The
Central American nation of Costa Rica was in the news recently because it did something probably no other nation has done before.
The country had
managed to generate all the electricity it needed for the first 75 days of this
year without using a drop of petroleum. It other words, it went almost three
months relying only on renewable energy sources for its power. That is
impressive for any country, and a big step toward Costa Rica’s goal of
becoming carbon-neutral by 2021, a target that is remarkable in itself.
It’s another reason the small Central-American country enjoys an
especially good reputation as an eco-friendly país. I would love to visit there someday.
I
was curious to know more about how exactly Costa Rica did it, and what it would take other for countries to follow suit. Happily, Vox Media ran an article that probed the background to Costa Rica’s success, but also explained why it
won’t be easy for most of the world’s other nations to replicate it. And that
is a shame.
In
its green-energy campaign, Costa Rica is starting from an admittedly
advantageous baseline of relatively low electricity consumption and not one,
but two, sources of plentiful renewable energy: water and the Earth itself.
According
to Vox, almost 80% of Costa Rica’s power comes from four hydroelectric dams. That’s
a huge chunk of green energy right there. Also, usually heavy rainfall allowed the country to forgo oil for as long as it did by keeping the floodgates cranked wide open.
Another
12% of the country’s electricity comes from geothermal sources. Sitting on the
Pacific Ring of Fire does have its perks.
A
pie chart presented in the Vox article (from the local utility Grupo ICE, dated
2009, presumably a normal year) also shows that only 7% of the country’s power
comes from “thermal” sources, which I can only conclude means “burning oil or coal”.
Using fossil fuel for only 7% of your electricity needs is enviable in anyone’s
book. I wish all countries could manage that.
As
the Vox article goes on to point out, most can’t. And I would say this is
especially true for the US, sadly the world’s 800-pound gorilla when it comes
to wasting energy.
Wondering
exactly how feasible it would be for the US to follow Costa Rica’s example, I
dug into the Internet for information on how America produces its electricity.
I found a surprising good site, maintained by the US Energy Information Agency
(EIA), complete with an interactive infographic map displaying every spot (it
would seem) in the US where electricity is produced. It’s actually pretty cool.
As
a thought experiment, I decided to focus on my home state of Georgia to see how
it stacks up against Costa Rica. I'm not saying Georgia is representative of the US as a whole. In fact, it might be a rather poor role model.
It’s
not always possible to make exact comparisons, however. For instance, I
couldn’t come up with data on how much electricity Georgians actually consume. Let’s say, though, for the sake
of argument that it’s the same as for America as a whole, namely 1511 watts per
person. That’s seven times the consumption of an average Costa Rican (210 watts). (Finns consume even more, 1795 watts. This is, after all, a cold
country with a lot of saunas to heat.)
Obviously,
Costa Rican society happily gets by with much less electricity than Americans
are used to. I doubt anyone in the States would put up with that kind of
austerity.
It
would be hard for most to even imagine it, but you can try it at home. Begin
your week using electricity as you normally do – up until half past midnight on Monday
night, then nothing more for the following six days. Air conditioning only one
day a week. It’s the kind of hardship that would, for Americans accustomed to the
good life, certainly spark a revolution.
While
Americans probably could never reach Costa Rican levels of low energy use,
there is surely waste that could be eliminated (right off the bat, Las Vegas
comes to mind). Still, I’m not holding my breath for the average Georgian to
cut back on any use of electricity.
Using
the EIA map, it is much easier see how Georgia produces
its electricity, and from what sources. I realize, of course, that just because
power is generated in Georgia, doesn’t mean it stays in Georgia. The ownership
of power plants and distribution their output is no doubt a complicated issue
in the real world, an issue way above my pay grade. For simplicity sake, I just
imagined that Georgia had nationalized all power generation within its borders
and kept all the electricity for its own use.
.png) |
The Energy Information Agency's impressive infographic map of the Lower 48.
Easy to see where the solar power is. |
First
of all, Georgia has two nuclear power plants, accounting for about 13% of the
state’s generating capacity. That’s about average for the US. Costa Rica,
apparently, has no atomic energy.
Both
Georgia and Costa Rica depend on fossil fuels for some of their power, but to
radically different degrees. Georgia burns hydrocarbons (about half coal, half
natural gas) for 75% of its electricity, about the same proportion as Costa
Rica happily derives from water. Likewise, the share of generating capacity in
Georgia from hydroelectric dams is exactly the same as Costa Rica’s capacity
from petroleum – seven percent.
