An unbroken line of presidents from Nixon to Obama has exhorted Americans to break their addiction to foreign oil, in part by producing more of the energy we consume. Given that, as a nation, we've failed for generations to realize that objective, what can Georgia realistically do to help?
The state -- which consumes six times what it produces and ranks 29th among the states in energy production -- has two opportunities to step up its contribution: nuclear power and biofuels, energy economists said Wednesday. How much new power either of those industries might bring to market -- and how soon -- is a matter of considerable debate.
The state does have the potential to significantly increase production by building more nuclear capacity, said Michael Wetzstein, a professor 0f agricultural and applied economics at the University of Georgia.
“It already has an established nuclear power industry,” he said.
Atlanta-based Southern Company and has two plants in Georgia, one near Augusta and the other in Baxley in southern Georgia, each with two reactors. The operator, Southern Nuclear, has applied to build two additional reactors at the plant near Augusta. Essentially, the company is positioned to be the first to start construction on new reactors in three decades in the United States.
The existing reactors have a peak summer capacity of about 4,000 megawatts, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That's roughly 11% of Georgia's total electric capacity, making nuclear second only to coal as a fuel for Georgia's power plants.
U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson praised the president for including nuclear energy among the proposals announced Wednesday. He said the new reactors would make the plant near Augusta “the most modern nuclear facility in the world.” And he said American safety advances in the wake of the Three Mile Island accident 32 years ago, including the fact that the reactors will be built more than 100 miles inland, will help prevent the kind of disaster Japan is experiencing.
But Stephen A. Smith, director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, said the Obama administration should think twice before going head-first into nuclear development.
“Nuclear power will do absolutely nothing to help reduce oil dependency,” he said, “unless you get a lot of electrical vehicles very quickly."
He also said the safety questions are far from settled. “Nuclear guys say, our stuff doesn’t put out any emissions, until it does,” he said.
Unlike nuclear power, biofuels are still in the experimental stage -- and, at least in Georgia, those experiments have not yet yielded a commercially viable industry.
Nevertheless, “Georgia could be the king of biomass,” said Jay Hakes, who served as an energy official in the Carter and Clinton administrations. “We have one of the largest forestry industries in country. That’s a tremendous renewable source.”
However, Paul Ferraro, an economics professor at the Andrew Young School at Georgia State University, said he does not have great faith in biofuels taking off in Georgia -- at least not without large government subsidies.
“A lot of people are enthusiastic about it, but it is nowhere near realizing that dream,” Ferraro said.
Critics of biofuels point to several plants in Georgia that received tens of millions of dollars in government subsidies, but failed.
Hake and Smith said those failures are merely bumps in the road, not the end of it. Expecting successful commercial production so soon was simply unrealistic, they said.
“I don’t know that it was a failure as much as they were stepping back and looking at their technology,” Smith said.
“It is a difficult jump to go from the laboratory to mass production,” Hake said. “I predicted we would be there by 2015. That’s right in line with Obama’s goals.”
Regardless of whether nuclear and biofuels fulfill the promise their supporters see in them, Georgia will have a long way to go to become a leading energy producer. As of 2008, the state produced less than one percent of the energy generated within U.S. borders, the Energy Information Administration reported.
The leading domestic producer, Texas, with its massive oil and gas reserves, produces 23 times what Georgia does.
Staff writer Victoria Loe Hicks contributed to this article.
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