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E
lectricity generation provides 18,000 familiar paradox that greater efficiency can lead
terawatt-hours of energy a year, around 40% to greater consumption. So a global response to
of humanity’s total energy use. In doing so it climate change must involve a move to carbon-free
produces more than 10 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide sources of electricity. This requires fresh thinking
every year, the largest sectoral contribution of about the price of carbon, and in some cases new
humanity’s fossil-fuel derived emissions. Yet there technologies; it also means new transmission
is a wide range of technologies — from solar and systems and smarter grids. But above all, the various
wind to nuclear and geothermal — that can generate sources of carbon-free generation need to be scaled
electricity without net carbon emissions from fuel. up to power an increasingly demanding world. In
The easiest way to cut the carbon released by this special feature, Nature’s News team looks at
electricity generation is to increase efficiency. how much carbon-free energy might ultimately be
But there are limits to such gains, and there is the available — and which sources make most sense.
ARTWORK BY J. TAYLOR
Hydropower settings. Annual operating costs are low
— 0.8–2% of capital costs; electricity costs
The world has a lot of dams — 45,000 large $5 million per megawatt of capacity, depend- $0.03–0.10 per kilowatt-hour, which makes
ones, according to the World Energy Council, ing on the site and size of the plant. Dams in dams competitive with coal and gas.
and many more at small scales. Its hydroelec- lowlands and those with only a short drop
tric power plants have a generating capacity between the water level and the turbine tend Capacity: The absolute limit on hydropower
of 800 gigawatts, and they currently supply to be more expensive; large dams are cheaper is the rate at which water flows downhill
almost one-fifth of the electricity consumed per watt of capacity than small dams in similar through the world’s rivers, turning potential
worldwide. As a source of electricity, energy into kinetic energy as it goes.
dams are second only to fossil fuels, The amount of power that could theo-
and generate 10 times more power retically be generated if all the world’s
than geothermal, solar and wind run-off were ‘turbined’ down to sea level
power combined. With a claimed full is more than 10 terawatts. However, it
capacity of 18 gigawatts, the Three is rare for 50% of a river’s power to be
Gorges dam in China can generate exploitable, and in many cases the figure
more or less twice as much power as is below 30%.
all the world’s solar cells. An addi- Those figures still offer considerable
tional 120 gigawatts of capacity is opportunity for new capacity, accord-
under development. ing to the IHA. Europe currently sets a
One reason for hydropower’s suc- benchmark for hydropower use, with
cess is that it is a widespread resource 75% of what is deemed feasible already
— 160 countries use hydropower exploited. For Africa to reach the same
to some extent. In several countries level, it would need to increase its hydro-
hydropower is the largest contributor power capacity by a factor of 10 to more
to grid electricity — it is not uncom- than 100 gigawatts. Asia, which already
mon in developing countries for a large has the greatest installed capacity, also has
dam to be the main generating source. the greatest growth potential. If it were
Nevertheless, it is in large industrial- to triple its generating capacity, thus
ized nations that have big rivers that harnessing a near-European fraction of
hydroelectricity is shown in its most its potential, it would double the world’s
dramatic aspect. Brazil, Canada, overall hydroelectric capacity. The IHA
China, Russia and the United States says that capacity could triple worldwide
currently produce more than half of with enough investment.
the world’s hydropower.
Advantages: The fact that hydro-
Cost: According to the International electric systems require no fuel means
Hydropower Association (IHA), that they also require no fuel-extracting
installation costs are usually in the infrastructure and no fuel transport. This
range of US$1 million to more than means that a gigawatt of hydropower
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would double the available fuel reserves. capacity for making key components would Technology described a concrete scenario for
Furthermore, although current reactor also need enlarging. tripling capacity to 1,000 gigawatts by 2050, a
designs use their fuel only once, this could In light of these obstacles, predictions of the scenario predicated on US leadership, continued
be changed. Breeder reactors, which make future role of nuclear power vary considerably. commitment by Japan and renewed activity by
plutonium from uranium isotopes that are The European Commission’s World Energy Europe. This scenario relied only on improved
not themselves useful for power production, Technology Outlook — 2050 contains a bullish versions of today’s reactors rather than on any
can effectively create more fuel than they use. scenario that assumes that, with public accept- radically different or improved design.
