Tag Archives: Health

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The costs and benefits of EPA’s new rules on coal

Photo by Nick Humphries, via Flickr Creative Commons

The AP’s Dina Cappiello has an excellent piece out today on the impact of a controversial new EPA rule on air pollution. Here’s her lede:

WASHINGTON—More than 32 mostly coal-fired power plants in a dozen states will be forced to shut down and an additional 36 might have to close because of new federal air pollution regulations, according to an Associated Press survey.

Together, those plants — some of the oldest and dirtiest in the country — produce enough electricity for more than 22 million households, the AP survey found. But their demise probably won’t cause homes to go dark.

The fallout will be most acute for the towns where power plant smokestacks long have cast a shadow. Tax revenues and jobs will be lost, and investments in new power plants and pollution controls probably will raise electric bills.

Backers of Big Coal have long-protested similar clean-up rules, predicting economic ruin and widespread blackouts. A new rule to clean-up dirty coal? Cue the horsemen of the Apocalypse. But, as Cappiello’s investigation found, the consequences won’t be quite so dire. There are losers and winners, to be sure. But a full cost-accounting shows that these EPA regulations generally save lives and have a net economic benefit to boot. Just a few years ago, for example, as many as 30,000 Americans died prematurely every year because of particulate pollution from coal-fired power plants. In 2010, thanks to new EPA rules, that number had been reduced to slightly over 13,000.

The EPA says that the new rule would save thousands more lives annually and it would prevent, in 2016,

  • 4,500 cases of chronic bronchitis,
  • 11,000 nonfatal heart attacks,
  • 12,200 ER visits,
  • 11,000 cases of acute bronchitis,
  • 120,000 cases of aggravated asthma.

Yes, the new rule costs money. The EPA puts the price tag at nearly $11 billion in 2016. On the other hand, the health benefits from the new rule are estimated at between $59-$140 billion for 2016 — or somewhere between five and twelve times greater than the costs of the rule.

For years, opponents of “big government” and regulatory policies have relied on framing the issue as a choice between the environment and the economy. It’s a false choice, as the evidence shows. What’s good for the environment is, in this case and in many others, good for the economy.

 

 

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Congressmen Call for Hearing on the True Costs of Coal

Photo by Nick Humphries, via Flickr Creative Commons

Democratic Congressmen Henry Waxman (CA) and Bobby Rush (IL) today called on Republican committee chairs to hold hearings on the full economic costs of coal-fired power plants. The key word here is, of course, full.

Big Coal and its supporters in Congress often use the club of “expensive energy” to beat up on renewable sources such as solar power and wind. But, as Waxman and Rush state in their request letter to Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-MI), a new study “finds that the economic costs of air pollution from coal-fired … power plants outweigh the economic value these sources add to the economy.” The letter was also addressed to the chairman of the Subcommittee on Energy and Power, Ed Whitfield (R-KY).

The study, Environmental Accounting for Pollution in the United States Economy, determined that economic damages caused by coal-fired power plants outweighed benefits by up to 5.6 times.

Coal-fired electrical generation only seems cheap because most of the costs don’t appear on the power bill. Instead, the full cost of coal is paid by ordinary Americans in increased health care and shortened life spans, by businesses in lost work days due to respiratory and heart-related illnesses, and by the agriculture industry in lower crop yields due to climate change.

The new study appears in the latest issue of the American Economic Review, and was co-authored by economists at Middlebury College and Yale University.

For more on the healthcare costs of coal-fired power plants, see the excellent 2010 study, The Toll From Coal, published by the Clean Air Task Force.

 

The True Cost of Coal

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The Truth About Benefits & Risks of the Smart Grid

Smart Grid Grants

Public doubts about smart meters — the basic components of a smart grid — are in the news once again.

The New York Times just ran a piece about the “Stop Smart Meters” movement in the San Francisco Bay area. Health and privacy are key concerns there. On the health side of the equation, some people worry about possible negative effects caused by the wireless signals broadcast from smart meters.

