Will we have electricity when the wind doesn’t blow when we’re old?

Today I drove by the Jeffrey Energy Center in Pottawatomie County north of St. Marys. I noticed the plumes from the coal plants showed the wind was almost still (see below). The two windmills at the Jeffrey Energy Center (left) were not moving at all so they were not generating any of the 1.5 megawatts they might.

What good is wind energy as a major solution to our energy policy, when the wind doesn’t blow some days like today?

Jeffrey Energy Center on Sunday
2160 megawatts from coal, 1.5 megawatts from wind

An article in the Arizona Republic last week said experts fear future power outages — demand rising, but generation, distribution not increasing.

Five years after the worst blackout in North American history, the country’s largest power providers say the problems that turned out the lights on 50 million people have largely been resolved, but they fear that larger, systemic issues could soon lead to even bigger outages.

Excess capacity in the system is shrinking and construction, as well as plans for new plants, has slowed as costs to build and operate them have soared.

At the same time, it is estimated that electricity use will increase 29 percent by 2030 - much of it driven by residential growth, according to a government report issued in June. …

Gov. Sebelius’ energy policy is focused on promoting wind power and killing coal power. But is this wise? What will the consequences be on days the wind doesn’t blow?

Will Gov. Sebelius’ energy policy force us back to the 1930s? Many on Kansas farms in the 1930s only had electricity from wind energy. On days when the wind did not blow, power was not available. Radios went dead when there was no wind. (For those that don’t know, TV didn’t exist in the 1930s.)

The Arizona Republic article warned about the lead time for new plant construction, which Gov. Sebelius doesn’t seem to understand:

Yet infrastructure projects take a lot of time. [American Electric Power] announced a plan for a transmission line in West Virginia and Virginia in 1990 that was not finished until last year, due mostly to the regulatory approval process.

Power plants are an even bigger problem, Morris said, particularly for coal and nuclear power. In Kansas, for example, Gov. Kathleen Sebelius has blocked plans for two coal-fired power plants.

We are FAILING to build adequate infrastructure in Kansas and in the U.S.:

But even as Americans demand more power to feed flat-screen televisions, video games, surround-sound systems and appliances, there is broad opposition to infrastructure that experts say is needed, and the costs are only going up.

Construction of coal-fired generating plants has almost stopped and new nuclear plants are years away, if they are approved at all …

If we don’t change course soon, we likely will pay the price, as warned in the article, by power black-outs or brown-outs in future years. These problems may hit many of us in our golden years, and could easily affect quality of life when we don’t have electricity for heating or cooling, or for electronic entertainment devices — or for medical devices. With the lack of adequate planning and attention to infrastructure, we’ll spend our golden years with the same unpredictable power Kansas farms had in the 1930s. Thank you, Gov. Sebelius.

The Pickens Plan.

I have heard the T. Boone Pickens TV commercials and radio ads and they didn’t make any sense to me. In the brief commercials Pickens was mixing wind energy for electrical power generation with oil energy needed for transportation. I didn’t understand the connection in what Pickens said:

America’s blessed with one of the best wind corridors in the world. Using private investment and technology that already exists, we can supply 20% of our electricity needs, freeing us to build a bridge to domestic alternative fuels for transportation and break the stranglehold of foreign oil. I’m T. Boon Pickens. This plan will work, but it needs your help. Join me. We can take back our energy future.

So what is the Pickens’ Plan? His web site shows a 10 minute “Pickens Plan” video with some additional details.

Pickens explains the rapid growth in dependence on foreign oil, from 24% in 1970 to nearly 70% today. This is a huge problem.

Pickens explains that the 70% of oil from foreign imports is draining $700 billion from our economy each year. This is a huge problem.

Next Pickens shows that about 50% of our electrical energy is from coal and 22% is from natural gas. Pickens plan is to replace the 22% of natural gas used for power generation with wind.

Pickens would take the natural gas, which would have been used for generation of electricity, and use that for transportation. Pickens’ plan would reduce the need for foreign oil imports by 38%, saving about $300 billion a year. This would be a great improvement.

I have no problem with Pickens’s Plan to reduce foreign imports and use natural gas in transportation. BUT THIS IS NOT A COMPREHENSIVE ENERGY PLAN!

Pickens’ Plan does nothing to address the growing energy needs of the U.S. that will increase by 29% by 2030, according to the Arizona Republic article. Pickens’ Plan does nothing to reduce the likelihood of future power brown-outs and black-outs. The “pie” in Pickens’ diagram above is growing, even if the percentages remained constant.

The political left uses regulations to kill all sorts of power resources, which will eventually strangle the U.S. economy:

• We can’t use hydroelectric power (remember the snail darter?).
• We can’t use nuclear power (there have been no new nuclear power plants in the U.S. for nearly three decades).
• We can’t drill for oil.
• Now regulations will kill coal power plants (Sebelius’ appointee Roderick Bremby used new regulations to kill power plants in Kansas).

Wind is all that the left will let us have for power generation?

Unless we all want to lower our standard of living, and use far less electricity for everything — including less power for computers and the Internet — we had better get more economists and engineers working on the energy problem than politicians. If we don’t, we’ll likely have a lower quality of life in our golden years.

• Wind won’t solve energy crisis, Russell Mesler, emeritus KU professor of chemical and petroleum engineering, Lawrence Journal-World, Aug 2, 2008.
• Loss of wind causes Texas power grid emergency, Reuters, Feb 27, 2008.

Tags: coal power, Energy Policy, Kathleen Sebelius, Pickens' Plan, T. Boone Pickens, wind energy