As I have stated on other posts, I am an engineer in the power industry. My opinions are my own and certainly do not reflect any employer. I am not a carbon denier, but it sounds to me like the numbers simply don’t add up.

Changing over the entire US grid (even if you drop it to 300 GW with efficiency) to renewables and energy storage in 10 - 15 years is a VERY tall order. You need to test it and prove to the regulators and the public that such a combination will be reliable compared to the current system of baseload and peaking units AND more economical than other low carbon options. My experience tells me that you will need transition fuels of some kind to get from here to there. I brought up LNG because historically it is quicker to build gas turbines than reactors (the low carbon technology everyone loves to hate).

As for existing CCS, there are a few coal plants that have been fitted with ammonia chillers to capture carbon to test the process. However, that technology would mean a 10% power loss to the plant.

there’s going to be a lot more of this in the future- http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2008/may/06/capturing-awareness/

also, maybe the proponents of CCS could explain why none of the 150 new coal fired power plants proposed are CCS. perhaps because it’s a pipe dream being used by the coal industry to delay and distract from the real solution of phasing out coal fired power (along with other fossil fuels like oil and LNG) for renewable energy and energy efficiency.

By investing in huge infrastructure around the world for a new shift to LNG dependency, we are being locked into a dependency on a global energy source with the exact same social and environmental problems as coal and oil.

The fossil fuel industry is proposing LNG as a “bridge fuel” because they can sell the idea that natural gas burns cleaner than oil. However, the life-cycle emissions of LNG are often as bad as coal (Heade 2007; Carnegie-Melon 2007). And natural gas reserves are rich in Iran, Peru, Nigeria, Algeria and other places where US resource wars are already happening or soon will be.

My climate movement is about RESTRUCTURING our supply and consumption process to locally-based, decentralized energy infrastructure, which does not rely on the exportation of social and environmental injustice, for the importation of cheap resources.

R Margolis - Stop pushing LNG (increasing consumption of a fossil fuel to “buy us time”), its just plain embarrassing. Who do you work for anyway?

Has the Youth Climate Movement been talking at all with NARUC on how to approach the regulatory side of this issue? I recall Xcel talking about a smartgrid test in Boulder CO with renewables and storage (V2G?), but have not heard what the schedule is.

* [The value drops to ~300 GW if the US can go to the per capita electric use of Switzerland, but that is a tall order in our larger and more diverse economy.]