T. Boone Pickens, oilman and swiftboat vet funder, in the WSJ:
How will we do it? We’ll start with wind power. Wind is 100% domestic, it is 100% renewable and it is 100% clean. Did you know that the midsection of this country, that stretch of land that starts in West Texas and reaches all the way up to the border with Canada, is called the “Saudi Arabia of the Wind”? It gets that name because we have the greatest wind reserves in the world. In 2008, the Department of Energy issued a study that stated that the U.S. has the capacity to generate 20% of its electricity supply from wind by 2030. I think we can do this or even more, but we must do it quicker.
My plan calls for taking the energy generated by wind and using it to replace a significant percentage of the natural gas that is now being used to fuel our power plants. Today, natural gas accounts for about 22% of our electricity generation in the U.S. We can use new wind capacity to free up the natural gas for use as a transportation fuel. That would displace more than one-third of our foreign oil imports. Natural gas is the only domestic energy of size that can be used to replace oil used for transportation, and it is abundant in the U.S. It is cheap and it is clean. With eight million natural-gas-powered vehicles on the road world-wide, the technology already exists to rapidly build out fleets of trucks, buses and even cars using natural gas as a fuel. Of these eight million vehicles, the U.S. has a paltry 150,000 right now. We can and should do so much more to build our fleet of natural-gas-powered vehicles.
Now T. Boone has his own motives, as we have discussed before (although I can not find the post- maybe it is one I drafted and discarded- maybe I just linked it to Tim hoping he would write about it), as he has invested heavily in wind power, but it doesn’t hurt that someone is pushing a plan that involves something more than drilling for oil. I forget where I saw it, but someone noted that the petroleum-centric plans being currently offered (MORE DRILLING! MORE DRILLING!) are very much like a heroin addict realizing he has a problem and coming to the conclusion that the solution is more heroin.
I think that one thing that is interesting about this whole debate (what little we have had) is that at least one portion of our energy plan for the future must involve re-thinking how we zone and build our communities and a need for reliable and usable public transportation, and other than Matt Yglesias and Atrios I never see anyone talking about that. We need some serious changes in our energy and transportation policies, and we need them now.
Of course, I know I am failing miserably as a blogger when I bring this subject up, because I am supposed to be disowning Obama for his FISA vote. Sadly, I think the fact that McCain, on top of any number of issues, is wrong about this, is more important. If we elect McCain, we will get more of the same. The price of all of our food, all of our goods, all of our transportation strikes me as a touch more important than Obama voting against a bill that was going to pass anyway and that he had no control over and that could not even be successfully filibustered.
*** Update ***
I should probably add that there is also significant upside to this being raised by Pickens, as he is not a DFH. As such, the media will probably notice his plan.
Apsaras
It’s just wierd hearing someone talk about our Wind Reserves. Do we have a Strategic Wind Reserve? Is it kept in the Federal Wind Reserve Bank?
Alex
Well, the problem is that we can burn natural gas at quite high efficiency (say, 60%) in electricity generating plants, but using it as a transportation fuel would not be so effective (if it were as good as gasoline, 25%). More wind power is a fantastic idea (though it seems…weird…to refer to unharnessed wind as “reserves”), but we’d be far, far better off figuring out how to make better electric cars, which could then use the grid power from wind, natural gas, coal, whatever.
linda
i happened to catch him on msnbc yesterday morning as he began his rollout. frankly, even knowing his duplicitous motivations, i think this is nothing but good. he’s someone who has credibility with the vast reservoir of deniers out there who need to be beaten over the head with the message that peak oil is real and it’s here.
so anything that gets this conversation going on a national level, i enthusiastically welcome.
khead
It’s not enough.
New-kuh-lur. Can you say it with me class? I knew you could.
Why would I want to power my car with natural gas when I could plug it into the outlet in the garage wall instead?
T Boone should just spend another 100 mil or so on OSU sports and hang out in the stands with sorority girls.
cleek
ideological purity is the most important thing ever.
90% good is just as bad as 90% bad
wingnuts to iraq
the sad thing re: mass transit and the such is seeing old pictures of your town… Back in the 1930s here in Denver there was an extensive street car system… yet some genius along the way ripped it all up.
