Wind Energy is the Ethanol of Electricity

The more I hear about the need to switch to wind energy, the more I think that it’s going to become some government mandated item that’s supported by billions in tax dollars and has unintended economic consequences that nobody (at least in the political arena) will see coming, but will continue to be supported by politicians in key political states through a small group that benefits from the mandates and tax support.

In other words, wind energy will be the next ethanol.

I’d like to take all the credit for thinking of this myself, but I first read it in an article in Reason online (a libertarian magazine) concerning an interview with Robert Bryce, managing editor of the Energy Tribune.

The entire article is a good read, but I want to highlight one specific point that got me started on thinking that wind will be the electric ethanol:

reason: How about domestic renewables as a solution to dependence on foreign oil?

Bryce: I’m not opposed to renewables. I have 3,000 watts of solar panels on the roof of my home. I understand the economics of renewables. But an incurable problem for both solar and wind is intermittency. The sun doesn’t shine at night. I like to have lights and TV at night. Unless we come up with some incredibly efficient method of storing large amounts of electricity, it’s not a viable source because we can’t store it.

It’s the same problem with wind. I consider wind the electric-sector equivalent of the ethanol hype. At a conference recently I asked a wind guy, “Without subsidies, how many projects now under way [regarding wind] would make economic sense?” He said maybe 30 percent.

The point here is to say that there’s a place for wind, just like there’s a place for ethanol. But to make it responsible for 20% of electric generation, like T. Boone Pickens and Al Gore are proposing is economically illiterate. The same way that thinking making ethanol responsible for 10% of gasoline consumption is already causing problems with the nation’s economy.

First Anti-Pickens/Gore Graphic

The Future Under Pickens/Gore

There will be more to come with this, but it’s my first attempt at graphically showing one of the major flaws with the Pickens/Gore Plan, the basic unreliability of wind and solar. Without electrical storage (and there’s NONE right now), the Pickens/Gore Plan will leave alot of the country worse off with little to show for it.

Pickens Plan a Bridge to Gore Plan

From Bloomberg:

While Pickens views his own proposal as a “bridge to where Al wants to go,” there are no plans now to coordinate.

“He asked if we could we join together and do something; I told him no, because global warming is on page two for me,” Pickens, founder and chairman of Dallas-based BP Capital LLC, said. “Page one is foreign oil.”

“There are some pieces where they might differ,” Gore spokeswoman Kalee Kreider said. Gore’s “feeling is they have more in common than the elements that might separate their proposals.”

I’d like to see where reliable energy is on Pickens (or Gore’s) pages. Somewhere near page 387, I’m guessing. So if there’s some brownouts or blackouts (the equivalent of Lenin’s “If you want to make an omelet, you must be willing to break a few eggs), then so be it. So what if our economy devolves into something seen in Africa, just so long as it is clean energy.

Just remember that whenever you see or hear “The Pickens Plan”, just substitute “The Gore Plan” instead.

Amen Rush! Pickens Plan = Gore Plan

I’ve mentioned before that I prefer Rush Limbaugh’s style of radio to Sean Hannity’s. This afternoon’s broadcast was an excellent reason why:

RUSH: This T. Boone Pickens thing is fascinating. T. Boone has been buying commercials on this program. He wants to invest in wind and he wants you to invest in wind, and he wants subsidies for wind, but he wants a lot of natural gas and he wants keep drilling for oil. This has led to some very critical pieces of T. Boone. I have one here in my formerly nicotine-stained fingers in the Los Angeles Times: “T. Boone Pickens’ ‘Clean’ Secret.”

“Well, Californians can clarify exactly whose dime it will be: Ours. Along with being the country’s biggest wind power developer, Pickens owns Clean Energy Fuels Corp., a natural gas fueling station company that is the sole backer of the stealthy Proposition 10 on California’s November ballot. This measure would authorize the sale of $5 billion in general fund bonds to provide alternative energy rebates and incentives — but by the time the principal and the interest is paid off, it would squander at least $9.8 billion in taxpayer money on Pickens’ self-serving natural gas agenda.”

So what’s happening here is we have a piece by Anthony Rubenstein in the Los Angeles Times, ripping T. Boone for basically saying that he wants his plan to be subsidized by the taxpayers, and that this plan is going to cost everybody a whole lot of money, and that T. Boone’s plan is not right because T. Boone is investing in the very thing that he wants subsidies for and it’s going to lead to him getting even richer while we pay the freight, and that is not right.

Well, I don’t think this is totally accurate, but why do we not get these kinds of stories about Algore? He plainly asks people to invest in the things that he has invested in. He plainly asks people to send him money, and he’s out there scaring people to death, or trying to, saying that we’ve only got ten years. Every time there’s a crisis, these Democrats and these liberals come up with the ten-year number. Can I give you the dirty little secret of all this? Any green energy plan is going to clobber us financially. That is the point, my friends. All of this green energy stuff is a flat out hoax, most of is, designed to increase taxes, raise government’s profile, and reach and power. It’s all based on the fallacious notion that this green energy stuff is going to clean up the planet and stop global warming, manmade global warming and all that. I think people had better understand very quickly, I don’t care if it’s T. Boone Pickens, if it’s Algore, I don’t care what green energy plan comes along, it’s going to cost everybody a lot of money, which is why people are doing it. If you think this green energy stuff is being done out of altruism, people want to save the planet, you gotta wake up. It has nothing to do with that. There isn’t a green program out there. A lot of corporations are actually giving up this green marketing stuff anyway because their customers aren’t buying into it — which is a good thing, don’t misunderstand.

I’ll have to look into Proposition 10, but if it is, it goes along with alot of what Pickens has already been doing with the federal government and in Texas. What’s interesting is that Pickens had said that he’d put the transmission lines up on his own dime, but is now going to be bankrolled by the Texas consumers through their utility rates, according to a ruling by the Texas Public Utilities Commission on July 16th.

Here’s what Pickens said on June 6th:

PICKENS: It’s big. It’s a uh, I think it’s the largest wind farm in the world. It’ll be 4000 megawatts, which will be about probably two pretty good nuclear plants. So, it’ll service a million, three-hundred thousand homes, and it’ll be about a 10 billion dollar project without the transmission, and we probably will do the transmission, and that’d be another two billion – so, total cost would be 12 billion dollars.

GELLERMAN: Now it’s pretty unusual for somebody to bankroll the transmission lines.

PICKENS: It is. That is unusual, I agree.

GELLERMAN: Well, why don’t you let somebody else pay for it, like the transmission people?

PICKENS: Well, it, everything goes slower if I do that. So to fit the schedule of when we’re gonna be ready to start spinning, which will be the last of 2011, we need to have transmission in place at that time, and this is the only way we can time it to work that way. And, see, everything has gotta happen fast for me, because I’m 80 years old.

So it only took forty days for Pickens to changes his mind. Amazing what $4 billion of free equipment will do for your mindset.

Pickens Supports Gore for Energy Czar

I really didn’t want this to be an anti-Pickens blog, but if the guy insists on making stupid ideas and backing them up with more stupidity, then I have to call him out on it. It doesn’t look like anyone in the ancient media is going to do that.

So this post is about an interview that T. Boone Pickens gave to the National Journal about his campaign. Unfortunately, the interview at the National Journal is gated, so I won’t bother linking to that, but the Free Republic does have a copy, so you can check out the strangely formatted interview there.

Here, I’m going to just highlight the part where he praises former Vice President Al Gore.