Carbon before profits

Fighting global warming a business imperative, says power company CEO

By: Lauren Otis
   The chief executive officer of the 10th largest power generating company in America told a gathering in Princeton that the nation, and its power generating industry, have a moral imperative to take immediate steps toward reducing carbon emissions into the earth’s atmosphere, an imperative which transcends national boundaries, politics and corporate profits.
   "For me, I think global warming is something that rises to the level where it is above profit," David Crane, president and chief executive officer of West Windsor-based NRG Energy, told a packed audience at Princeton University’s Friend Center last week. "It is a moral issue, and there aren’t many moral issues in the business world," he said, in a lecture sponsored by the university’s Center for Innovation in Engineering Education.
   Mr. Crane, a 1981 Princeton graduate, likened the magnitude of the need for industry to step up and confront the problem to the point a century ago when American industry "recognized that (workplace) safety is more important than profit."
   Mr. Crane placed the effort to combat global warming in a league with the Manhattan Project to develop an atomic bomb, for its sense of national urgency; the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe after World War II, because of the multi-lateral effort needed; and the Apollo space program to put a man on the moon, because of the visionary leadership it would require.
   Mr. Crane challenged his own power generating business sector to take the lead in reducing carbon emissions, despite it being an inconvenient time due to the rising prices of energy.
   "We emit 37 percent of total greenhouse gases in the United States. The power sector is the biggest emitting sector of carbon in the country, which is the biggest emitting country in the world," he said. At NRG Energy alone "we emit 60 million tons a year of carbon, more than Norway," he said.
   Efforts to develop alternative, and greener, energy sources are all well and good, but the problem, and its solution, lies with coal-fired power generation, which still dominates the power generating industry, said Mr. Crane. NRG owns windpower plants, and "we are very excited about being in the wind (generation) business, but it is not the solution to the global warming crisis," he said.
   "Fifty-two percent of (power) generation in the United States is coal fired. People who want to deal with global warming need to deal with the fact that we have to deal with coal," Mr. Crane said.
   Because of the high cost of natural gas, power plants using this fuel are no longer being built, but coal is still cheap and the U.S. power industry is poised to begin construction of a huge number of coal-fired plants in the next few years, Mr. Crane said. "While everyone studies whether global warming is going to really happen, the U.S. is going to build 100,000 megawatts of coal-fired power plants," spewing as much new carbon into the atmosphere as the carbon output of France and Spain combined, he said.
   "You should be worried about this, very, very worried," he told the audience.
   Blaming the rest of the world, or waiting for it to take its own strides toward reducing carbon emissions, is the wrong tack for American business executives, politicians and citizens to take, Mr. Crane emphasized. "By 2009 China will emit more carbon than us. China adds a coal-fired plant every nine days. These are true but we have no leg to stand on if we are building all those coal plants (domestically)," he said.
   Furthermore, "if you want to be against global warming you can’t be anti-nuclear. If you are anti-nuclear I have no time for you," Mr. Crane said. "One of the things we need is a renaissance in nuclear power," he said.
   The scale of the world’s power needs and the immediacy of the global warming crisis, require that nuclear power, which can supply vast amounts of electricity, be reconsidered, said Mr. Crane, noting that NRG is in the initial stages of going through the long and expensive U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission approval process to build two new nuclear power reactors in Texas.
   When they come online the power these new nuclear plants will produce "will itself displace a Bulgaria of coal," Mr. Crane said, adding, "That is why nuclear is so important, nuclear moves the needle, wind power does not."
   Mr. Crane said NRG did not want new and untested technology for nuclear power generation. "We don’t want any first of a kind engineering, that’s what killed the nuclear industry in the 1970s," he said. Instead, NRG would use a technology in Texas which is currently being used in four plants in Japan, yet which is 20 years more advanced than any currently employed in the U.S.
   He did challenge the students and future engineers in the audience to use their knowledge and creativity to develop new technologies which can cleanse carbon from coal before it is burned, for future generations of coal-fired plants, as well as after it is burned, so flue emissions of current coal plants could be made cleaner. "This is an area where you can get rich while practicing your profession and saving humanity," he said.
   Some clean coal technology has already been developed, Mr. Crane said, citing a company which NRG has teamed up with which uses algae to "eat" carbon emissions. "If you want a career in algae this is an area you can turn into a very profitable business," Mr. Crane said.
   The problem of what to do with all the carbon that is removed must also be solved, he said. "This is a huge area and a very important area that needs to be solved in the future."
   Mr. Crane said he asked himself what NRG, a mid-sized power company, can do to bring about a solution to the problem.
   "The most important thing to me, is take a stand," he said. "We wanted to stand for something as a corporation. I do believe a corporation has a soul, has a heart. It was not part of the economic bargain, that people who came to work for NRG were coming to work for a tobacco company."
   Mr. Crane said he has encountered open hostility from other power utility executives over his outspokenness on the imperative of reducing carbon emissions, and their "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" attitude to the crisis. And the question of what Wall Street does remains: "Will they keep funding projects that are bad for the environment?" he asked.
   Mr. Crane wondered "where is the civil outrage" over what is being done to the environment, which might begin to sway such entrenched interests, and wondered what the legacy of his generation will be with regard to global warming. While they may not see the problem solved, "our generation can actually get the ball rolling," which would be a worthy legacy, he concluded.