Topic:

In look­ing ahead to entirely decar­boniz­ing the elec­tric gen­er­a­tion sys­tem, there is a debate about the use of nuclear gen­er­a­tion.  One school of thought argues that nuclear will be essen­tial to suc­cess­ful decar­boniza­tion, while the other feels that this can be done entirely using renew­able tech­nolo­gies, essen­tially wind and solar.  This research inves­ti­gates the role and value of using nuclear gen­er­a­tion in decar­boniz­ing the elec­tric gen­er­a­tion sys­tem.  Along with gen­er­a­tion, how­ever, stor­age tech­nolo­gies will be needed.  This study also com­pares the value of using bat­ter­ies (expen­sive but effi­cient) to the use of ammo­nia (quite inef­fi­cient, but very cheap per unit of energy).  Based on the Capac­ity Expan­sion Model, the study devel­ops an ana­lyt­i­cal func­tion to eval­u­ate the mar­ginal cost of car­bon reduc­tion under var­i­ous sce­nar­ios of pri­mary gen­er­a­tion (with and with­out nuclear) and stor­age tech­nolo­gies (with bat­ter­ies or with ammo­nia).  The behav­iors of the gen­er­a­tors and stor­age deter­mine the dif­fer­ent com­po­nents of this equa­tion.  Illus­trat­ing these behav­iors gives us insight as to the role of nuclear and dif­fer­ent types of stor­age in decar­boniz­ing the system.

 Alan grad­u­ated from Stan­ford Uni­ver­sity in 1970 with a Master’s degree in geot­ech­ni­cal engi­neer­ing.  As a civil engi­neer he worked in heavy con­struc­tion in Alaska and Viet­nam,  Peace Corps in Venezuela in dam design, and in the Bay Area in earth­quake analy­sis.  He returned to Stan­ford and com­pleted a PhD in Engi­neer­ing Eco­nomic sys­tems in 1983.  He joined Lawrence Liv­er­more National Lab­o­ra­tory in 1987,  work­ing  energy sys­tem eco­nom­ics, devel­op­ing and apply­ing mod­el­ing plat­forms to eval­u­ate poli­cies and tech­nolo­gies for energy gen­er­a­tion and stor­age.  He was also active in risk analy­ses  for nuclear mate­ri­als pro­duc­tion and waste dis­posal.  He is cur­rently retired, but con­tin­ues to work in energy sys­tems eco­nom­ics to bet­ter under­stand strate­gies for reduc­ing car­bon emis­sions from the energy system.