I believe this same pattern is in many other cities. Even my tiny home town in Ohio used to have a rail car up the main drag, connecting it to other cities even.
If we could build this crap back almost 100 years ago, I’m pretty sure we could do it now.
DannyNoonan
Yup, our society is built around cheap gas. It’s why we have suburbs, McMansions and food shipped cheaply from far, far away. If oil really does crack $300 – or crap, even $500 – in the next few years we’re all going to be doing some serious subsistence farming. Get your beet seeds now.
Blue Raven
TBP is talking an interesting amount of sense here. I just can’t shake the knowledge he’s also very busy buying up access to large aquifers in the hope that someday, somewhere, some city’s going to want access and he’ll be right there to rent it to them.
Andrew
Using natural gas for transport really isn’t a good idea. The wind power is a good idea. The ideal solution is a combination of nuclear, wind, solar, and solar thermal plants generating cheap electricity. Once you get cheap electricity you can move most people to electric and electric/diesel hybrid cars.
demkat620
Did T. Boone just Swift Boat the oil companies?
I think he did.
Piled high, Deep
With you 100% on the need for refining out transportation infrastructure- There’s lots of cheap ways to get around, it’s just that it isn’t safe or legal to use them in 90% of the country.
I like the idea of a ‘low speed’ transportation grid, i.e. a network of roads where you could ride a bike, moped, or even a golf cart and get where you need to go without worrying about some j-a running you and your kids down. Could be a simple as re-designation of some back streets for low speed use only and putting in a few simple paths or overpasses, and obviously, these should be not be associated with roads that carry a lot of high-speed auto traffic.
BobK
>> I never see anyone talking about that
James Kuntsler ( “The Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle”) has been beating that drum for several years now…
nightjar
I think it’s great/ What better to have a greedy self-serving republican convince the rest of the greedy self serving republicans there’s MONEY blowin’ the wind, and hence, maybe other alternative fuels. If somebody doesn’t get the message thru fairly soon, the oil junkies will take us all down to fighting over the very last drop of crude.
JGabriel
John Cole:
That’s a fight we’ll have to continue – under an Obama administration, one hopes. We lost this round, but we’ll never be able to win it under a McCain or Republican presidency. Keep in mind that the Church commission was founded and issued its reports on executive branch communications abuses well after Nixon left office.
In the meantime, Obama remains our best hope for sanity in the next presidential administration. The FISA vote was a disappointment, but, given everything else the R’s have screwed up, Obama is still miles and miles better than McCain.
.
Cris
I’ve heard a couple of objections to wind-generated electricity, and I swear I’m not distorting these too badly:
1. They create wind currents harmful to raptors!
2. All those windmills are so ugly!
To number one, I say, yes that is a serious concern, but (1) I’d think we could reduce the impact through better design, and (2) can we have a little perspective on relative impacts? Like, compare it to coal? (I have a similar pair of reactions to the harmful effect of dams on salmon.) Wildlife conservation is a top concern to me, but I hate how my environmentalist allies so often want to reject solutions that are far better than what we have because they’re not perfect.
To number two, I say, they’re no more ugly than oil derricks and they’re a far sight nicer than the smoke stack coming from a coal-fired plant. But then, I think they look kind of cool.
Carnacki
I heard him on NPR (Nice rePublican Radio) getting a sloppy blow job interview from the reporter talking about this yesterday. So you’re right the media is noticing.
Warren Terra
A couple of people have already pointed out that the “Natural Gas In Cars” notion isn’t all that hot. I’m not terribly well-informed on the subject, but I’ll point out that Matt Yglesias wrote a whole post on the subject earlier today, and even though he’s no expert either I’m guessing if there is a reasonable case to be made it’ll be in the comments there.
I do think that alternative energy sources (wind, solar, tidal, cellulosic ethanol, not grain ethanol) should be aggressively pursued, and I’m glad Pickens is pushing one of these. And on a more practical political level: Obama is also pushing alternative energy sources … and McCain is working against subsidies for wind and solar development.
Keith
I read an article somewhere on the wind project being the political grease to what he’s really after – water – and has some neighbors quite irate about it. Unfortunately, all I can find is this.
b-psycho
Hell, T Boone’s commercials are better than McCain’s, I’ll say that much…
john b
there are SO MANY more people who talk about this.
