The New York Times had an article today about how some wind farms are bumping up against the limitations of our Grid system. This is no surprise, because we don't have an electricity superhighway in this country. It's time for one.

Very brief diary to encourage reading of today's New York Times article re: wind turbines produce surges of electricity that overpower the outdated grid. Excerpt after the jump.

A cowboy has ridden out, gathering a posse, to slay the demon of imported oil.  Texas Oilman T Boone Pickens is investing over $50 million in promoting The Pickens' Plan with advertising, a tremendous website, public affairs, and public presentation after presentation. This includes speaking tomorrow at The Big Tent.  

There are serious issues surrounding Pickens' politics that foster questioning not just of T Boone's designs but also thesensibility of inviting T Boone into a new media spaceand whether Pickens will face serious questioning when there.

(Cross posted to The Drexel Dems blog. Something for those of us without Convention Fever!)

One of the aspects of this election that hasn't really penetrated most of the mainstream media narrative is John McCain's complete lack of leadership or coherent position on energy, particularly with regard to renewables and energy independence.  Recently, Tom Friedman noticed that McCain had missed a number of key votes on energy, but it's even worse than Friedman wrote.  As I noted many times before, John McCain didn't even have an energy policy during the Republican primary.  His rhetoric is completely unmatched by his plans and his record.  His lack of a coherent energy plan has been discussed here and elsewhere before, however, so now I'm going to explain in moderate detail McCain's dismal senate record on energy policy.

Let me start out by saying I'm not necessarily pro nuclear energy - I consider myself primarily anti-fossil fuels and I've come to believe over the last year or so that nuclear energy will be key if we want to get rid of coal and other fossil based fuels.  Nuclear energy diaries may be the most contentious ones that are written on this site and since I started to comment in diaries on this topic, I've seen many of the same arguments come up over and over again, so I've decided to start a diary series to attempt to address some of these issues.  

The first one tries to examine whether nuclear energy is really so much more expensive than wind or solar based solutions.  If you're interested in seeing how much electricity produced from an overbudget nuclear plant in Finland, T Boone Pickens' wind farm, or a planned desert solar plant would cost, please read on.

Ok, so I, like so many of us filling out tanks with $4+ gas, have been thinking about ways to address the "energy problem". I really haven't heard anyone with a broad and cohesive plan to really address it yet... all just "baby steps" in my opinion (or it's "DRILL DRILL DRILL"). Nothing that's going to change anything significantly any time soon. But I've had a couple of ideas that I thought might be worthy sharing. So for what its worth, here's my energy plan.

Short n' sweet: In exchange for being hooked to the energy grid, anyone hooked up must also be able to generate and return to the grid, some portion of the power being provided by a renewable energy source such as solar or wind or both.

The details after the jump.

There is a pretty fundamental political mistake being made when it comes to McCain's energy plan and it sounds a lot like this:

You can inflate your tires to the proper levels and that if everybody in America inflated their tires to the proper level we would actually probably save more oil than all the oil we get from John McCain drilling right below his feet there... Wherever he was going to drill.

BARACK OBAMA
August 5th, 2008

A detailed cost comparison of nuclear versus wind energy shows that nuclear energy will soon no longer be cost competitive with wind energy if present trends continue.

While nuclear energy is regarded as one of the cheapest sources of power available -- given the enormous amount of energy released from the splitting of atoms -- and wind is considered relatively expensive, analysis of a number of current projects using publicly available data indicates that wind energy has closed the gap in price per kilowatt.  

I read earlier today a proposal to use the rights of way that currently
(pun intended) carry transmission lines to be used for solar projects.  Which reminded me of the many times I've wondered why we have so much negatively used space in our highway medians.  

I'll explain more after the jump.

We need some robust discussion on Obama's support of some drilling in linkage with the bipartisan work in the Senate by the so-called Gang of Ten.

