Michael Ivanovich

Thar she blows...the Pickens Plan for Wind Energy
July 15, 2008

Who has a national energy plan that could sustain human civilization (in America) for more than 100,000 years?

In such a time frame, oil and natural gas are not viable answers. Nor is coal.

More than $100 dollars a barrel ago, in 2005, when oil began creeping steadily upward, I wrote for another publication that there's no reason for oil to go back down. I cited factors that have become standard fare today, such as the draws of India and China on the global supplies, unceasing Mideast tensions, refineries at capacity, and escalating demand. At the time, the international benchmark for the "preferred" price of oil was $25, and at $35 per barrel, the writing was on the wall (and in the newspapers, websites, ceilings, floors, and tea leaves).

Basically, the mathematics of "growth without limits" against finite natural resources has caught up now that heavily populated "underdeveloped" nations have developed. Of course, I didn't account for investors running to oil to shelter themselves from the U.S. dollar. No one did.

So, what to do? Nationally, that is.

Are we finally at the crisis that Americans depend upon for taking meaningful action? 

What is meaningful action, anyway? Perhaps we should define our national energy goals before we create a national energy plan. I propose that meaningful action is that we plan for humans to inhabit the Earth until the sun dies, which is for another 5 billion years or so. Or, conservatively, let's plan for another 100,000 years or so -- which isn't even as long as Homo Sapiens have been around (depending on your religious beliefs). I think we, as a people, should be able to plan for that amount of time...heck, if we have to plan for handling waste that lasts that thousands, millions, and hundreds of millions of years, why can't we figure out how to harness an energy source that lasts that long? Why do we create problems that last longer than solutions?

That said, I think that solar and wind power are inevitable choices for primary energy sources, given a 100,000-year perspective...

Two different national-scale plans for renewable energy are now in play. The latest has been fielded by oilman--turned-wind-farmer T. Boone Pickens, who has committed $58 million in marketing money to promote the development of enough wind power to huff and puff and blow the brick house down of the oil industry. 

According to the Pickens Plan, wind farms would be built across the Midwest to generate electricity that replaces natural-gas fired power plants. The natural gas savings would be pumped into cars to replace gasoline, i.e., foreign oil. Along the way, rural America would be revived.

It's definitely a whale of a plan, what kind of whale it is needs to be decided. For example, the natural gas component still has a dependency on a finite natural resource that already is stressed.

The Pickens Plan isn't the first national energy strategy that focuses on renewable energy. Scientific American published, "A Grand Solar Plan," in December 2007. The solar plan called for setting aside vast tracks of land for PV panels, establishing a DC-power distribution backbone, and pumping $420 billion of subsidies into procurements the whole shebang. The result would be 69% of electrical energy and $35% of total energy by 2050. The solar plan article has 688 comments attached to it; among them are readers asking questions and getting answers from the authors. Worth a read on a Sunday morning with a pot of coffee. 

FYI, the authors of the Grand Solar Plan are relevant backgrounds, so their article is compelling. The authors are Ken Zweibel, James Mason and Vasilis Fthenakis. Zweibel is president of PrimeStar Solar in Golden, Colo., and for 15 years was manager of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory's Thin-Film PV Partnership. Mason is director of the Solar Energy Campaign and the Hydrogen Research Institute in Farmingdale, N.Y. Fthenakis is head of the Photovoltaic Environmental Research Center at Brookhaven National Laboratory and is a professor in and director of Columbia University's Center for Life Cycle Analysis.

What do you readers think about either or both of these plans? Do you have a plan of your own? Let's get a dialog started...

Posted by Michael Ivanovich on July 15, 2008 | Comments (1)