LanceThruster
I heard Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) on KTLK radio talk about the same things with the same passion (US Southwest is the Saudi Arabia of solar power). All it needs is a dedicated effort to use many existing technologies; certainly the cost effectiveness equation is improving. As the saying goes, solar power will become feasable when utility companies figure out how to meter the sun.
Is methane a low power output fuel? Why aren’t we running more things off the fumes from our poop? Why can small scale power sources be used to distill hydrogen? If we ship oil the distances we do, why can’t hydrogen be generated using the cheap power of the region (solar, wind, geothermal) and shipped to wher it’s needed?
Watch the doc “Who Killed the Electric Car?” to see some of the answers.
Cris
I totally agree. And unfortunately, that’s an extraordinarily hard problem to address because our sprawled-out, automobile-oriented communities are already built. Un-building and un-sprawling our existing infrastructure isn’t really something we can do in the short or medium term (excepting the Pol Pot school of governance).
srv
T. Boone’s gas ideas are out there with Dick and his hydrogen cars. Never going to happen.
If you think oil has peaked, you missed that natural gas peaked earlier. Read Julian Darley.
Short of the US building a couple dozen LNG terminals, gas will decline.
crack
From the interviews I’ve seen him in Pickens has said that he’s fine with plug-in hybrids, just that they are not a reality right now and that the assist engine should be natural gas. He’s also looking into solar as a future option, but feels that wind is much more viable currently and there is plenty of wind power left to use. He isn’t anti-solar, just thinks its not quite as far along as wind. He’s also said he thinks conservation is part of the puzzle.
He isn’t recommending nuclear or coal, hell he’s even talking about biogas replacing some of the natural gas.
jnfr
We certainly do have a Strategic Wind Reserve in the US, and if you lived on the Colorado plains like I do, you’d know exactly where it is – it roars through my back yard more often than not.
re: Wind and birds. I have a friend who works in wind energy up in British Columbia, and he has to fight this argument every time he discusses wind power. Turbines kill birds at a much lower rate than cars or office buildings or many other modern contrivances. And global warming or other types of pollution are very harmful to birds and other animals as well.
Of course you shouldn’t site them in a migration corridor but even the stupidest siting of turbines – such as the ones in Altamont Pass – using old design turbines, kills approx. one bird per turbine every 30-35 years. If you have a cat that wanders freely, I guarantee your cat is killing far more birds than that. Modern wind farms have nearly zero wind kill rates.
Flappy McScrotum
This is one area where I could never really understand the conservative mindset. Whenever the idea of energy conservation or wind/solar power comes up on a conservative blog or website it’s complete ridiculed. Isn’t that something that a good business-minded conservative should be embracing? If spending an extra $10 on a CFL saves you $50 in electric bills shouldn’t you like that? If spending money now on windmills can save us a boatload of money down the road why not do it? Why is it so important we stick to oil based energy and not explore others?
Some people like to joke around that the entire Conservative philosophy is based on pissing off liberals. On this issue it really does seem that way.
LanceThruster
Good point. I thought the push to block wind turbines off Martha’s Vineyard was fodder for the GOP because it made rich liberals look like a bunch of NIMBY’s. I think the turbines have an almost surreal beauty to them.
cyntax
The significance (and the irony of that significance) can’t be overrated. But hey, whatever it takes to get more exposure for the idea.
montysano
Balloon Juice comments: where cynicism is elevated to an art form.
Zifnab
Remember when people had to pay money to advertise? Nice to know T. Boone can just show up and hawk his shtick on the public dime via NPR.
I’m all for Wind Farms, don’t get me wrong. I just wish someone other than him was turning a buck off of it.
Still, this sort of greed is at least marginally more productive than “Let’s Invade Iran for one more shot of the black stuff!” that we’ve been putting up with.
LongHairedWeirdo
One other thing to keep in mind about “drill more!” as a solution.
Do you really think that the oil companies are going to drill enough to bring supplies up so high that they bring oil prices down to levels where their profits aren’t as good? That’s the same reason that refinery capacity is stagnant. More capacity isn’t as good for profits.