A system built on such reactors might get 60 ance and the development of new reactor tech-
times more energy out for every kilogram of nologies, nuclear power could provide about 1.7 Verdict: Reaching a capacity in the terawatt
natural uranium put in, although lower multi- terawatts by 2050. The IAEA’s analysts are more range is technically possible over the next few
ples might be more realistic. cautious. Hans-Holger Rogner, head of the agen- decades, but it may be difficult politically. A
With breeder reactors, which have yet to be cy’s planning and economic study section, sees climate of opinion that came to accept nuclear
proven on a commercial basis, the world could capacity rising to not more than 1,200 gigawatts power might well be highly vulnerable to
in principle go 100% nuclear. Without them, by 2050. An interdisciplinary study carried adverse events such as another Chernobyl-
it is still plausible for the amount of nuclear out in 2003 by the Massachusetts Institute of scale accident or a terrorist attack.
capacity to grow by a factor of two or three, and
to operate at that level for a century or more.
Biomass
Advantages: Nuclear power has relatively
low fuel costs and can run at full blast almost Biomass was humanity’s first source
constantly — US plants deliver 90% of their of energy, and until the twentieth
rated capacity. This makes them well suited century it remained the largest; even
to providing always-on ‘baseload’ power to today it comes second only to fossil
national grids. Uranium is sufficiently wide- fuels. Wood, crop residues and other
spread that the world’s nuclear-fuel supply is biological sources are an important
unlikely to be threatened by political factors. energy source for more than two bil-
lion people. Mostly, this fuel is burned
Disadvantages: There is no agreed solution in fires and cooking stoves, but over
to the problem of how to deal with the nuclear recent years biomass has become a
waste that has been generated in nuclear plants source of fossil-fuel-free electricity.
over the past 50 years. Without long-term solu- As of 2005, the World Energy Council
tions, which are more demanding politically estimates biomass generating capacity
than technically, growth in nuclear power is an to be at least 40 gigawatts, larger than
understandably hard sell. A further problem is any renewable resource other than
that the spread of nuclear power is difficult to wind and hydropower. Biomass can
disentangle from the proliferation of nuclear supplement coal or in some cases gas in
weapons capabilities. Fuel cycles that involve conventional power plants. Biomass is
recycling, and which thus necessarily produce also used in many co-generation plants
plutonium, are particularly worrying. Even that can capture 85–90% of the avail-
without proliferation worries, nuclear power able energy by making use of waste
stations may make tempting targets for terror- heat as well as electric power.
ists or enemy forces (although in the latter case Capacity: Biomass is limited by the available
the same is true of hydroelectric plants). Costs: The price of biomass electricity var- land surface, the efficiency of photosynthesis,
A long-term commitment to greatly ies widely depending on the availability and and the supply of water. An OECD round table
increased use of nuclear power would require type of the fuel and the cost of transporting in 2007 estimated that there is perhaps half a
public acceptance not just of existing tech- it. Capital costs are similar to those for fossil- billion hectares of land not in agricultural use
nologies but of new ones, too — thorium and fuel plants. Power costs can be as little as $0.02 that would be suitable for rain-fed biomass
breeder reactors, for instance. These technolo- per kilowatt-hour when biomass is burned production, and suggested that by 2050 this
gies would also have to win over investors and with coal in a conventional power plant, but land, plus crop residues, forest residues and
regulators. increase to $0.03–0.05 per kilowatt-hour organic waste might provide enough burnable
Nuclear power is also extremely capi- from a dedicated biomass power plant. Costs material each year to provide 68,000 terawatt-
tal intensive; power costs over the life of the increase to $0.04–0.09 per kilowatt-hour for a hours. Converted to electricity at an efficiency
plant are comparatively low only because the co-generation plant, but recovery and use of of 40%, that could provide a maximum of
plants are long lived. Nuclear power is thus an the waste heat makes the process much more 3 terawatts. The Intergovernmental Panel on
expensive option in the short term. Another efficient. The biggest problem for new biomass Climate Change pegs the potential at roughly
constraint may be a lack of skilled workers. power plants is finding a reliable and concen- 120,000 terawatt-hours in 2050, which equates
Building and operating nuclear plants requires trated feedstock that is available locally; keep- to slightly more than 5 terawatts on the basis of
a great many highly trained professionals, and ing down transportation costs means keeping a larger estimate of available land.
enlarging this pool of talent enough to double biomass power plants tied to locally available These projections involve some fairly
the rate at which new plants are brought online fuel and quite small, which increases the capi- extreme assumptions about converting land
might prove very challenging. The engineering tal cost per megawatt. to the production of energy crops. And even
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W m–2
60N 1,400
1,200
40N 1,000
850
20N 750
650
EQ 550
450
Geothermal
Earth’s interior contains vast amounts of heat, Costs: The cost of a geothermal system
some of it left over from the planet’s original depends on the geological setting. Jefferson
coalescence, some of it generated by the decay Tester, a chemical engineer who was part of a
of radioactive elements. Because rock conducts team that produced an influential Massachu-
heat poorly, the rate at which this heat flows setts Institute of Technology (MIT) report on
to the surface is very slow; if it were quicker, geothermal technology in 2006, explains the
Earth’s core would have frozen and its conti- situation as being “similar to mineral resources.
