How much land would be needed for the Pickens Plan to work?

But let’s give the benefit of the doubt to Pickens and say that wind could make up the difference. How many windmills and land would be needed for it to work?

From the graph in my previous post, we have a power deficit of 300,000,000,000,000,000 British Thermal Units. This converted to kilowatt hours is 87 921 325 000 000 kWh. You need to get capacity to figure out how much space is needed, which is in units of kilowatts so you divide by the number of hours in a year, specifically 8420. That means you need to have 10441962589 kW of capacity to get this much power in a year.

But wind turbines don’t run 24 hours a day, in fact, they only run about 33 to 50% of the time, so you actually need double the capacity, AT BEST, to get the capacity needed. So you really need 20883925178 kW to supply the power importation needs for the US.

How much land would this require? For that I went here and used their calculator. The end results:

To get the US off foreign energy, we would need 41,767,850 turbines, which would cover 10,441,962.5 acres. This is also 16316 square miles. Or nearly the size of Vermont and New Hampshire COMBINED. And this is just for the physical items of turbines themselves.

Using a different method, a rule of thumb is that one square kilometer can support 10 to 15 MW of capacity. So using the figure above, we’d get 20883925 MW. So dividing by the best case scenario of 15 MW per square km, we get 1392262 sq. km or 537555 square miles. This is approximately the size of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska and half of South Dakota, including urban areas, highways, mountains, and water.

So when T. Boone says that the Great Plains is the Saudi Arabia of wind, you better believe it because if we’re going to use wind to get the US energy independent, the Great Plains will become one giant wind farm.

And this is under a BEST case scenario. Just for fun, lets use the lower end of the power estimates (under the cut):

How Much Does the Government Spend on Energy Subsidies?

Thanks to the Energy Information Agency, I get little email every once and a while alerting me to when they have produced something called “Energy in Brief.” So this week, I got one in the email called:

“How much does the Government spend on energy-specific subsidies and support?”

Jackpot.

And the answer to this question: $16.6 billion just in the past year. To put that in pork perspective, that’s 45 to 60 Bridges to Nowhere, depending on which figure you use (total price of bridge to nowhere or just the famous 2005 earmark). That’s right, we can connect 45 to 60 small towns with their airports for just how much the government gives out for energy.

And what does the government do with this money? Not much, by the EIA’s own accounting:

Have Subsidies Affected Prices or Production?

Between 1999 and 2007, the average real price of total energy per British thermal unit (Btu)3 consumed increased more than 80%. Meanwhile, total energy consumption or demand, including imports, grew by about 5%. Most subsidies and support to energy producers should stimulate supply; so too should higher prices and rising energy demand. Yet in 2007, the United States supplied roughly 72 quadrillion Btu from domestic resources, about the same amount as in 1999. This leaves the impression that energy subsidies had little effect on net domestic production other than to help prevent further declines. But the enactment of various production-oriented tax incentives in the Energy Policy Act of 2005 and subsequent legislation may have contributed to the slight increase in primary energy production over the last two years.

So as a result of billions of dollars in subsidies and tax incentives, the US might have had a slight increase in energy production. At least with the 45 to 60 Bridges to Nowhere, we would have ACTUAL BRIDGES, not possible things that people would be hard pressed to identify.

You’d think that because of T. Boone Pickens’ ad campaigns that we don’t do anything to support wind energy right now. And, like most things T. Boone Pickens says, this is pretty wrong. Again from the EIA:

Did You Know?
The estimated value of production tax credits to wind producers in FY 2007 was $666 million. The benefit was distributed over an estimated 27.7 million megawatthours, making wind power the largest beneficiary of production tax credits among all renewable technologies.

And this doesn’t even include other incentives given to wind producers that AREN’T tax credits, like direct subsidies. And this doesn’t even take into consideration that wind power DOESN’T produce much energy. So the per unit cost is an astronomical $.02/per kilowatt-hour. Considering that your energy bill is anywhere from $.08 to $.20 / kWh per unit, wind gets a subsidy that’s equal to 10 to 25% of your per unit costs. That sounds like it’s doing a whale of a job.

But believe it or not, wind ISN’T even the worse offender when it comes to government largess. That would be “clean coal”, which gets $2 billion to produce a tiny fraction of the energy in the US. But once again, clean coal and coal-to-liquids have huge backers in the Senate in the form of Robert Byrd and Mitch McConnell. And that’s money that’s not doing a lick of good.

So before we start heaping MORE money on renewables, a la the Pickens Plan, we should look to see what works and what doesn’t. Right now, wind and solar aren’t.

How Did the Pickens Plan Calculate $700 Billion?

