This commentary is by Steve Comeau, a resident of South Burlington who is a retired business intelligence developer.
A missing component of the Vermont Climate Action Plan is to plan for adding new advanced nuclear power as part of electricity used in Vermont over the coming decades.
The plan ignores nuclear power as part of the Vermont energy mix, yet nuclear power is an essential part of Vermont’s carbon-free electricity mix today. Given that the plan will result in actions that incentivize electric vehicles and heating system electrification, Vermont will need more no-carbon sources of electricity.
Vermont is supplied with good renewable energy resources, including in-state hydroelectric, solar and wind, and a direct connection to Hydro-Quebec for large-scale hydro. Vermont is also part of the New England electricity grid; therefore we have access to a reliable grid supported by nuclear power and natural gas generation.
Per the Department of Public Service 2022 Compressive Energy Plan, Vermont currently gets 28% of its “physical” electricity from nuclear power. The plan states that “meeting Vermont’s short-term electric supply needs will be challenging without existing resources such as hydroelectric power and nuclear and could have unintended consequences such as increasing pressure to build new long-lived fossil generation.”
Natural gas generation on the New England grid provides vital services for grid stability and reliability that are frequently overlooked. It is easy to take for granted that, except for short-term local outages, the electricity grid is always on.
The New England grid is reliable because natural gas plants can “follow the load” by ramping up and down to handle changes in electricity demand. There are generators that are on spinning reserve, ready to go online quickly when the need arrives. Other peaking generators can spin up fast to handle the peak load times of the day.
Hydroelectric, in some cases, can also provide these services, but most of these services are provided by natural gas generation. These essential services are critical to a reliable grid and cannot easily be replicated with renewable energy sources such as wind and solar.
The ability of renewable energy to eventually replace natural gas and oil generation is dependent on grid-scale energy storage. To have four hours additional solar energy later in the day, there must be batteries to store four hours of energy and another set of solar panels dedicated to providing that energy to the battery storage.
This storage extends the time the solar energy is available, but will require much more infrastructure and cost. Due to cloudy and stormy days, as well as the short days of winter, the solar power and storage will still need to be backed up by other generation resources such as natural gas.
Energy storage using batteries (or pump hydro storage) can smooth out solar and wind power fluctuations, but there will be great difficulty to scale out storage of any type to be a fully reliable resource without having firm and reliable power generation resources.
The need for firm and reliable power is where nuclear power comes in; specifically new small modular reactors currently in development by multiple companies in the United States. Those small nuclear reactors are designed to be modular, scalable and intrinsically safe. They require a small physical space and produce no direct carbon emissions.
Small modular reactors can provide base-load power, but also will have the ability to be flexible and follow the load, which is a critical service for a reliable grid.
The Oregon-based company NuScale has Nuclear Regulatory Commission design approval for new small modular reactors that will start to be built later this decade in Idaho and also in Poland. TerraPower is developing another technology, the traveling wave reactor, designed to provide base-load power. Many other U.S. companies are developing new nuclear power technologies.
The Vermont General Assembly should direct the Public Utility Commission to research small modular reactors and other advanced nuclear technologies and to recommend which technologies can provide a good fit for clean and safe energy production in Vermont for the 2030s and beyond.
Vermont should also retain the power supply contracts needed for the existing and available nuclear power from New Hampshire, since it already substantially helps Vermont achieve climate change emissions goals.
There still remains a lot of anti-nuclear sentiment in Vermont. But attitudes are changing because the danger of climate change is now obvious and real. States such as Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Indiana, and West Virginia are opening up to new nuclear as a future replacement for coal generation.
New England states should not rely only on renewables to fill the void as fossil fuel generation is reduced. The time has come to challenge the old assumptions about nuclear power and recognize that the nuclear power systems have a vital role in deep decarbonization.
