Isramart : State report casts doubt on Colorado CO2 goals

Isramart news:
A new report from the Governor’s Energy Office says there is no way that Colorado’s utilities can cut their carbon dioxide emissions by 20 percent from 2005 levels by 2020 unless major investments are made and older coal-fired power plants shut down.

A 20 percent cut in CO2 was the goal set by Gov. Bill Ritter’s 2007 Climate Action Plan.

But the report released Wednesday, called the Renewable Energy Development Infrastructure, or REDI Report, says actual emissions in 2020 will be higher than the goal — unless there is a breakthrough in the capture and storage of CO2 emissions, or there’s a massive amount of spending in Colorado on new transmission lines, large, renewable energy power plants, and energy conservation efforts.

The state should also have more natural gas power plants, and shut down older, less efficient power plants that rely on coal, according to the report. Natural gas has fewer emissions of CO2 than coal.

The report outlines several steps that are needed if the 20 percent cut in CO2 is to be met by 2020:

• “Greatly increasing investment” in energy efficiency and conservation efforts by businesses and consumers.

• “Rapidly increasing investment” in large, utility-scale wind and solar power plants.

• Building large-capacity power lines to carry sun- and wind-generated electricity from Colorado’s remote areas, that have a lot of those resources, to population centers.

• Use natural gas-fired power plants to meet basic power demands as well as support wind and solar power, which isn’t constant because the wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine.

• Cut the power produced, or simply shut down, the oldest and least efficient coal-fired power plants in the state.

In an announcement about the REDI report, Ritter focused on the jobs and economic boots of the investments.

“Updating and expanding our aging and constrained transmission infrastructure is a critical piece of our New Energy Economy,” Ritter said in a statement.

“Investment in transmission means jobs and a major boost to Colorado’s economy, including in rural areas that are home to many of our state’s richest renewable energy resources. Bringing dependable, affordable clean energy — whether solar, wind or natural gas — from where it’s generated to where it’s needed the most will keep Colorado on the leading edge in a world moving fast toward a new energy future,” he said.

The report was paid for through a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy.

Click here for the REDI report.

In February, Holy Cross Energy Inc., a rural cooperative based in Glenwood Springs, issued its own report on the costs and methods of reaching Ritter’s goal of cutting CO2 emissions statewide by 20 percent by 2020.

The cooperative worked with Randy Udall, an independent consultant who’s worked on renewable energy issues for years, to figure out what the utility needed to do — and by extension, what the state needed to do. The cooperative serves about 55,000 customers in Vail and Eagle County, Aspen, the Roaring Fork Valley and areas west of Glenwood Springs.

Holy Cross’s report was called “Reducing Colorado’s Electric Sector Greenhouse Gas Emissions: The Difficulty of Running Down an Up Escalator.”

It concluded that in light of a growing population and rising demands for power, in order to meet the governor’s Climate Action Plan goal, Colorado would have to:

• Eliminate up to 2,700 megawatts of Colorado’s existing coal-based power, out of the 4,900 megawatts coal currently produces in the state.

• Nearly double the state’s use of natural gas for power, and replace shuttered coal plants with five new, efficient, natural-gas power plants at a cost of at least $2.5 billion.

• Build about $6 billion worth of large, new wind farms, plus two of the world’s biggest concentrating solar power plants — which focus the sun’s heat on a boiler to produce steam to turn a turbine and generate electricity — at a cost of $4 billion, and launch massive energy-efficiency programs to cut power consumption.

The report also said that — as an alternative to spending $10 billion on wind farms and solar power plants — Colorado instead could build two large nuclear power plants for about $12 billion.