At the opening ELECTRIC POWER 2009 plenary session, both the keynote speaker and the Power Industry Executive Roundtable participants kept circling back to the problems created by a public and lawmakers who seem to be promoting policies without an adequate understanding of energy realities. Most of the speakers acknowledged that the industry itself is partly to blame, but nobody offered a way forward.
As you’d expect, this year’s keynote speaker and roundtable panelists addressed issues of carbon legislation, renewables, and financing. Those were the subjects of the stated questions. But woven into the answers was a strong thread of what one conference delegate perceived as "frustration." Power industry frustration with the ways of Washington is nothing new, but this year the speakers also expressed frustration with the public.
Energy Education Gets a Failing Grade
A major subtext of the ELECTRIC POWER 2009 opening plenary session was the industry’s need to better-manage the message about the tradeoffs required for achieving a lower-carbon electricity portfolio.
Keynote speaker Jason Makansi (Figure 1) said, "We’ve been defined by our discharge — not our product." Makansi, president of Pearl Street Inc. and executive director of the Energy Storage Council, observed that everyone wants to know how to stop global warming. His answer: renewables plus energy storage, nuclear with fuel reprocessing, coal with sequestration, and electric vehicles. Note the multipart answer. Note that no single generation type can stand alone, without modification and without partnering.
1. Keynote speaker Jason Makansi. Source: POWER
"Industry doesn’t do a good job" of educating the public about the power value chain, Makansi said. There’s a need for better public understanding of everything from the difference between kilowatts and kilowatt-hours to the smart grid, because even discussions of the smart grid tend to be one-sided. Public focus is on the "smart" element: the software and end-user devices; as for the "grid" component — the hardware — it’s "the stuff nobody wants."
Makansi noted that the industry is in part to blame for the public’s poor understanding of its business. "Nobody puts a coal plant on the home page," he observed, though many now feature wind turbines, so the public gets a false impression of where their electricity comes from. And, while acknowledging that "nuclear is absolutely necessary," as is coal, the coal industry "needs a wakeup call," he said.
Makansi sounded another cautionary note when predicting that carbon trading could be the next Wall Street debacle — the new "financial engineering platform" — and his penultimate slide urged the power industry to "Invest in infrastructure engineering, not financial engineering."
From Makansi’s perspective, the industry is at a pivot point at which it’s favoring demand-side management over new supply. Nevertheless, this industry is "fortunate," he said, because it’s the centerpiece of economic recovery.
Though neither Makansi nor the executives offered a multistep plan for addressing the problem, at least the industry has taken the first step in admitting that there is a problem.
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