Everyone today is throwing around the number $700 billion.  Obama, McCain, Hannity, Limbaugh, the media.  And presumably, the source of the figure is from T. Boone Pickens and the Pickens Plan.

But where did that figure come from?

Pickens himself says its “At current oil prices, we will send $700 billion dollars out of the country this year alone”. But he doesn’t cite any sources for that information, nor does he calculate how he got that number. A search of the internet doesn’t come up with any answers either. So I’ll have to do it myself.

The end result: It’s the highest possible price for all petroleum imports (not just crude), but is a flawed number that is at least 8% too large and probably off by even more.

How I got those results are under the fold.

Why Focus on Electricity?

Every plan for long term transportation use involves moving cars and trucks to electric vehicles, powered by alternative energy sources. But why use electricity, a delivered by the bulk power system?

One reason could be that there’s possible efficiencies in making energy in bulk and distributing it. It delivers lower prices than would be done if everyone generated their own energy. Efficiencies of scale, in economic terms. There’s also the efficiency of generation of electricity in terms of getting the most bang for the fuel. Steam generators operate at a higher efficiency than internal combustion engines. So we would be able to use less energy for transportation needs from electricity than from automotive fuels.

However, this does not take into account for the transmission losses as electricity moves from the generator to the consumer. This takes alot of the generational benefit out of the electricity. But even saying that this is a wash, there’s a different, more political reason why people like moving to electricity.

Control.

Governments, generation companies and environmentalists are heavily represented in the process of setting electricity prices and what types of generation are allowed. Note that consumers, and in particular, small consumers are not represented very well in these proceedings. Those who have a larger stake in power have a greater interest in the proceedings. Residential consumers aren’t going to take the time or energy out of their day to attend a commission meeting on electric rates. States try to get around this by setting up consumer advocates in the government itself, but is at best an imperfect representative.

However, in gasoline production, prices and quantities consumed are determined by largely economic forces. This is opposed to electricity, where prices and quantities consumed are largely non-economically determined. This is because of monopoly control of the electric distribution and how electricity is priced, which is very secretive. Most people have little idea of how much they are paying for electricity, the units of electricity and how their actions determine how much it costs.

Contrast this with gasoline. Everyone knows what gas costs, how it’s delivered and how their actions affect them. Thus, it makes it easy to know how their actions are influencing the costs. Also note that government (outside of a flat additional tax) has little say in how prices are determined. They make plenty of investigations into how prices are determined, but doesn’t have direct say in the price. This is a good thing, as markets, especially the gas market, works when allowed to work.

So moving from electricity from gasoline would allow government more control over a very large segment of the economy that it has relatively little control over currently. Also, it allows for other actors to become more important as well. That’s why these people have been driving this change to electricity, instead of focusing on other solutions.

Simple answers to silly questions

Question: How does the United States attain energy independence?

Answer: Ban energy imports.

Oh, you don’t like that answer? Well, that’s the only way we’ll get there.

Of course, it depends on what you mean by energy independence. First there’s the neo-mercantilist/conservative view, which is independent from foreign energy. Because the foreigners have lower labor and production costs, any reduction in cost as a result of moving to a different energy plan will drive out domestic suppliers first. Look to the 1980’s and remember all the wildcatters in Texas capping the wells. That’s what will happen when prices go down when demand decreases while supply increases (e.g. late 70’s to the early 90’s). So the only way to not let those dirty, anti-American foreigners get our money is to not buy their goods. So you have to ban energy imports.

Or you’re a liberal/environmentalist, who believes energy independence is being independent from any energy. Here, there’s a couple of ways of doing it. The most harmful is to tell people to not use energy. It’s anti-freedom and will be costly to enforce (you try being the one to tell people they can’t use their AC in the South during the summer). The second-best option is to make people want to use less energy. Right now, there’s the going green movement, which is basically a way of shaming people into using less energy. It’s working, but it can only go as far as people are willing to believe the guilt. The more powerful motivator is economics, more specifically prices. Using gas prices as an example, during the Hurricane Katrina aftermath, people were alot more willing to carpool and use less gas when gas was at $4.50 a gallon (remember this is 2005). More to the point, it was a sudden increase that forced people to change. Drivers can adapt their habits when the price doubles over a span of many years (prices went from $1 to $2 between 1996 and 2005), but are in much more of a shock when the price increases much faster ($2 to $4 between 2005 and now). When you’re in shock, you’re more willing to make more drastic changes. If you’re in favor of decreasing the use of gasoline, then faster increases are preferable to slower ones (Yes, I’m talking to you, Sen. Obama).

So no matter if you’re Sean Hannity or Nancy Pelosi, there’s one fast and easy solution to energy independence. Make the US an island. That is, if you’re really interested in the idea and not using it as a political point. Somehow, I think that may just very well be the case with “energy independence”.