What's the Real Lesson Behind The Tennesee Valley Authority's Coal Spill?

(MoneyWatch)  The true economic damages of the coal ash spill in an eastern Tennessee valley are yet to be fully discovered, although some are calling the Christmas event the United States' worst on-land ecological disaster in history. But there are several good lessons the public could take away from the spill, not all of which revolve around the "coal is bad" theme.

First and most obvious is that some states lag behind the national average when it comes to environmental rules, as the Christian Science Monitor points out. Energy plants place themselves in states with lax rules, then sell their electricity over large geographical areas. While bureaucrats should be cautious about instituting new rules, the best available regulations should be standardized across states, to bring laggards up to pace.

The second lesson is that energy is a large business, in every way. The spill managed to spread goo over an impressive area of land -- estimates run from 300 to 3,000 acres -- and ran into a local river, potentially causing problems for decades. No doubt a wider area would have been affected if the landscape in the area were flatter. The Tennessee Valley Authority, the utility at fault, should thank its lucky stars that it didn't do more damage with its inept handling of the waste.

Coal operates at a huge scale, with many requiring hundreds of train cars of coal per day to continue operations. However, it's not alone in its size. Coal provides a huge portion of the world electricity output, but other sources use resources on a similar scale.

Gas requires pipelines and drilling, for example, but in general is fairly low profile. Renewables will each have their own profile. Wind turbines cause a noise that some find unpleasant, and often kills birds and other wildlife. Solar farms cover large areas of land, and can also be disruptive to wildlife, as many installations denude and level the land. Both wind and solar will require long transmission lines that must be placed.

More similar to coal and oil are biofuels. Now that we're seeing significant levels of ethanol and biodiesel production, it's time to start thinking about their environmental impact, including water that is used by growing plants and in the process of creating the fuel. Much of that water can be rendered useless. Meantime, plans for cellulosic ethanol will consume some farming byproducts, like corn husks, which are currently left on the land as fertilizer -- thus reducing the useful life of the farmland.

As the various new energy industries grow, problems will crop up, as occurred with solar panel pollution in China. The best solution might be to develop profiles of each energy source comparing their overall environmental damage (not just CO2 emissions), and factor that information into their pricing.

Whether that will ever happen is questionable. But disasters like the one in Tennessee, which are bound to happen again in the future, will certainly help us decide.