RESOURCES/MACROECONOMIC/INSTITUTIONAL COMPARATIVE ASSESSMENT Ronald G. Whitfield Argonne National Laboratory -Argonne, Illinois 60439 Three areas important in the Comparative Assessment of energy technologies are resource requirements, macroeconomic effects, and institutional considerations. Scenarios (alternative energy futures) developed as part of the SPS Concept Development and Evaluation Program were used to provide another perspective on the land and water resources required; macroeconomic results followed from the scenario development activity. The institutional analysis, completed before development of the scenarios, focussed on regulatory issues. Scenario data are shown in Table 1. Table entries are the number installed megawatts for each technology for the year 2030, for three sets of scenario assumptions UH, UI, and CI (U means unconstrained in terms of the limits on coal production and deployment of nuclear power plants, C means the opposite, H denotes high energy intensity, and I denotes an intermediate energy intensity), with and without an SPS. Land requirements were first derived on a normalized basis for each of the energy technologies. In km2 per 1,000 MW of installed capacity, the land requirements used here are: 10 for coal, 3 for light water reactor (LWR), 2 for liquid metal fast breeder reactor (LMFBR), 20 for terrestrial photovoltaic (TPV), 35 for SPS, and 2 for fusion. These amounts include (where appropriate) land requirements for resource and fuel extraction, processing, the power plant site itself, and waste disposal. Transmission requirements are not included because they have been shown to be about the same for all technologies, particularly in view of studies indicating that 60 SPS rectennas can be sited within 300 miles of a load center. Scenario-driven results, shown in Figure 1 for the 1980 to 2030 time period, indicate that total land use (excluding transmission) increases 0-500% without SPS and 100-900% with SPS while electrical energy demand increases 75-850% by the year 2030. The land required by SPS alone in the year 2030 is 2-6 times the total land in use for electrical generation in the United States today. The availability of additional land for power plant sites has not been determined. The need for large contigious areas, as for SPS rectennas, is a further complicating factor. Water use in m3 x 106/GW/year, is 22 for coal, 60 for LWR, 22 for LMFBR, 12 for fusion and negligible for TPV and SPS. Total water requirements for the three scenarios, with and without SPS, are shown in Figure 2. Results indicate that deployment of SPS can save large volumes of water. For Scenario CI, SPS saves an amount equal to 40% of the total used in 1980 for baseload electrical generation by coal and nuclear; for Scenario UH, the saving is 170% of today's total. Due to large uncertainties in determining the resource/reserve levels for both the United States and the world, the analysis of materials problems was less quantitative than the land and water analysis. A screening methodology focussed on a reliance on imports criteria and included availability and total demand considerations. These screening factors identified gallium as being a material of serious concern. Gallium is used extensively in the GaAlAs solar cell option for SPS. Also, of serious concern is tungsten, which is used both in SPS and coal technologies.
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