Google's "Clean Energy 2030" Plan

Google.org (not the Google.com everyone is familiar with) just released a plan "to wean the U.S. off of coal and oil for electricity generation by 2030." I have to say I'm a bit disappointed with their plan because even though nuclear power is somewhat a part of it, Google doesn't give nuclear power much consideration.

What's their plan?

In order to achieve much of their goal, Google.org calculates that the U.S. should build 380 gigawatts (GW) of wind, 250 GW of solar and 80 GW of geothermal by 2030. This is a total of 710 GW of renewable capacity which would generate 56% of the country's electricity. As well, efficiency is projected to reduce electricity demand 33% by 2030 while plug-in vehicles increase demand by 8%.

Their plan will supposedly cost a total of $4.4 trillion while saving $5.4 trillion through efficiency gains and avoided fossil-fuel use. The efficiency and renewable capacities alone are estimated to cost nearly $2.5 trillion.

What do the numbers look like for nuclear plants?

Based on some simple arithmetic, nuclear power plants could achieve the 56% fuel share at a cheaper cost and half the capacity than Google's proposed plan.

According to EIA's latest Annual Energy Outlook (Google bases their plan on this report), US electricity generation is projected to reach about 5,000 billion kWh by 2030 (2007 was about 4,000 bkWh). If nuclear plants were to provide 56% of the country's electricity by then, they would have to produce 2,800 bkWh.

The average nuclear plant operating 90% of the time produces about 7.9 bkWh in a year (equation: 1 gigawatt of capacity times 90% capacity factor times 8,760 hours in a year). Therefore, about 350 GW of nuclear capacity would be needed by 2030 to provide 56% of the electricity. That's less than half the capacity needed compared to Google's plan!

Not only that, we really only need to build 250 GW of nuclear capacity because the nuclear plants operating today already provide 100 GW of capacity. As well, today's operating nuclear plants aren't projected to begin retiring until 2029.

What's the cost for all of those nuclear plants?

Let's assume a one GW nuclear plant costs $8 billion (just to be on the conservative side). Building 250 GW would therefore cost $2 trillion. That's half a trillion dollars less than the estimated costs for efficiency and renewables in Google's plan.

Let's be realistic.

Okay. 250 GW of new nuclear capacity most likely couldn't happen by 2030 because our infrastructure isn't quite ready for such a large build-out. But as the Wall Street Journal points out, the same is said for wind, solar and geothermal.

I could appreciate the level of effort the Google authors must have spent putting this together. But I'm disappointed that they overlooked one of the biggest technologies that could help achieve their goal. My numbers above are simple and compelling, and Google should take another look at what nuclear energy has to offer. They could start by googling "nuclear energy." :-)