A better analogy is a heroin addict deciding that his pusher needs to have access to more opium poppies, because everyone knows that if there’s more raw material, the price of the finished product *always* goes down.
montysano
You’d think so, wouldn’t you. Well, you would be wrong. Rush laid it all out yesterday:
Shorter wingnuts: Conservation is for pussies.
The Other Steve
I question his claims about natural gas being plentiful. It has not shown up on my heating bill as such.
Otherwise, it’s about time conservatives got on board the gravy train of alternative energy.
montysano
They won’t do it because they can’t do it. We don’t have that much oil. We have a small amount of actual oil, and a large amount of oil shale and oil sand, i.e. dirt, from which oil must be extracted. It’s a dirty, expensive process, and is an environmental nightmare.
Peak Oil is about easy oil and hard oil. We’ve used up the easy half, the stuff that you suck out with a straw, and now we’re left with the dregs.
Kevin
Well, Rush is the guy who said that the only way he’d ever go to a museum is if they gave him a golf cart to drive around it in.
Libby Spencer
Well knock me over with a feather. I never thought I’d see the day I’d be agreeing with T. Boone, much less promoting one of his projects but I don’t care what his motives are, he’s right about this one. I shopped it around today too.
I also happen to think the wind mills are actually quite attractive. Not as cute as the Dutch ones but still I like the look of the big propellers.
As for the FISA thing. Just fuck. We knew it was going to happen. Obama sucks for helping it happen. We’ll of course still vote for him but all the other idiot Dems who sold out need to be kicked out and replaced with better Dems.
But I’m glad it’s over in a way. I was getting sick of talking about it.
OriGuy
I heard one of Pickens’ commercials today on KGRN, the liberal talk station in San Francisco.
Cris
I find the Appeal to motive (ad hominem circumstantial) to be really problematic. Yes, it’s technically a fallacy, but it’s often relevant. At the very least, it should alert us to more carefully consider the arguments.
But in this case, I suspect he’s not just advocating a position to improve his investment, he invested because he believes in the same arguments he’s making.
Face
Aside from the carcasses of the thousands of dead birds.
Jim
The earlier comment about the “Saudi Arabia of solar power” rings true to me. I’m no scientist, so I don’t have a good handle on what it will take to make solar power efficient from an energy and economic standpoint, but as I spend summers here with all this blasted sunshine, I can’t help but believe solar can play a huge role in the future as long as there is focus put on it. I keep hearing Kudlow rant about “DRILL DRILL DRILL” while saying we can also do alternative energy. Apparently he thinks there is an infinite source of funds to develop energy. In my own ignorant view, it strikes me that money spent on drilling offshore and in Alaska is money that won’t be spent on alternatives.
Brachiator
The current issue of the LA Times has a particularly stupid column about Pickens’ plan (demonstrating again why newspapers are in decline), T. Boone Pickens could gain from his energy plan, but so might we
Columnist David Lazarus has a few good questions about the plan (e.g. the costs of converting vehicles to run on compressed natural gas), but then negates everything by admitting that even though he is a supposedly powerful pundit for a mighty well-known newspaper,
The rest is the kind of dreary speculation you can get almost anywhere. At least he notes that Pickens has a site where you can get some info straight from the horse’s, uh, web page.
Arguing with signposts
“Wind Reserves”? You can’t “reserve” the wind. It’s like saying we have great “tornado reserves.”
I’ll give him this: at least he’s talking seriously about an alternative, although I disagree that natural gas is all that and more.
calipygian
T Boone Pickens is a peak oiler:
He’s CRAAAAAAZY, CRAAAAAAZY I tells ya.
Alex
I want to point out that even if his natural gas in cars idea is crazy, his commercial is actually quite good. Introducing himself as an oil man and then telling us about how oil is not going to work and showing lots of windfarm pictures is only going to influence people in the right direction. Bully for him on that.
Cris
First, see jnfr’s comment re: Wind and birds..
Second, I doubt “100% clean” is supposed to mean “0% impact.” The word “clean” typically refers to pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.
JL
This is T Boone Pickens in the NY Times in July of 2000
So does his becoming a wind guy indicate that he wants Obama to win?
Davebo
I’m all good with more nuclear power, but don’t kid yourself into thinking it’s cheaper.
