Coal to solar switch
could save 52,000 US lives per year
By Brian
Bienkowski for The Daily Climate
Swapping out coal energy for solar
would prevent 52,000 premature deaths in the United States every year,
according to a new analysis from Michigan Technological University.
Amid all the talk from the Trump
Administration that regulations targeting coal are hurting people, this shows
"many more lives are saved by phasing out coal," said Liz Perera,
climate policy director for the Sierra Club, who was not involved in the study.
In addition the savings in health
care costs added to the value of the solar electricity could in some cases
bring in money, offsetting the costs of the switch.
“Evolving the U.S. energy system
utilizing clean, alternative technology will allow the U.S. to prevent
thousands of premature deaths along with becoming a global leader in renewable
technology adoption,” the authors wrote in the study published in the journal Renewable and
Sustainable Energy Reviews.
Michigan Tech University researchers
analyzed peer-reviewed health studies and calculated lives lost per kilowatt
hour to coal each year—finding approximately 51,999 people die due to coal
pollutants that spur respiratory, heart and brain problems.
“Coal-fired pollution harms human
life. It kills people,” said senior author Joshua Pearce, a researcher and
professor at Michigan Tech University's Department of Materials Science and
Engineering. “From an American perspective this transition [from coal to solar]
makes complete sense.”
Pearce and Michigan Tech Ph.D
student Emily Prehoda calculated it would take 755 gigawatts of solar energy at
a cost of $1.45 trillion to replace all current coal power. That would be a
significant bump up from the current 22.7 gigawatts of solar power in the U.S.
This averages about $1.1 million
invested per life saved. That cost, however, doesn’t take into account solar’s
value. When the energy pumped into the grid is combined with the health care
savings, a switch to solar would actually end up saving money, Pearce said.
He estimates that using a net
metering system that credits commercial solar energy system users would
actually bring in $1.5 million for every life saved and a residential net
metering would bring in more than $2 million per life saved.
Solar’s growth, and coal’s decline,
is undeniable. A report from the International Renewable Energy Agency last week estimated
that solar jobs were up 82 percent over the past three years.
There are now about 260,000 solar
jobs in the U.S., compared to just 51,000 in coal mining.
But solar only accounts for about
1.5 percent of the nation’s electricity. Pearce said that’s due to two things:
inertia and policy. Citing a local example he said he and other professors were
helping people near their university get solar power at their homes and the
biggest obstacle is the local regulations on how much solar can be put into the
grid.
“It’s rules like this that are
stopping people from doing it individually,” he said. “I have Republican friends
who installed solar—not to save the whales or anything, but to save
money.”
And on the national level President
Trump has been all-in on coal use.
Trump signed an executive order
earlier this year to rescind the Clean Power Plan—currently on hold as it is
litigated—which requires power plants to cut carbon emissions 30 percent below
2005 levels by 2030.
And just last week Trump announced
that he would pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement, saying the
accord would “decapitate” the U.S. coal industry.
He gave a nod to coal country saying
he was putting Pittsburgh before Paris. (Pittsburgh has committed to powering
itself by 100 percent renewable energy by 2035.)
But researchers say Trump and other
pro-coal supporters are fighting an uphill battle.
"Trump can't stop the will of
the market and the will of the people to choose clean energy," Perera
said.
The Daily Climate is an independent,
foundation-funded news service covering energy, the environment and climate
change. Find us on Twitter @TheDailyClimate or
email editor Brian Bienkowski at bbienkowski [at] EHN.org