Clean energy, governor? We have some reading on that

As Tony Evers tours schools to talk of energy, here’s some background 

Wisconsin is nearing the end of what Gov. Tony Evers proclaimed “Clean Energy Week,” and the Badger Institute offers ample reading on the subject.

Wisconsin will likely need to generate more electricity, even as utilities shut down the former workhorse of their generating mix, coal-fired power plants, in response to federal regulations and Evers’ demand that Wisconsin cease emitting any carbon dioxide from power plants by 2050.

The demand for electricity will increase due to data centers, efforts to make consumers turn to electric cars, and possibly efforts to push electric home heating as a replacement for natural gas.

Natural gas and the similar fuel, propane, account for most home heating in Wisconsin. The most likely electric replacement, heat pumps, use a lot of electricity in cold climates — enough to add about $20,000 in heating costs to a typical Wisconsin home over a 15-year period, a groundbreaking Badger Institute study found. Nonetheless, Evers has gone out of his way to keep open a pathway to banning natural gas use in Wisconsin homes.

Electricity bills have been rising rapidly in recent years after a period of stability. Replacement sources of electricity, such as utility-scale solar installations, while not requiring any fuel and having the regulatory advantage of not emitting any carbon dioxide, can run into other problems because of their extensive land use.  And both solar installations and wind turbines generate power much less reliably than the coal and gas they are slated to replace.

One possibility is nuclear power. It uses little land and produces a lot of reliable  electricity, leading to renewed interest across the political spectrum in states such as Michigan.

Nuclear is getting new attention from the Biden administration’s Department of Energy, which reports new plants could be added to existing sites, including in Wisconsin. And the advent of “small modular reactors,” which could bring down costs and make nuclear applicable in more places, has sparked interest from Wisconsin’s rural electric cooperative market.

It’s worth keeping in mind that Wisconsin faced a similar crisis in power supply in the late 1990s — and managed to overcome it, chiefly by building power plants that now are being shut down,  and building new transmission capacity.

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