Posted on 08/14/2008 5:24:18 AM PDT by thackney
Webb is a senior scientist with the University of Virginia's Department of Environmental Sciences. His Web site, www.VaWind.org, addresses environmental issues associated with commercial wind energy development.
Oil billionaire T. Boone Pickens is being disingenuous, telling one thing to the American people and another to Congress.
He has repeatedly said that no government help is needed to pursue his plan to build the world's largest wind farm in the Texas Panhandle. Yet he is lobbying hard for extension of the Production Tax Credit and National Renewable Energy Zones -- essentially a huge tax shelter for wind industry investors and expedited eminent domain for transmission corridors.
The real innovation here is the well-coordinated manipulation of public perception. The Pickens media campaign focuses on independence from foreign oil, and he is just one among many who have tried to convince the public and policymakers that there is a connection between wind-generated electricity and oil, which is hardly used for electricity.
The nation has seemingly not reached the point where we can look at this issue in a rational manner. Real analysis, however, makes it clear that commercial wind energy is but a small part of the solution to our energy problems and, moreover, it makes far less sense in some areas than in others.
Pickens advocates development of what he calls "the" wind corridor, the swath of open country from Texas to the Dakotas. The push here in the East is for wind development on forested Appalachian mountain ridges. The Appalachian wind corridor may be a first-rate tax shelter, but it's definitely not a first-rate energy resource. It comes in a distant third behind both the Texas-to-Dakotas corridor and the Atlantic offshore corridor. It's a loser in terms of energy benefits and environmental trade-offs.
The Pickens argument for freeing up natural gas for transportation, and thereby reducing U.S. demand for oil, depends on a tenuous string of assumptions and propositions. He assumes that wind power, although intermittent and unreliable, will be available somewhere in large supply all of the time.
His answer is to build enough turbines over a wide enough geographic area -- hundreds of thousands of turbines over a thousand miles of latitude -- and to build the vast array of new transmission lines required to get the electricity where it's needed. In the meantime, until this fantastic investment and landscape transformation takes place, the Pickens plan will introduce unprecedented variability into the generation side of our national electricity system.
I predict that the Pickens plan will backfire. It will run up demand for natural gas as a fuel source for the new levels of rapidly dispatchable generation that will be needed to maintain the electricity system in a manageable state of balance.
The National Research Council released a report to Congress in 2007 based on what was then considered the most ambitious, yet still reasonable, estimate for growth in the wind industry. It was estimated that by 2020, the U.S. would have the equivalent of 36,000 wind turbines providing 4.5 percent of our electricity supply, not the 20 percent now promoted.
Even at 4.5 percent the predicted environmental costs are stunning. In the Appalachian region, where I focus my research, this scale of development will require extensive industrialization of our mountain ridges. In other words, the trade-off involves much of our remaining wild landscape.
Indiscriminate national investment in commercial wind energy will involve a huge commitment of public resources and the neglect of serious responses to serious problems. The public will get smart about this before long, but perhaps not before real damage has been done and real opportunities are lost.
We do need solutions for our energy problems. For now, though, most of the political traction is going to those who propose implausible solutions that stand to make them a lot of money. The concept of green energy is at risk of losing currency.
I hope he fails miserably in getting Tax Payer money for those projects.
“build the vast array of new transmission lines required to get the electricity where it’s needed. “
He needs to figure out Tesla’s system for energy distribution. Sending energy through the earth. Ya just go down to your basement, drive a stake into the ground, and hook your house up to the stake! :)
I don’t trust T-bone as far as I can throw him!
When I hear T. Boob on the radio, I immediately think that Al Gore wrote his script.
T. Boob is trying to sell out America; financed, of course, by America.
yet, my husband said he’d heard that Pickens will not permit the windmills on HIS property, bc they are ugly. has anyone else heard this?
The writer claims that ".... he is just one among many who have tried to convince the public and policymakers that there is a connection between wind-generated electricity and oil, which is hardly used for electricity."
Turns out that "oil" is frequently used for "electricity" ~ mostly in "standby" generators that kick in when electric demand exceeds the capacity of base load systems (hydro, coalfired and nuclear power plants).
Oil is also used to power diesel engines on locomotives. Not a big deal I suppose but we can replace "diesel" with electricity on many thousands of miles of rail line.
BTW, that's without thinking about the problem very much ~ and it looks like the writer didn't think about it at all.
Oil is primarily used in transportation, manifest as gasoline and diesel fuel, but it's also used to heat homes in the Northeast. There are a myriad of electrically powered systems available to replace the oil fired furnaces for a quarter of the homes in this country.
Modern technology makes electricity "fungible" and readily substituted for oil in many applications.
And what do you think will be kicking in when the wind isn't blowing?
I hope he fails miserably in getting Tax Payer money for those projects.
San Fran Nan is one of his investors. Think about it.
We experimented with natural gas vehicles a few years back. In order to have any range at all, you have to have extreme pressures in the tank. Even with the highly pressurized tanks, you are looking at a 100-120 mile range, which is unacceptable for most folks.
We had a slow-fill system at our site, and would refill the vehicles overnight. For some applications, such as parts running and maintenance, the vehicles worked fairly well. But I would not want to deal with that for a daily driver.
The fact that the Congressional hogs are putting up their own money to eat from this trough makes me think that the fix is probably in. We need to be rational about energy policy. This program looks like just one more way for private individuals to enrich themselves from the treasury.
It would be cheaper and less damaging to our economy to just ask these people how much it would take them to go away and cut them a check.
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I’m having a hard time understanding something......the environmentalists don’t have a problem with gigantic windmills lined up from Texas to N. Dakota, but they fight to stop oil wells from being built in ANWR, which is in the middle of nowhere, where no one ever goes, or ever will?
You set a water powered turbine between the two lakes. You can run it quite effectively at a consant rate.
We have an operation like that in Virginia for use with an atomic power plant. The plant runs at a constant rate. The lake is used to adjust load so that the atomic power plant does not need to be "adjusted" ~ (SEE: Chernobyl).
Recent announcements concerning breakthroughs in large scale battery systems indicate that the problem of storing electricity for use in high demand situations is not insurmountable.
Remember, just because something isn't there today doesn't mean it can't be there tomorrow.
So he’s a crook. Doesn’t mean he’s not got a good idea. Without a lot of folks like T. Boone Pickens you’d be shoveling horse manure off the street out front everyday, like it or not.
They fought redundancy to a standstill and suffered on account of it.
I like redundancy! We have underground wiring in this area ~ two sets of it in fact. Wires are good!
Ever been out to the Texas Panhandle? There isn't enough elevation gain for that to be practical.
We've got coal out the wazoo. Natural gas. Oil Shale. And we're finding more oil all the time. We don't need to have massive subsidies for wind power that is intermittent.
Of course, they are right, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't go after underground minerals.
Pure BS!!
It looks pretty level, but it's not as flat as Illinois and they are already well into building some pretty massive windfarms.
Fortunately electric wires work. So you can "ship the potential" somewhere else to run the pumps to move the water.
Less than 3% of the electricity generated in this country is via oil. Much of that is in remote locations such as small Alaskan villages. Conventional coal-fired plants will also burn some oil when starting up a 'cold' boiler because you have to get the temperature up before you begin feeding coal into the burners. But overall, nothing in Pickens' plan would change the amount of oil we use to generate electricity.
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