Oct. 28, 2009 (Business Wire) -- David Crane, CEO of NRG Energy, Inc. (NYSE: NRG), testified today before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, chaired by Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., about the need for strong and comprehensive climate change legislation. In addition to the current push for more renewable generation, Crane emphasized the need for a wave of new advanced nuclear power plants and a new urban “foothold” approach to the development of electric vehicle ecosystems around the United States.
“Renewable resources are a major part of our low carbon future, but their inherent issues of intermittency, limited scale, expense and geographic constraints are serious limitations,” said Crane. “We need to build a zero carbon baseload foundation under our wind farms and solar fields. That foundation is new advanced nuclear power. And it’s zero carbon nuclear that will provide the juice for a personal transportation system based on a nationwide fleet of electric cars, dramatically reducing both tailpipe emissions and the transfer of American wealth to the oil-exporting nations.”
In his testimony, Crane highlighted his Company’s proposal to build two new Advanced Boiling Water Reactors (ABWR) at the South Texas Project in Bay City, Texas, currently under due diligence at the DOE for a federal loan guarantee authorized by the Energy Policy Act of 2005. The STP project would add another 2,700 megawatts (MW) of inexpensive, reliable, safe and zero emission baseload generation – enough electricity to power two million Texas homes (including two million electric cars). Crane noted, however, his expectation that only two other nuclear projects currently before the DOE will go forward and become operational by 2020.
“If you assume that all 104 nuclear reactors currently operating in the United States [will be] retired by 2050, that means we need approximately 75 new nuclear units over the next 41 years simply to keep nuclear power’s share of electricity production near 20%,” explained Crane. “If we want to double the nuclear share of power production to 40% in order to accommodate demand growth and realize a greater carbon benefit, we are going to need to build about 150 new nuclear units. Suffice it to say, there is a big gap between the 3-4 projects moving forward and 150.”
In order to successfully embrace new nuclear as a key part of a widespread decarbonization of the power industry, legislation must include pragmatic policy tools in addition to putting a price on carbon emissions, said Crane. These tools should address the key commercial constraints to nuclear energy, such as worker training, expanded domestic manufacturing capability, transitional loan guarantees for new project financing, making appropriate federal lands available for new plant siting and regulatory approval processes capable of handing a much larger volume of projects efficiently and safely.