nents ceased to drift long ago. There is a continuum of resource grades
The slow flow of Earth’s heat makes it a hard — from shallow, high-temperature regions
resource to use for electricity generation except of high-porosity rock, to deeper low-porosity
in a few specific places, such as those with regions that are more challenging to exploit”.
abundant hot springs. Only a couple of dozen That report put the cost of exploiting the best
countries produce geothermal electricity, and sites — those with a lot of hot water circulat-
only five of those — Costa Rica, El Salvador, ing close to the surface — at about US$0.05
Iceland, Kenya and the Philippines — generate per kilowatt-hour. Much more abundant low-
more than 15% of their electricity this way. The grade resources are exploitable with current
world’s installed geothermal electricity capac- technology only at much higher prices.
ity is about 10 gigawatts, and is growing only
slowly — about 3% per year in the first half of Absolute capacity: Earth loses heat at
this decade. A decade ago, geothermal capacity between 40 TW and 50 TW a year, which
was greater than wind capacity; now it is almost works out at an average of a bit less than a
a factor of ten less. tenth of a watt per square metre. For compari-
Earth’s heat can also be used directly. Indeed, son, sunlight comes in at an average of 200
small geothermal heat pumps that warm watts per square metre. With today’s technol-
houses and businesses directly may represent ogy, 70 GW of the global heat flux is seen as
the greatest contribution that Earth’s warmth exploitable. With more advanced technolo-
can make to the world’s energy budget. gies, at least twice that could be used. The MIT
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expect an annual insolation of about 1,000 kilo- Both photovoltaic and concentrated solar of the electricity generated will pose problems.
watt-hours per metre on a south-facing panel thermal technologies have clear room for A 2006 study by the German Aerospace Centre
tilted to take account of latitude: at 10% effi- improvement. It is not unreasonable to imag- proposed that by 2050 Europe could be import-
ciency, that means more than 60 square metres ine that in a decade or two new technologies ing 100 GW from an assortment of photovoltaic
per person would be needed to meet current could lower the cost per watt for photovolta- and solar thermal plants across the Middle East
UK electricity consumption. ics by a factor of ten, something that is almost and North Africa. But the report also noted that
unimaginable for any other non-carbon elec- this would require new direct-current high-
Advantages: The Sun represents an effec- tricity source. voltage electricity distribution systems.
tively unlimited supply of fuel at no cost, which A possible drawback of some advanced
is widely distributed and leaves no residue. The Disadvantages: The ultimate limitation photovoltaic cells is that they use rare elements
public accepts solar technology and in most on solar power is darkness. Solar cells do not that might be subject to increases in cost and
places approves of it — it is subject to less geo- generate electricity at night, and in places with restriction in supply. It is not clear, however,
political, environmental and aesthetic concern frequent and extensive cloud cover, generation whether any of these elements is either truly
than nuclear, wind or hydro, although extremely fluctuates unpredictably during the day. Some constrained — more reserves might be made
large desert installations might elicit protests. concentrated solar thermal systems get around economically viable if demand were higher
Photovoltaics can often be installed piece- this by storing up heat during the day for use — or irreplaceable.
meal — house by house and business by busi- at night (molten salt is one possible storage
ness. In these settings, the cost of generation medium), which is one of the reasons they Verdict: In the middle to long run, the size
has to compete with the retail price of electric- might be preferred over photovoltaics for large of the resource and the potential for further
ity, rather than the cost of generating it by other installations. Another possibility is distributed technological development make it hard not
means, which gives solar a considerable boost. storage, perhaps in the batteries of electric and to see solar power as the most promising car-
The technology is also obviously well suited to hybrid cars (see page 810). bon-free technology. But without significantly
off-grid generation and thus to areas without Another problem is that large installations enhanced storage options it cannot solve the
well developed infrastructure. will usually be in deserts, and so the distribution problem in its entirety.
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Ocean energy
The oceans offer two sorts of available kinetic
energy — that of the tides and that of the
waves. Neither currently makes a significant
contribution to world electricity generation,
but this has not stopped enthusiasts from
developing schemes to make use of them.
