January 14, 2008
Last weekend I moderated a Breakout Session Climate Change and Sustainable Energy Development in the Everglades at the 2008 Everglades Coalition Annual Meeting on Captiva Island. While the panel addressed some key energy and climate change issues of interest to an Everglades audience I was personally surprised that the audience wanted to know more about renewable energy related to their homes rather than exploring further the relationship of sustainable energy development to the Greater Everglades Eco-System. Fortunately for me there were people at the main conference, including ‘Rock’ Salt, my friend and Energy Advisory Committee colleague from the Governor’s Commission for a Sustainable South Florida (1996-97), with whom to share my questions.
What of the relationship between long-term sea level rise, new power plant siting, and restoring water flow to the Everglades, the latter also functioning as a climate change adaptation measure to protect our drinking water from saltwater intrusion. Modeling even 6″ of sea level rise and setting up monitoring stations at the pressure points would help us understand the rate at which change is taking place. Monitoring sea level changes at this time would be analogous to a Hurricane watch, albeit over much longer times, as a precursor to going to a sea level warning. This information has to be invaluable to the Corps of Engineers. Given that over 30% of the Everglades are less than 1 foot above sea level even a 6″ increase would be calamitous. Who is the lead agency for this kind of measurement and monitoring? Is it NOAA, USGS, USACE, someone else?
If long-term sea-level rise is a distinct possibility how much thought has been given to its impact on sites being considered for new nuclear and coal plants at the boundaries of the Greater Everglades Eco-System? Heaven forbid. I’m thinking in particular about sites like Turkey Point which is an island at 3 feet of sea-level rise. I would certainly expect FDEP and FPSC to be asking these questions as they go through siting and need determination scenario planning. The electric utilities have 40-year sunk infrastructure (no pun intended) investments and long-term operating horizons to think about. Assuming the power plants operate that long, how do they propose to harden reactor cores against sea-level intrusion long after the sites have been abandoned?
Another Everglades-related energy scenario has increased nitrogen loading of our estuaries becoming an unintended consequence of growing and producing biofuels in the Everglades, without the appropriate run-off controls on biofuels development. I was asked by another colleague to suggest to our session that Florida looks into the feasibility of harvesting and converting invasive cattails into biofuels. Could transforming cattails into biofuels be economically viable? That would be a total win-win situation.
A third concern relates to smart growth in the Kissimmee Valley and South Florida, and everywhere else for that matter. New mixed-use communities built around integrated cogeneration/renewable energy systems hold the potential to lessen the demand for new central power plants, their emissions, and the quantities of Everglades-bound water needed to cool them. There are also far more efficient ways we can use natural gas, a very valuable resource, rather than as fuel for 45% efficient (after transmission losses) combined-cycle gas turbines. Mitigating greenhouse gas emissions and the tremendous demands for cooling water for power plants must be placed very high on any energy planning agenda.
For all of the questions, what is absolutely needed is the vision and the will to approach energy/eco-system solutions from a systems design perspective. Isn’t it time we took the time and made the necessary investment in serious energy scenario planning in Florida?