If
your image of Georgia is the flat piney woods or farmland that covers most of
the state (and you’re not wrong), you might be surprised there is any real potential for hydroelectricity
there.
But
Georgia does have mountains and rolling plateaus, with numerous rivers making
their way to either the Atlantic or the Gulf of Mexico, all with some potential
for turning falling water into electricity. Many of these have long been dammed
to form 30 or so lakes (reservoirs, really; there are no natural lakes of any
size in Georgia), prized not only for power generation, but also bass fishing,
water skiing, that kind of thing.
My birthplace in Georgia sits at the tail end of a mountain range, the Blue Ridge, a long
water divide that curves down from North Carolina.
North of that unbroken
ridgeline, water soon slips over the state line, flowing northward,
eventually into the Tennessee River. Some of that water is impounded by a dam I’ve driven over hundreds of times on US 76, the main highway threading through
Georgia’s northern-most counties.
The road used to run across the top of the dam, allowing a nice view of Blue Ridge Lake, stretching back toward the
mountains. The
modern road, however, now passes below the dam, giving a view of the dam
itself, not nearly so scenic but with a certain antique character. It was built in the 1930s by the
Tennessee Valley Authority, the massive federal government program for bringing electricity to the impoverished Appalachian region as part of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. It worked.
While TVA, the largest public utility in the US, operates 29 hydroelectric dams in half-a-dozen states, its presence in Georgia is relatively small. Blue Ridge Dam, together Georgia's other TVA dam (I’m not counting a third one that sits
across the border in North Carolina), contributes only two percent of the state’s hydroelectricity.
On
the south side of the Blue Ridge divide, it’s a different story. Here the
mountains are drained mostly by the Savannah and Chattahoochee, both longish
rivers that travel the length of the state, marching to the sea (so to speak)
and both important to Georgia’s energy needs.
The
Chattahoochee (the “Hooch”) is interrupted by at least nine dams along its route to Florida. The much shorter Savannah and its tributaries
encounter another ten dams, most straddling the border with South Carolina, some almost piggy
backing behind each other to form an almost continuous impoundment of water.
The Savannah makes up more than a third (34%) of Georgia’s hydro capacity, even
after you subtract South Carolina’s share.
The
Hooch’s share, even if you include the dams on its “little sister”, the Flint,
is only about a quarter (24%), and the rivers that arise in the Piedmont to eventually form the languid Altamaha generate even less – only ten percent.
The
rest, almost a full third (31%), comes from just two dams on an entirely
different river system, the Coosa. One of those, I know well.
 |
| Georgia's many petroleum-powered generating plants. |
When
I was in the seventh grade, our teacher put a paper on our classroom wall
explaining about the massive dam that was being built on the edge of Gilmer County, my home county. I recall that, according to the paper, the dam would be completed in
1975. At the time, to my young mind that seemed far in the future. It was six
years. In fact, the dam was finished in 1977 after 15 years of construction.
The
site was perfect. Just to the west of my county, the Appalachians proper
come to an abrupt end. Along a high escarpment running north-south, a region of
2000- to 4000-foot peaks gives way to a broad, flat valley less than 1000 feet
above sea level. Reaching this unexpectedly flat valley is a fast-moving
stream, the Coosawattee River, escaping the mountains through a 400-foot gorge.
Or,
at least it used to. Plugging the mouth of that gorge with an immense amount of
rock and dirt is Carters Dam, the highest (445 feet) earthen dam east of the Mississippi. (Fontana, a concrete TVA dam
in North Carolina, is higher.) Eleven miles (18 kilometers) of the Coosawattee were flooded to create a 3880-acre lake, the deepest in Georgia and the
source of a significant slice of renewable energy.
I
grew up a mile and a half from the Coosawattee. Nothing but woods and a single road separated my house from a bend in
the upper part of river, not far downstream from civilization.
“Far
from civilization” nicely sums up my memories of the Coosawattee, at least the
parts we visited further downstream. I grew up in an outdoorish family. We were
always going somewhere in the mountains camping, fishing, hunting. As a kid, I
followed my father for miles through hollows and along ridgetops, up one icy
creek after another. But, somehow, of all those places far from any road, no
place felt as isolated to me, as cut off from civilization, primitive even, as
“the River”.
