Want a Better Way to Power Cars? It's a Breeze
(Page 2 of 3)
Sept. 2, 2008
By Lester R. Brown, Earth Policy Institute
The key to this massive development is the participation of the Texas state government. The state facilitated the construction of transmission lines that link the strong wind resources in west Texas and the Panhandle to major markets — known as "load centers" — in Dallas, Fort Worth and Houston.
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While many residents in some places, such as Cape Cod, Mass., take a NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) view of wind farms, the opposite is true in much of the rest of the country — including the ranch country that extends from Texas north through the Dakotas. There, it's a PIMBY (Put It in My Backyard) perspective. In ranching regions, competition among communities for these wind farms, and the jobs and tax revenues that come with them, is intense. Each wind turbine on a rancher's land typically brings a royalty of $3,000 to $10,000 per year, with no investment on the landowner's part. And the ranchers can continue to graze cattle on the land.
States outside of ranch country are also chiming in on the wind energy trend. California's largest project is a 4,500-megawatt cluster of wind farms in the Tehachapi Mountains in the south that will soon supply a large part of Los Angeles's electricity. Some 30 other states — led by Iowa, Minnesota, Washington and Colorado — now have commercial-scale wind farms.
New wind proposals are popping up everywhere. In July, California-based Clipper Windpower and BP announced a joint venture to build a 5,050-megawatt wind farm in eastern South Dakota. Because this would produce far more electricity than the state needs, the companies plan to build a transmission line across Iowa, feeding the electricity into Illinois and the Midwestern industrial heartland.
In the East, Delaware is planning an offshore wind farm of up to 600 megawatts — enough to meet the residential needs of 40 percent of its residents. To the north, in Maine, a proposal by the governor to develop 3,000 megawatts of wind-generating capacity (more than enough to meet the state's residential electricity needs) passed both houses of the legislature unanimously in April. In the Northwest, Oregon and Washington are turning to wind to complement their hydropower resources.
While most of these developments are in the planning stages, the potential — and the desire for wind energy — is high. That's because wind wins on almost every count. It is carbon-free, cheap, abundant and inexhaustible — and it is ours. No one can embargo the supply, the price never changes, and wind farms can be built in 12 months.
This is why shifting to natural gas to fuel cars, as Pickens recommends, isn't the best move. In contrast to wind-generated electricity, where costs are falling, the price of natural gas is on its way up. Reserves of natural gas, like those of oil, are shrinking. And ironically, as with oil, we import natural gas, sending money abroad for one-sixth of our supply.
