Our friend Barth in Chester asked us some questions about electricity choice in Connecticut. This is another one of them:
What IS the actual “cleanest” electricity source?
Oy. Well, that depends exactly on what you consider clean. Are you taking into account only the actual energy production process itself or are you considering the whole great big enchilada —not just the energy making process but also all the processes that go to making the machinery in the energy making process.
Sometimes, this big picture idea is used as a way to equivocate the environmental impacts of fossil fuels with green renewable energy sources, like wind and solar. If you sit down to compare them, yes, it is pretty danged complex. For example, in many respects, the environmental damage from materials processing, construction, and shipping for a ton of solar panels can be as bad as mining, shipping, storing, burning, and clean up for a ton of coal used in a power plant.
But there’s one important difference: fossil fuels are fuels. Once a ton of Powder River Basin coal is burned to make a kilowatt of electricity it’s gone —turned into ash and cinders. Wind turbines and solar panels don’t have to be re-made every time they generate power. Most solar panels last 20 years before losing capacity and even then most are recyclable.
With ALL that in mind, one way you can determine which is the cleanest electricity source is to determine which produces the most amount of electricity with the least amount of pollutants or CO2.
That means currently in Connecticut, the cleanest electricity source is hydroelectric power. Other clean renewable sources (excluding land fill gas which is burned) such as solar and wind are lagging and still underdeveloped (compare it with Iowa).
All that said, though, the real, real, real cleanest way to clean energy is to increase the efficiency of the things that use electricity. That not only includes everything from washers, windows, and water heaters all the way up to transmission lines, transformers, wind turbines, and power storage systems. There are so many, many inefficiencies from the generator to your smart phone charger that you can power a small city with the wasted power.