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Executive Summary
Global warming is real, is happening now, and is largely caused by
human activities. To prevent the worst impacts of global warming, the
United States must take action to reduce global warming pollution
quickly and dramatically. Electricity generation accounts for more than
a third of America’s emissions of global warming pollution. Preventing
catastrophic global warming, therefore, will require the United States
to shift away from highly polluting sources of power, such as
coal-fired power plants, and toward clean, renewable energy.
Concentrating
solar power (CSP) technologies—which use the sun’s heat to generate
electricity—can make a large contribution toward reducing global
warming pollution in the United States, and do so quickly and at a
reasonable cost. CSP can also reduce other environmental impacts of
electric power production, while sparking economic development and
creating jobs. The United States has limited time to transition away from dirty energy sources and toward clean, renewable energy.
•
The latest climate science tells us that the United States and the
world must reduce emissions of global warming pollutants quickly and
dramatically to prevent the most catastrophic impacts of global warming. •
Should global average temperatures to increase by more than 2° Celsius,
scientists warn that dangerous impacts from global warming will become
inevitable, including flooding of coastal cities, the loss of large
numbers of plant and animal species, and increases in extreme weather,
wildfire and drought.
• To have a reasonable chance of
preventing a 2° C increase in global average temperatures, the world
must keep the concentration of global warming pollution in the
atmosphere below 450 parts per million.1
• The United States
must, at minimum, reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 15-20 percent
from 2000 levels by 2020, and by 80 percent by 2050 to prevent
catastrophic impacts from global warming. Other nations must act
aggressively as well.
• America’s electric power plants produce
more carbon dioxide (the leading global warming pollutant) than the
entire economy of any nation in the world other than China.
•
Even if America uses energy efficiency improvements to prevent future
growth in electricity consumption, the nation will still need to expand
its renewable generating capacity dramatically. Reducing carbon
dioxide emissions from power plants to 20 percent below 2000 levels by
2020, for example, would require the U.S. to generate 15 to 24 percent
of its electricity from new renewable sources—or between 158 GW and 257
GW of new renewable energy by 2020. The need for clean energy will
further accelerate in future decades as the United States seeks to meet
increasingly stringent targets for emission reductions.
Concentrating solar power is ready to reduce global warming pollution, and can begin doing so right away.
•
America has immense potential to generate power from the sun. The
National Renewable Energy Laboratory has identified the potential for
nearly 7,000 gigawatts (GW) of solar thermal power generation on lands
in the southwestern United States—more than six times current U.S.
electric generating capacity. Other sunny areas of the United States,
such as the mountain West, the Great Plains and Florida, can also
generate power from solar thermal energy.
• Solar thermal power
plants covering a 100-mile-square area of the Southwest— equivalent to
9 percent the size of Nevada—could generate enough electricity to power
the entire nation.
• Building just 80 GW of CSP capacity—a
target that is achievable by 2030 with sufficient public policy
support—would produce enough electricity to power approximately 25
million homes and reduce carbon dioxide emissions from U.S. electric
power plants by 6.6 percent compared to year 2000 levels. Solar thermal
power can make even greater contributions in the years to
come—precisely the time when the nation must achieve deep cuts in
global warming pollution.
• CSP plants are increasingly
cost-competitive with other power generation technologies that do not
produce carbon dioxide. The cost of energy from solar thermal power
plants is estimated to be approximately 14 to 16 cents/kWh—competitive
in cost with theoretical coal-fired power plants that capture and store
their carbon dioxide emissions and with new nuclear power plants.
•
CSP development has accelerated dramatically since the beginning of
2007. More than 2,800 MW of solar thermal projects are in some phase of
development nationwide and could be completed by 2012. CSP benefits the
environment and America’s economy.
• CSP power is clean. Its
only necessary emission, water vapor, is harmless. By developing CSP,
America can avoid the need for coal-fired power plants—which emit
health-threatening mercury, particulate matter, and smog-forming
pollutants and consume large quantities of water—and nuclear power
plants, which consume large amounts of water and produce radioactive
waste.
• CSP can play a leading role in the electric power
system. Unlike intermittent forms of renewable energy, CSP plants with
thermal energy storage can deliver power when it is needed to serve
demand. CSP plants can be designed to provide either peak or baseload
power, enabling them to address a variety of needs within the electric
grid.
• Solar thermal plants create permanent jobs for local
economies. Construction of 80 GW of CSP power has the potential to
generate between 75,000 and 140,000 permanent, green jobs for Americans.
•
CSP and other forms of renewable energy reduce demand for natural gas,
thereby reducing prices. Installing 4 GW of CSP in California could
save Californians between $60 million and $240 million per year in the
cost of natural gas.
• America’s vast potential for CSP could
one day produce renewable electricity to be used in vehicles—thereby
reducing the nation’s dependence on oil. Strong public policies can
increase the use of CSP in the United States. Priority actions include:
•
Enacting a national Renewable Electricity Standard (RES) that requires
25 percent of all U.S. electricity to come from renewable resources—and
a certain percentage from solar power technologies—by 2025. States
should also enact RES policies or expand their existing RES targets.
•
Expanding and extending the Renewable Electricity Investment Tax Credit
can give CSP project developers the financial certainty they need to
move forward.
• Enacting caps on global warming pollution at
both the national and state levels, which will encourage the
development of clean, low-carbon energy sources like concentrating
solar power and encourage the retirement of America’s dirtiest electric
power plants. Money raised by auctioning allowances under a
cap-and-trade system should help support renewable energy development
and reduce the cost of the program to consumers.
• Creating
feed-in tariffs for renewable energy sources, which provide financial
rewards to generators who feed renewable energy into the power grid.
Widely used in Europe, feed-in tariffs aim to move renewable energy to
non-subsidized cost competition with conventional energy, creating fair
markets between new and traditional electricity sources.
•
Providing access to transmission for CSP, in particular through western
regional policy agreements and initiatives, can ensure that solar power
can be delivered to power consumers. New transmission lines should be
built to renewable resource areas before they are built to traditional
power generators and be sited and designed to minimize environmental
impacts. The federal government should also fund existing research and
development on a high-voltage direct current transmission backbone.
•
Creating an annual $3 billion fund for research, development, and
deployment of renewable energy for 2009, which can ensure that CSP and
other renewable energy technologies are available to meet America’s
energy and climate challenges. The fund should be renewed for the next
10 years, committing $30 billion over the next decade. These dollars
should come from shifting funds away from coal, oil, gas and nuclear
power subsidies.
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