The
river was reportedly the last place in the county where it had been possible to
find what my father called “Indian deer”, the remnants of the original
white-tailed deer population that lived in Georgia when it was still Indian
land, before European settlers took their devastating toll on both the deer and
the Cherokee.
That the gorge of the Coosawattee could have been the last sanctuary for aboriginal
deer is easy to believe. It was a neglected part of the county, and the river down there wasn’t easy to get to.
The
places we went to on the river could be reached only over some of the
most horrendous jeep tracks imaginable, tough even for my father’s old WWII
surplus Army jeep, a classic indestructible off-road machine. It always felt
like an adventure descending deeply rutted roads through dark, sunless woods to reach the river, then
bushwhacking through jungle-like canebrakes to find spots to fish.
We felt
utterly alone down on the river, and I
don’t recall that we ever saw another living soul there. Certainly, no
sexual predators. Our imagination wasn’t that vivid.
The
damming of the Coosawattee was the inspiration for the book “Deliverance” by
Georgia poet James Dickey. I didn’t realized this until decades after the John
Boorman movie adaption ("Syvä joki" in Finland) of the book came out in 1972, putting the wild nature of
North Georgia on the map.
 |
Hydroelectric dams in the Peach State,
many shared with neighbors. |
Supposedly,
Dickey got the idea when, like the four city-slickers in his story, he and a
real-life friend decided to canoe the free-flowing Coosawattee before it was
forever submerged under a mass of docile lake water. A companion, arriving to
meet Dickey at the take-out, encountered a couple of suspicious locals with shotguns. I swear it wasn’t us. Although I seem to recall once going duck hunting
on the river, we were never otherwise armed with anything but fishing poles.
In
the book/movie, this encounter spirals into a gripping tale of a fight of
survival against the river and the locals, including murder and a rape
scene that, for better or worse, has entered the annuals of movie history. (I
recently saw a South Park episode in which the scene was reproduced with Steven
Spielberg and George Lucas as the inbred hicks violating Indiana Jones. Some
kind of commentary on the disappointing latter installments of that franchise. Or something.)
In
real life, the locals help carry Dickey’s canoe back to the road. No violent
confrontation, though I can see how a heightened sense of vulnerability in a
place as cut off from anywhere as the Coosawattee could inspire thoughts of a
much darker, and dramatic, scenario.
I
can’t say how accurately Dickey portrays the real-life river itself, as, to be
honest, I’ve never read the book. The movie was filmed on another Georgia
river, the cinematically spectacular Chattooga River, with white-water rapids
(up to Class VI) that could foil the likes of a Burt Reynolds.
The
Coosawattee wasn’t quite like that, at least not the parts I remember. We
fished in broad shoals of fast moving water, sometimes wading almost up to our
waists. The river wasn’t as dramatic as some creeks we used to fish but it was
bigger in terms of volume. A nice stream, but not as scary as the Chattooga.
There
was, however, a falls on the river, maybe 10 feet high, which I have a vague
memory of visiting on one of our trips. Or maybe I’m thinking of another falls
on another river. Anyway, somehow connected to those falls is a dim memory from
my childhood of a murder. I seem to recall my parents talking about someone
being killed at the falls and dumped in the river, weighed down by rocks.
Perhaps that incident somehow found its way into Dickey’s story.
In
any case, not long before the floodgates of Carter Dam were closed and the lake
slowly begun to fill, we made our own last visit to “the River”. We used to
have a photograph from that trip, a picture of the hillsides along the river
that had been cleared of all vegetation up to the future shoreline of the
reservoir, a reservoir that ended up bringing a boost of renewable
electricity to Georgia.
Carters
Dam, with the immense pool of lake water behind it, has a generating capacity
of some 570 megawatts, a full 15% of Georgia’s renewable energy (but only 2% of
the total), just from a single dam. Still, that’s only about half of the output
of the mammoth Hoover Dam, which tamed the mighty Colorado. The Grand Coulee
Dam in Washington State, outdoes them both, with a capacity more than 10 times
that of Carters. Then again, the Columbian is much, much bigger river than the
Coosawattee.
For
Georgia to match the 80% share of electricity Costa Rica produces from water,
would take an additional 35 Carters Dams. I’m not aware of any plans to add to the state's hydroelectric capacity by even one. There aren’t that many free-flowing
rivers left in Georgia to tap into anyway. The Chattooga is still mostly free.
