of U.S. carbon emissions comes from the transportation sector,” he said, “half of that … from light cars and trucks.”
He went on to explain that the entire U.S. light car and truck fleet would need to be converted to zero-emission vehicles in order to meet the federal goal of 80 percent carbon reductions by 2050.
Crane said such a transformative effort would require what he called a “commercial foothold strategy” to quickly gain market share for electric vehicles by converting infrastructure in key cities to support the new automotive technology.
“It’s zero-carbon nuclear that will provide the juice for a personal transportation system based on a nationwide fleet of electric cars, dramatically reducing both tailpipe emissions and the transfer of American wealth to the oil-exporting nations,” he said.
Development of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles—and their all-electric counterparts—is being conducted by U.S. companies large and small, including Ford, GM and Tesla. To enable longer journey times between battery recharges, research into longer-life batteries is also ongoing. The third necessary development before these cars could come into large-scale use would be the infrastructure to connect them to the electric grid for recharging. Some countries such as Denmark and Israel are putting in place thousands of recharging stations in readiness for large fleets of these future cars.
In the eastern U.S., the electric grid operator PJM is also anticipating tomorrow. With nuclear plants supplying underlying baseload power, and with future wind generators more available at night-time when electricity demand is low, PJM executive director Frank Koza says, “As many as 25 million cars could be added to the PJM system without the need for additional generating capacity—all at an equivalent cost of 60 cents a gallon of gasoline.”
NRG Energy is one of the country’s largest electricity generators. It owns and operates more than 24,000 megawatts of generation capacity, including a 44 percent share in the twin-reactor 2,560-megawatt nuclear plant at South Texas Project. NRG also has a 50 percent stake in plans to add another 2,700 megawatts of nuclear power at the site—and is part of the “new wave” of plant applications being reviewed by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
For more information on plug-in electric hybrid vehicles and nuclear energy, see
here.
—Read more articles in Nuclear Energy Insight and Insight Web Extra.