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Carbon emissions reduction according to EPRI

Submitted by Bruno De Wachter on Tue, 2007-03-20 08:30.

Aggressive technology deployment required

Last month, the U.S. Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) published the paper Electricity Technology in a Carbon Constrained World. It is an assessment of technologies that have the potential for achieving significant CO2 emissions reductions within the next 25 to 30 years.

EPRI President and CEO Steve Specker in an EPRI News Release of February 15, 2007: 'This analysis indicates that over the coming decades it is potentially feasible for the U.S. electric sector to first slow down the projected increase in CO2 emissions, stop the increase, and then decrease the emissions while meeting an ever increasing demand for reliable and affordable electricity. The challenges to actually achieving these reductions are daunting in their scope and complexity. They will require a decade or more of very aggressive development, demonstration, and deployment of technologies.'

A broad portfolio of technologies

The paper stresses that there is no such thing as a silver bullet technology. A broad portfolio of technologies will be needed. It suggests ambitious deployment programmes in seven specific areas:

  1. End-use efficiency in homes, buildings, and industry
  2. Cost-effective, large scale renewable energy sources
  3. Maintaining the existing nuclear fleet and expanding it to include new advanced light-water reactors
  4. Efficiency improvements in coal-fired power plants
  5. Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) at nearly every new coal-fired plant placed into service after 2020
  6. Plug-in hybrid vehicles replacing gasoline with increasingly clean electricity for up to 30 percent of their range
  7. High efficiency distributed generation resources (e.g. solar PV) for up to 5 percent of the total load by 2030

In its prediction of the commercial introduction of CCS, this report is significantly more optimistic than the U.S. Government’s Energy Information Agency Annual Energy Outlook 2007 (link) or Belgium’s Commission on Energy 2030 (see previous blog post).