Xenos
Pickens rather famously observed, in 2004, that he had made as much money during the first W term than he had made in his entire career to that point. So he had good motivation to support the Swift Boaters. Now, like Michael Corleone, he wants to go legit and make a killing at the same time.
At this point we might as well root for him.
Cris
Clearly Pickens hates Vietnam vets.
PeterJ
About birds and wind turbines.
While the Kennedys don’t want them in their backyard, there are others that are more than happy to have them.
ThymeZone
Ah, so this is why there are no birds in the Netherlands.
Oh, wait.
PaminBB
I was certainly caught by surprise when I saw the commercial, and I don’t doubt that ole T. Boone stands to make money, but I’m generally impressed by what I’ve seen. However, I was wondering about reports not too long ago that he went on the record saying that he will not support any Swift Boat-type projects this cycle. I’m wondering just how strongly he supports McCain.
Cris
Less Louis Brooks, more Louise Brooks, please
John Cole
That is $77,000 a month, on top of whatever he earns on his ranch. That is not shabby.
Turbulence
Why can small scale power sources be used to distill hydrogen?
Because hydrogen is a really really bad way of storing energy. Hydrogen makes most metals brittle and weakens them over time. It is so light that the only practical way to deal with it is to store it in vessels at tremendous pressure, further compounding the danger. You really don’t want to drive a car that contains a 3000 pound steel hydrogen tank.
US Southwest is the Saudi Arabia of solar power
The problem with this is that electricity has different transportation costs than oil. When you extract oil from Saudi Arabia, you can put it on a ship and transport it anywhere. Transporting oil by ship for thousands of miles costs shockingly little in terms of energy expenditure. Ocean shipping is really really energy efficient. In contrast, if you’re shipping electricity large distances, you will lose a decent fraction of that energy due to transport losses. At 30,000 volts, even very small parasitic resistances can hurt you. There is a reason why we generally don’t ship electricity over thousands of miles.
Also, solar energy isn’t easy to store. Battery technology doesn’t really scale, and we need electricity at night too.
Don’t get me wrong: I love me some renewable energy. But the southwest can’t be the whole answer. The transport losses might be alleviated by using space based mirrors to focus lots of sunlight on special collectors outside the southwest, but death rays are a little terrifying.
HyperIon
when i told my repub brother-in-law (wealthy but cheap) that he could save money by replacing all the incandescent bulbs in his garage with compact fluorescents, his reply was: “why would i want to do that?”
and one or two windmills are cute but those farms are pretty ugly.
finally, TBP reminds me of a cross between Ross Perot and Mr. Burns.
Xenos
Rush’s idea of a shining city on a hill would be an enormous, illuminated phallus.
SteveIL
What is it about lefties and their love of public transportation? The one great thing about living in the suburbs of Chicago is that I’m not under the thumb of corrupt city politicians, 99% of them being Democrats. It also means I’m not beholden to some kind of damned public transportation timetable in order to go anywhere a few miles away. Are our leftist liberal overlords planning on doing this in rural areas as well, or will these same liberals steal the land from the private owners in order to overpopulate already overpopulated cities?
SpotWeld
Is SteveL a parody? I really can’t tell.
Incertus
I swear, for a group of people who acts so fucking tough all the time, y’all are some of the whiniest crybabies I’ve ever come across. I don’t care if you keep driving your Humscalade–I just want it to cost you what it should, which is about eight bucks a gallon to fill it up. I’ll be happy to wave at you from the maglev train while you’re begging for the cash to fill your tank.
Bill Arnold
when i told my repub brother-in-law (wealthy but cheap) that he could save money by replacing all the incandescent bulbs in his garage with compact fluorescents, his reply was: why would i want to do that?
Home Depot sells a “150 Watt” equivalent compact florescent. It is noticeably brighter than a 100 watt incandescent, uses about 40 watts, and lasts a very long time.
My folks put them in their reading lights, because they were bright, and not as hot.
ArtV
Anyone that thinks nuclear power is the answer needs to read this.
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/06/02/nuclear_power_price/index.html
ThymeZone
Huh? I’m sitting in the shadow of a nuclear power plant that is part of a grid that produces and sells power over distances of … wait for it …. thousands of miles.
Wikipedia.
{ voice of Hank Hill } I tell you what, for what I’m getting paid to do fact checking around here, it damned sure ain’t enough.
