Next Generation Energy

The technology is ready, but the (conservative) politicians aren't. When the Bush administration and uberconservative billionaire oilman T. Boone Pickens agree that wind can be 20% of US electricity supply, you'd think conservative politicians would jump on board. You'd be wrong.

This year, Bush Department of Energy released the most detailed and credible report on wind in a decade, "20% Wind Energy by 2030: Increasing Wind Energy's Contribution to U.S. Electricity Supply," which concluded:

• Annual installations need to increase by only a factor of three from current levels by 2018.


• Costs of integrating intermittent wind power into the grid are less than 0.5 cents per kWh.


• No material constraints currently exist..


• This would require 300,000 MW of wind, delivering electricity for about 6 to 8.5 cents per kilowatt hour, unsubsidized (i.e. no federal tax credit) and including the cost of transmission to access existing power lines within 500 miles.


• The 20% Wind Scenario could require an incremental investment of less than 0.06 cent (6 one-hundredths of 1 cent) per kilowatt-hour of total generation by 2030, or roughly 50 cents per month per household.

Pickens told me in a recent interview we could get to 20% wind by 2020 with aggressive government action:

"The government's going to have to provide corridors to transmit the wind energy to the east and west coast... Second you need to put a 10-year production tax credit."

The problem is that the conservative politician Pickens supports (to the tune of $100,000 last year) have spent most of the past year blocking even a one-year extension of the tax credit. In the past year, McCain missed eight straight votes on renewable tax credits; his spokesman made clear he would've voted against the tax credits had he bothered to show up. In response to a question from Grist on wind and solar, McCain, who supports huge subsidies for the mature nuclear industry, said (apparently with a straight face):

I'm not one who believes that we need to subsidize things. The wind industry is doing fine, the solar industry is doing fine. In the '70s, we gave too many subsidies and too much help, and we had substandard products sold to the American people, which then made them disenchanted with solar for a long time.

McCain said last year of wind and other renewables "The truly clean technologies don't work". After meeting with Pickens this year, McCain said that Pickens was wrong about wind's potential, that renewables simply can't meet much of the projected demand.

It is no exaggeration to say that conservatives -- led by their intellectuals -- hate government programs to promote renewables. In a recent column, George Will wrote:

Obama recently said he would "require that 10 percent of our energy comes from renewable sources by the end of my first term -- more than double what we have now." Note the verb "require" and the adjective "renewable."

Will called this "comic" and a "fairy-tale promise."

But back to requiring this or that quota of energy from renewable sources. What will that involve? For conservatives, seeing is believing; for liberals, believing is seeing. Obama seems to believe that if a particular outcome is desirable, one can see how to require it. But how does that work? Details to follow, sometime after noon, Jan. 20, 2009.

Actually, Obama has spelled out the details in his energy plan, but I wouldn't expect Will to bother using Google to find it. In any case, Will has nailed the difference between conservatives and progressives. Conservatives believe that if they haven't seen something happen yet, it can't possibly happen. Will is mocking Obama for wanting an additional 5 percent of total U.S. electricity to come from all forms of new renewable energy in five years. Yet Pickens is certain that 20 percent of all U.S. electricity could come from wind power alone in 10 years.

This conservative myopia dates back to President Reagan, who gutted Jimmy Carter's multibillion-dollar research and development budget for renewables, and ended the tax credits for wind and solar. The sad result is our country is now a bit player in what will probably be one of the biggest job-creating industries of the century, an industry we launched. We had 90 percent of global-installed wind capacity in the 1980s. Today we have one major wind manufacturer, General Electric, with about one-sixth of the market.

Clean energy shouldn't be a partisan issue. But it is. And that means those who who want this country to be a leader in clean energy -- those who want to avoid catastrophic global warming and avoid the worst of peak oil -- need to start becoming single issue voters.