SET Energy

I wrote a few months back how amazingly resilient natural gas inventories were in September despite the hurricane outages. The EIA just published an explanation in their electric power monthly data for the month. Electricity consumption fell more than 5% in September from 2007, sending natural gas demand for electricity down a staggering 15.5%! Demand for coal fell 3% and oil 19%, while hydroelectric generation increased almost 13% on some drought relief around the country. Unfortunately, wind electricity generation fell as well, due to slower winds — showing wind can be intermittent across large regions. Lower electricity consumption was largely driven by a big dip in manufacturing and power outages from the hurricanes.

Year-to-date, a .8% drop in electricity generation has decreased consumption of all fossil fuels. Coal use is down a small .1%, natural gas a large 6.8% and oil a whopping ~25%. Hydro and wind are up ~5% and almost 39%, respectively. This fall in electricity use is poised to be the first annual decline since 2001 and may be a deeper decline. The EIA projects electricity use to fall again in 2009, hopefully allowing grid operators to postpone building new fossil fuel power plants until Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS) technology can be integrated or the plants can be replaced by renewables. And with the whole electricity pie shrinking, wind power can significantly grow in market share in 2009 even if its growth is 25-40% slower than this year, as recent announcements suggest.

The climate implications of these September numbers are an even deeper cut in emissions than I projected after the Short Term Energy Outlook last week. It now appears US emissions in 2008 may be almost 3% below their 2007 level. Achieving 1990 levels by 2020 seems to be getting easier and easier — as long as we base economic recovery on the deployment of efficiency and renewables. We’ll see if Obama & Co. aim to cut emissions further toward the 1Sky goal of 25% below 1990 level by 2020 (as I’m sure Al Gore urged him to last week) if emissions fall a good deal further.

Onwards in the sustainable energy transition-

Tags: climate change, Coal, Electricity, Gore, hydro, Natural Gas, Obama, Oil, US, Wind

This entry was posted on Monday, December 15th, 2008 at 9:53 am and is filed under Climate Change, Coal, Daily Recap, Electricity, Natural Gas, Oil, Wind. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.