AnneLaurie
Un-building and un-sprawling our existing infrastructure isn’t really something we can do in the short or medium term (excepting the Pol Pot school of governance).
I have seen many discussions about Peak Oil and the ensuing need for re-thinking / re-designing our public spaces on DFH blogs, but one word I haven’t seen is jitneys. For most of the “developments” or “planned communities” built in America post-WWII, it’s never going to be cost-effective to run buses or trolleys often enough or widely enough to get people where they need to go. And too often, the people who need door-to-door, or at least block-to-block, transportation the most — small children & their caretakers, the elderly, the disabled — are the ones least able to afford it. On the other hand, if 5 or 10 households (one street, one condo/apartment building) can run a single multi-passenger minivan or microbus jointly, it’s much more cost-effective to plan a couple trips every morning to the nearest bus/train station for the commuters, another swing to drop the kids at school and the wrinklies at the senior center, and then reverse the process again in the afternoon/evening. Add maybe a weekly or twice-weekly excursion to The Local Shopping District (whether that’s an urban street or a suburban/rural strip mall), and it’s a lot more possible for the average person to survive once one-car-per-citizen-over-16 is no longer possible. Jitneys will, however, require a certain amount of re-jiggering licensing, insurance, and zoning laws… good practice, no doubt, for learning to live on a much more “community” (if not communitarian) level, as we are all going to need to do. And it will provide a use for all the no-longer-viable-as-individual-carpod Excursions and Tahoes and such vehicles now advertising “seven passengers! twelve cupholders!” because “if you’re a Real American, you’re entitled to an 8mpg living room extension for your two-hour commute!” has become… ineffective.
Of course, the Big Secret to surviving the end of cheap oil/natural gas is that there’s going to have to be a lot more regionalism and a lot less one-size-fits-all thinking. Wind power is extremely cost effective in Mr. Pickens’ neighborhood, but not so much in a heavily built-up region with a more demanding terrain. Solar power is a lot more reliable in Arizona than here in New England, but we have 300 years’ worth of hydropower development & expertise that our desert-dwelling neighbors can only dream about. This kind of small-scale, here-but-not-there thinking and planning is anathema to megacorporations and their political servants, which is why waiting for “Somebody” to present us with a magic “Something” (moar drilling! nuk-a-lar! hydrogen cars! gas tax holiday!) to solve the problem has gone beyond futile to suicidal.
Bruce in Norte California
Now we know why “the fence” is being built the length of our southern border, to “dam” the wind in order to keep it in the US of A for our own use and not let it blow across the border into Mexico.
However, we must also look north and somehow prevent those crazy Cannucks from putting up their own fence.
SamFromUtah
Rush laid it all out yesterday:
It does my heart good to hear it. Rush delivered the Senate to the Democrats with his Michael J. Fox sneering; Operation Chaos = FAIL, etc. etc.
Just because he makes a shitload of money to be wrong at 20 million idiots doesn’t mean he isn’t wrong. The paymasters mostly just care that they can charge a lot for ads during his airtime.
Soliton
Back in the early sixties I used to ride electric powered buses in Atlanta, they ran off overhead wires and had fixed routes that could not be easily changed but they were clean, quiet and the acceleration was remarkable.
A solution to the problem of not being able to change routes easily with electric powered buses is the Gyrobus, which was developed to the point of actually carrying paying customers in Switzerland in the late forties. Another advantage to the Gyrobus is that it requires remarkably little infrastructure development.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyrobus
There are a couple of reasons a flywheel is superior to any chemical battery for this sort of application. The first reason is that batteries are limited in the charge current you can feed them, I’m not aware of any battery which will accept a charge at anywhere near as great a rate as it will discharge, this is not true of flywheels, you can dump power into them at a rate only limited by the electronics and the motor/generator driving the flywheel.
The second reason is that all chemical batteries have a strictly limited number of charge/discharge cycles before they wear out.. This also is not true of flywheels, you can spin and despin them an almost infinite number of times.
I’m a firm believer in getting the most bang for the buck and even light rail development is a major infrastructure investment that costs a lot of money and usually takes a lot of time, particularly when you allow for the inevitable legal squabbles over rights of way and so forth.