From Senator Kent Conrad's website here is in the public domain a summary of the bill.

chew on this:

We can lower the amount of greenhouses gases produced by electric power, which now generates 36 percent of our carbon emissions. Emissions will grow dramatically as the demand for electricity increases unless we significantly change the way we produce power through new investments in renewable energy sources and advanced-coal energy production.

Crossposted at MLW

    There has been a lot of talk recently about the "energy crisis". I wonder if this is the same energy crisis we heard about in the 70’s? If it is then that means for over 30 years instead of solving our domestic energy needs, we have ignored them and allowed them to grow. In 1970 we were importing about 24% of the oil we used and the embargo back then threw our economy into a tail-spin, imagine what would happen today when we import about 70%. Rather than using the past 30 plus years to develop new or existing technologies to reduce or break our dependence on oil, we have elected to do something worse than nothing. Instead of our vehicles getting smaller and more fuel efficient during this time they have actually gotten larger.

Al Gore has set a challenge: 100% clean electricity, 100%!

Get us (the US, and eventually, all the globe) off coal.

And, determine to do this within a decade.

People are going to scream that this is impossible. They will be wrong.  This is possible, difficult to do in the timeline perhaps, but absolutely possible.  They are wrong.

Al Gore is now giving a major speech in Washington, setting out an ambitious goal for the USA to produce all of its electricity from carbon-free sources by 2020. While I have not heard the speech yet, I thought I'd comment on the technical feasibility of the plan, and the underlying economics of such an endeavour.

from the Department of Energy's recently published study about bringing wind power to 20% of total generation

The short answer is: while 100% is probably unrealistic, it's not unreasonable to expect to be able to get pretty close to that number (say, in the 50-90% range) in that timeframe, and it is very likely that it makes a LOT of sense economically.

Initially on European Tribune, and also on the Oil Drum. UPDATE: see disclosure below the fold.

Here is the NYT analysis of the speech:
http://www.nytimes.com/...

Former Vice President Al Gore said on Thursday that Americans must abandon fossil fuels within a decade and rely on the sun, the winds and other environmentally friendly sources of electric power, or risk losing their national security as well as their creature comforts.

Mr. Gore called for the kind of concerted national effort that enabled Americans to walk on the moon 39 years ago this month, just eight years after President John F. Kennedy famously embraced that goal.

As President George Bush has steadily rolled back environmental protections – his shocking commitment to open up our beautiful coastlines to offshore drilling is only the latest outrage – the responsibility to protect our environment has fallen to cities, states and many dedicated individuals.

San Francisco is one of the greenest cities in the country today because we did not wait for Washington. We are taking action now to green our environment and our economy from the ground up. But we are making so much progress because we are working with so many talented people.

The SEC is banning traders from playing dirty tricks on taxpayers, at least in one of the legally-sanctioned methods.  Of course taxpayers have to bail out the rich and the idiots who bought the ARMs because our government is corrupt.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission will issue an emergency rule later Tuesday to stop "naked" short selling in major financial firms, including Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the SEC said.

[snip]

The emergency rule would require any person making a short sale in the listed securities to borrow the securities before the short sale is effected and deliver the securities on the settlement date.

The SEC has already proposed rules to curb naked short selling abuses and prevent market price manipulation.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

My italics.

Have you heard? Oilman T Boone Pickens is not only committed to planting the world's largest wind farm in the fertile soil of Texas.  He is not only committed to working to stringing a meaningful electrical grid to move electricity from that wind farm to lush markets for harvesting serious profits.  T Boone has a plan to save America (while making a bundle) and has committed some serious dough to convincing Americans that his plan is the path to a better future.

In something that reminds me of another Texan with charts (Ross Perot), Pickens' $58 million will go a long way, along with a cooperative media, in making sure that people hear about this.

And, as per the discussion after the fold, while there are some tremendous things among what Pickens is saying and pursuing, there are far more missing items, and there are some highly questionable elements.