From the Times:

The health concerns about the smart meters focus on the phenomenon known as “electromagnetic hypersensitivity,” or E.H.S., in which people claim that radiation from cellphones, WiFi systems or smart meters causes them to suffer dizziness, fatigue, headaches, sleeplessness or heart palpitations. (At a recent Public Utilities Commission hearing on smart meters, an audience member requested that all cellphones be turned off as a gesture to the electrosensitive people in the audience.)

Opponents of smart meters say that wireless systems aren’t necessary for a smart grid. I asked smart grid expert, and author of The Smart Grid Dictionary, Christine Herztog, about that claim.

“Most smart meters in this country are wireless,” Hertzog responded, “while in Europe most are PLC [Power Line Carrier — meaning that the utility lines themselves are used to communicate data].” The problem with PLC, she explained, is that “if the electricity drops, so does the ability to communicate. Wireless – if the electricity drops, the ability to communicate remains until the battery dies.” Large utilities with many distant customers combine wireless and PLC communications.

So, the truth is that smart meters aren’t exactly necessary for a smart grid — but for technical and economic reasons, they’re here to stay.

But, do wireless smart meters really pose a public health danger? The most-frequently cited study on the issue found that the data “suggested” a correlation between the highest levels of radiation exposure from cellphone use and a type of brain tumor, with the caveat that no causal relationship was found.

What’s more, the amount of radio frequency (RF) current generated by smart meters is relatively low — compared to cell phones, Bluetooth headsets, WiFi routers and the like. That’s mostly because smart meters only send information one or two times a day and even then in low-power bursts lasting only a few seconds. The fact is, most American’s live in an environment that is already permeated by RF current.

While the extra RF generated by smart meters is small, the data they provide could result in a healthier, safer environment according to an article that appeared last year in the journal, Science:

Electricity use in the home is of interest to epidemiologists. Appliance usage may be a main effect variable in epidemiologic studies of health impacts of electromagnetic fields. It may be a confounding variable in studies of air pollution or other causes of disease. Smart meters could provide direct data on use of some appliances (e.g., microwaves and electric blankets), as well as a check on usage data for other appliances obtained from the questionnaires normally used in such studies.

Other types of health studies (e.g., intervention studies) can benefit from access to detailed, individualized electricity data. Algorithms might be designed, for example, to infer how many times per day a refrigerator door was opened (relevant to dietary and obesity studies), the times of day a residence was occupied (relevant to air pollution health studies), and even the pattern of sleep (relevant to a variety of health studies).

Some uses of data may be unknown today, but important decades hence. Saved electricity data may help future generations solve unanticipated problems, just as 1960s satellite images collected before awareness of the climate problem assist us today.

One of the primary benefits of a smart grid is its potential to cut greenhouse gas emissions. A 2010 Department of Energy study concluded that a smart grid, if fully-implemented in the U.S., would lower the nation’s CO2 emissions by 12 percent (with another 6 percent reduction coming from indirect effects).

One of the real risks posed by smart meters is security, writes Christine Hertzog in her blog, The Smart Grid Library.

Everyone agrees that consumers need to be educated about the entirely new types of energy use data that can be created with Smart Grid technologies. While we must ensure that consumers are aware of their rights and responsibilities regarding energy use data, there is less conversation ongoing about educating utilities and vendors to deploy programs to ensure data privacy…

(Her entire post is well-worth reading — it has information that will benefit consumers, vendors, and policy makers alike.)

Indeed, some of the problems PG&E is experiencing with an anti-smart-meter backlash were caused by the failure of the utility to inform customers about its privacy and security programs. That was one of the conclusions of a study commissioned last year by the California Public Utilities Commission (pdf).

On her blog, Hertzog raises an issue that I haven’t seen explored elsewhere: ownership.

The bottom line question is: who owns the value of that energy use data? In the case of investor owned utilities, should regulators insist that proceeds of sales of anonymized energy use data be disbursed to ratepayers instead of shareholders? And in the case of energy service providers, whether a utility or another vendor, there are a range of questions about how that data could be used that must be answered to avoid the mis-steps and abuses of privacy that we have seen from some social media sites.

On balance, smart meters and a smart grid represent a giant step forward — technologically, economically, and environmentally. But, as with any major changes, there are risks. To reap the benefits and manage the risks we have to be at least as smart as the technology we’re embracing.

[This piece first appeared in my Forbes blog, Edison 2.0]