There are undoubtedly some places where,
thanks to peculiarities of geography, tides
offer a powerful resource. In some situations
that potential would best be harnessed by
a barrage that creates a reservoir not unlike
that of a hydroelectric dam, except that it is
refilled regularly by the pull of the Moon and
the Sun, rather than being topped up slowly
by the runoff of falling rain. But although
there are various schemes for tidal barrages
under discussion — most notably the Severn
Barrage between England and Wales, which
proponents claim could offer as much as 8 GW
— the plant on the Rance estuary in Brittany,
rated at 240 MW, remains the world’s largest
tidal-power plant more than 40 years after it
came into use. where close to the large-scale production age potential. Waves are not constant — but
There are also locations well suited to tidal- needed to significantly drive such costs down. they are more reliable than winds.
stream systems — submerged turbines that spin
in the flowing tide like windmills in the air. The Capacity: The interaction of Earth’s mass Disadvantages: The available resource var-
1.2 MW turbine installed this summer in the with the gravitational fields of the Moon and ies wildly with geography; not every country
mouth of Strangford Lough, Northern Ireland, the Sun is estimated to produce about 3 TW has a coastline, and not every coastline has
is the largest such system so far installed. of tidal energy— rather modest for such an strong tides or tidal streams, or particularly
Most technologies for capturing wave power astronomical source (although enough to play impressive waves. The particularly hot wave
remain firmly in the testing phase. Individual a key role in keeping the oceans mixed — see sites include Australia’s west coast, South
companies are working through an array of Nature 447, 522–524; 2007). Of this, perhaps Africa, the western coast of North America
potential designs, including machines that 1 TW is in shallow enough waters to be easily and western European coastlines. Building
undulate on waves like a snake, bob up and exploited, and only a small part of that is realis- turbines that can survive for decades at sea
down as water passes over them, or nestle on tically available. EDF, a French power company in violent conditions is tough. Barrages have
the coastline to be regularly overtopped by developing tidal power off Brittany, says that environmental impacts, typically flooding pre-
waves that power turbines as the water drains the tidal-stream potential off France is 80% of viously intertidal wetlands, and wave systems
off. The European Marine Energy Centre’s test that available all round Europe, and yet it is still that flank long stretches of dramatic coastline
bed off the United Kingdom’s Orkney Islands, little more than a gigawatt. might be hard for the public to accept. Tides
where manufacturers can hook up prototypes The power of ocean waves is estimated at and waves tend by their nature to be found at
to a marine electricity grid and test how well more than 100 TW. The European Ocean the far end of electricity grids, so bringing back
they withstand the pounding waves, is a lead- Energy Association estimates that the acces- the energy represents an extra difficulty. Surf-
ing centre of research. Pelamis Wave Power, a sible global resource is between 1 and 10 ers have also been known to object …
company based in Edinburgh, UK, for instance, terawatts, but sees much less than that as recov-
has moved from testing there to installing erable with current technologies. An analysis in Verdict: Marginal on the global scale. ■
three machines off the coast of Portugal, which the MRS Bulletin in April 2008 holds that about
together will eventually generate 2.25 MW. 2% of the world’s coastline has waves with an Reported and written by Quirin Schiermeier,
energy density of 30 kW m−1, which would Jeff Tollefson, Tony Scully, Alexandra Witze
Costs: Barrage costs differ markedly from site offer a technical potential of about 500 GW and Oliver Morton.
to site, but are broadly comparable to costs for for devices working at 40% efficiency. Thus See Editorial, page 805.
hydropower. At an estimated cost of £15 billion even with a huge amount of development, wave SOURCE MATERIAL AND FURTHER READING
(US$30 billion) or more, the capital costs of power would be unlikely to get close to the cur- Key World Energy Statistics 2007 (International Energy Agency,
the Severn Barrage would be about $4 million rent installed hydroelectric capacity. 2007).
per megawatt. A 2006 report from the British Hohmeyer, O. & Trittin , T. (eds) Proc. IPCC Scoping Meeting
on Renewable Energy Sources 20–25 January 2008, Lübeck,
Carbon Trust, which spurs investment in non- Advantages: Tides are eminently predict- Germany (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2008).
carbon energy, puts the costs of tidal-stream able, and in some places barrages really do Smil, V. Energy in Nature and Society: General Energetics of
electricity in the $0.20–0.40 per kilowatt-hour offer the potential for large-scale generation Complex Systems (MIT Press, 2008).
Metz, B., Davidson, O., Bosch, P., Dave, R. & Meyer, L. (eds)
range, with wave systems running up to $0.90 that would be significant on a countrywide Climate Change 2007: Mitigation of Climate Change (Cambridge
per kilowatt-hour. Neither technology is any- scale. Barrages also offer some built-in stor- Univ. Press, 2007).
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