Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
there is no reason in principle that they could not be used
to achieve national goals. They are used in practice to
achieve the Kyoto goals of the EU, but have not worked
well. I will come back to this issue in the
next chapter
.
.
Bad Things
In the name of saving us from global warming, there have
been some bad policies introduced as well as some good
ones. Greenness is very popular now, and things have
been done in a rush, sometimes without looking carefully
for unintended consequences. Here are a few examples.
Renewable Portfolio Standards
In all the talk about renewable energy, what seems to have
been forgotten is that the enemy is greenhouse gas emis-
sions and the hero to rescue us is low- or no-emission
electricity, not just renewable energy. Several states in the
name of greenhouse gas reduction have promulgated
what are called renewable portfolio standards (RPS).
Regrettably, the federal government may move in the
same direction. An RPS de
nes what fraction of electri-
city generated or used in the state must come from renew-
able sources. Renewable as now de
ned includes only
solar, wind, geothermal, ocean systems, and small
hydropower generation.
Table
shows data from the
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
.
s energy
informatics program giving the percentage of electricity
generated and the emissions produced by various fuels.
It
'
is misguided to exclude the largest producers of