We need to do as much as we can with our existing infrastructure and something like a Gyrobus could well be a partial solution. We have a lot of roads and not all that many rail lines.. In my mind the answer is not to build a lot more expensive rail lines but rather to make more efficient use of the vast network of already existing roads.
SamFromUtah
Soliton – thanks! I hadn’t heard that flywheel energy storage had ever actually been deployed like that. Cool.
georgia pig
Not quite true. HVDC has been used in the Southwest to ship power to LA for a couple of decades. “Skin effect” causes losses on HVAC transmission lines, so they are somewhat limited in distance. No skin effect with DC. Downside of HVDC is that it has to be stepped up and down at the terminal end, which requires some pretty hefty electronics, i.e., transistors the size of a house, but this is not the technical challenge it used to be. This is an area where the US can be cost-competitive, because it’s high-end high-tech manufacturing (think Boeing) and not mass-produced consumer products (think Samsung).
You’re right, though, about storage of wind or solar generated power.
I always thought a good idea would be to design electric cars with standardized hot-pluggable battery packs that you either charge yourself or swap with provider stations if you’re on the road, kind of like the cylinder exchange for propane You pull off the interstate into a station and swap out when you’re getting low, not much different than refilling your tank. You or the station charges its stock using differential-priced electric power that is priced based on the amount of wind or solar content (tax natural gas). If supercapacitor technology improves to allow faster charging of vehicle batteries, might be able to just go into a station to fill up from a solar or wind power charged megabattery bank. Seems more feasible than hydrogen.
Phoebe
1. I am disappointed to discover that T. Boone is not related to Slim.
2. Another big idea, for the non-midwest:
http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/environmentandenergy/archive/2008/07/08/the-secret-to-wave-power-snakes.aspx
Soliton
SamFromUtah:
That was sixty years ago, I suspect that such a system could be made to work at least a little better today.
To quote Roseanne: We are so broke that the light from broke won’t reach us for ten billion years.
We need some kind of electric powered public transportation system that can be deployed rapidly and at low cost, the Gyrobus is the best idea I have yet seen to fit those criteria.
Herb
Dissent on the heroin metaphor. Junk is too fringe. Crystal meth is more heartland.
So let the metaphor be: “More drilling for oil is like a meth addict building a meth lab in the basement. Doesn’t fight the addiction, just makes it easier to maintain.”
jcricket
I think we need to add in, along with conservation, waste/package reduction and better/more recycling/composting. There’s simply no reason why we can’t incrementally improve things on multiple dimensions along the way to get us where we need to be. I’d bet if we tackled this issue with 1/10th the ferocity we’re forced to argue about creationism in schools or gay marriage, we’d achieve energy independence and a massive reduction in greenhouse gases in under 20 years.
It’s not all or nothing, and there’s no single solution to our problems. There’s a great “slide” in “An Inconvenient Truth” that points out how you “get back” to 1980s (or before) levels of greenhouse gases by doing a little bit.
My employer, for example, just started composting something like 90% of the waste from their cafeteria. It’s a reduction of like 40 tons of waste/year diverted from landfills. Will it solve everything? No. But it’s a start.
If Republicans weren’t so god-damn fucking stuck on standing in the way of literally everything this country and planet needs to move forward, we might actually be ok.
BTW – I’m with you, except on the nuclear. I’m not worried about meltdowns, as I’ve read enough to know we’re light years ahead of where we used to (assuming proper regulation and up-front investment in safety). I just I don’t think we’ll ever reasonably solve the waste storage problem.
jcricket
BTW – I’d also add that we need de-centralized solar power generation along with centralized solar plants. With some innovation, most commercial buildings in metro or suburban areas could be blanketed with solar. Would provide much needed relief to the central power grid, especially if everyone’s connecting to it (new plug-in cars, their houses, etc) more and more.
Brian
The real significance of Pickens’ ad is that he specifically states that more US drilling is not a solution to the crisis. Coming from an extremely conservative lifelong oil man, this undercuts McCain’s entire energy policy.
jcricket
And what evidence do you have that McCain or other Republicans respond to facts and logic the same way a normal person might.
For heaven’s sake, McCain appears to have just recently learned that Social Security works the way it does (i.e. has for the last 70 years).