By Tony La Vina | Posted on July 07, 2012 | 12:01am
Three means of electricity generation are often raised as solutions to our looming power crisis: fossil fuel-based (coal and oil most especially), large-scale hydroelectric (big dams), and nuclear power. While some look at them as saviors, I view them with apprehension, and not just from an environmental aspect. These options come with overlooked costs, that fossil fuels, big hydro, and nuclear power cannot truly live up to the promise of cheap and abundant energy—that cheap energy is itself an utopian illusion.
Relative availability of the resource, and the maturity of combustion and turbine technologies are the reasons why fossil fuel power generation is relatively cheap compared to emerging RE technologies. Coal and oil plants (and diesel generators for independent power producers) are financially easy to set up compared to other options, explaining their appeal as the go-to option for large-scale and rural electrification. Yet we know that this cheap attractiveness doesn’t reflect or take into account greenhouse gas emissions (and prospects for emission caps) and the supply and price of fossil fuels, costs that, in the long run, we will pay dearly for.
Arguably, we have arrived at that point. We need not mince words about volatile fuel prices, influenced by global supply and demand, politics in the Middle East, and so on, and now even coal supplies are facing the crunch. For example, in an op-ed, Pete Maniego of the National Renewable Energy Board and analyst Dennis Posadas noted that in June 2011, the approved rate for Panay Energy Development Corporation, which operates a coal plant, was P7.40/kwh, when coal was at $53/metric ton. By January 2012 coal became twice as expensive, at $116/ton. Electricity costs in Iloilo in fact rose to as high as P8.30/kwh in March, before increased power consumption and reduction in rates and taxes lowered charges to P7.95—a reduction some fear is only temporary considering its bases.
All this is on top of the health effects of coal and oil combustion (localized to the plant’s surroundings), greenhouse gas emissions, and the expense required to “clean up” coal oil-fired plants with pollution-mitigating technology. The last of these increases the costs of fossil fuel plants themselves, while the rest are costs absorbed instead by society and the environment: increased health expenditures (both in private and government budgets), climate change, and other downstream effects.
As for large hydroelectric dams, they may not emit greenhouse gases like fossil fuel plants, and are so efficient that their electricity is practically as cheap as coal, but they carry just as heavy a cost. Unlike fossil fuel plants, large dams involve an equally large investment of resources and time in their establishment. Further, their reservoirs, inundating lands upriver from the dam, displace both environmental and human habitats—and in the Philippines, that usually means sensitive ecologies, and marginalized indigenous peoples and/or communities who depend on the river and land for a living—all the more true in poverty-afflicted Mindanao, an island with vast hydro resources being eyed for power generation.
It’s too easy to rationalize their loss, the sacrifices made by these people as one made “for the good of the many,” or that they will be properly compensated. (And here, the questions must be asked: how much electricity do they use, on average? Are their chances of gainful employment and a decent income truly increased by the hydro project, or do these go to more qualified outsiders/migrants? Will these people gain more access to the social services powered by the dam?) In doing so, however, we are asking a vulnerable land and people to pay the price for the benefits of sufficient electricity and energy security. In developing countries like ours, too often this price is paid with little benefit or compensation to those who bear the cost. We should remember Macliing Dulag, a Cordillera leader, whose people opposed the Chico River Dam project during the Marcos regime. He paid with his life—which also claimed the dam was for the “good of the many.”
There are however smaller-scale hydro projects—micro and mini—which are not as disruptive or destructive as the Chico Dam could have been, which I am wholly in favor of, and which I will talk about in a succeeding column.
However attractive any electrification project may be, we must remember that the opportunity costs are not always measured in dollars and pesos, and are not always taken at the national level. National development is too precious an objective to lose, but so are environmental health and human security. We need economically affordable power, but we must expand our notion of what “affordable” means, incorporating the environmental and human dimensions as well as the economic.
Next Tuesday, I look at nuclear power and its risks, concluding that this too, like coal and big dams, is a wrong energy choice. source
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