Another one that comes to mind would be the Conasauga, maybe the wildest river
in Georgia and just north of Gilmer County.
Fortunately (from my point of
view), the upper reaches of that river are safely encased in the Cohutta
Wilderness Area, and are therefore untouchable as a new source of renewable
energy. Maybe the lower reaches could still be exploited.
 |
| A dearth of solar power in the sunny South? What gives? |
In
truth, water seems to be the only major clean-energy option that Georgia is
exploiting. It does burn some wood for fuel, though that’s mostly related to
the state’s extensive timber and paper industry and amounts to only 2% of
electricity production.
While
Costa Rica might be in a sweet spot for tapping into geothermal energy, Georgia
is not. It’s on the wrong side of the country. The 60 or so existing US
geothermal power plants shown on the EIA map are all in the West, mostly in
California and Nevada.
There
is only one place in Georgia, around Warm Springs, where the Earth’s crust is sufficiently fractured to leak enough inner heat to raise the temperature of groundwater. But only enough to build a spa around it. Nowhere enough to spin a turbine.
Costa
Rica only gets two percent of its electricity from wind energy. Apparently,
that’s more than Georgia, which doesn’t seem to have erected a single wind
turbine. The Peach State isn’t a total outlier in that regard. According to the
EIA map, wind farms are rare in Dixie.
I’m
not quite sure why that is. Of course, compared to Oklahoma (where the wind
comes sweeping down the plain), states like Georgia perhaps aren’t all that
windy. Still, you would think that along Georgia’s Atlantic coast there would
be a reliable enough sea breeze. When I was recently in Copenhagen, Denmark, I
counted no fewer than nine wind turbines off shore. Then again, that is one
windy city.
Also,
you might think that many of Georgia’s mountains and ridgelines would be high
enough to catch a stiff breeze.
Further
north in the Appalachians, West Virginia and Pennsylvania both have numerous
mountaintop wind farms. One, NedPower Mount Storm, operates 132 turbines, 300-feet tall, along a 12-mile stretch of the Allegheny Front, enough to generate about half
of Carters Dam’s output.
The
only wind farms in the Deep South, and the closest to Georgia, are at Buffalo
Mountain, in Tennessee. The lack of serious wind projects elsewhere in the
South might be due to the “not in my backyard” curse, to which wind energy
seems especially vulnerable. Or, it might be down to economics. (Finland, by comparison, operates well over 200 turbines.)
Still,
what is really surprising to me is how little solar power is created in
Georgia. According to the EIA website, there are only eight producers of solar
power in the state, and some of these seem to be private installations for
direct use by property owners. For example, the IKEA distribution center in
Savannah is listed as a generator of 1.2 megawatts of photovoltaic energy,
thanks to the 6000 or so solar panels the company has installed on the
building’s roof. I'd like to think this reflects a Nordic mindset.
As
far as real solar farms goes, there seem to be only a couple. The biggest is a 30-MW
collection of solar panels in Social Circle, which alone accounts for about half of
Georgia's total solar output.
That’s
small compared to the massive 390-MW Ivanpah facility I saw a couple years ago
while driving from LA to Las Vegas, though to be fair the footprint of the
Social Circle farm is much, much smaller.
Georgia
might not have the cloudless days of the Mojave Desert, but it is still a sunny
place. After moving to Finland, I would fondly recall how the sun seemed to
shine in Georgia every single day, not just once or twice a month, like in Helsinki.
 |
| A bright spot in the Mojave Desert. California's huge Ivanpah solar power site. |
I'm only partly kidding. Meanwhile, some folks in Suomi are trying to
make the most of the little solar radiation we do get. A newspaper printing
facility in Oulu has installed on its roof Finland’s largest array of solar
panels, some 1600 of them. It’s a start.
As
the EIA map makes graphically clear, Georgia could be doing more in solar than
just eight sites. In neighboring North Carolina, there are almost a hundred, though to be
fair, all seem to be smaller-scale installations much like Savannah’s IKEA
facility. Still, the aggregate capacity comes to almost 400 MW, approaching the
output of Carters Dam.
I have to wonder, then, what is it about North Carolina that
encourages folks there to lay down more silicon panels? Or perhaps, rather,
what is it about Georgia that encourages them not to? To answer those questions, maybe I'll need to dig deeper into the Internet.
