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How US Government could help T. Boone Pickens energy plan
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Wind Farm
T. Boone Pickens has a plan to develop wind power as a way of boosting renewable energy production and decreasing our dependence on foreign oil. To reduce oil demand, he suggests building cars that run on natural gas.
His main goal is to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, which is a huge cost to our economy. We are spending $700 billion each year to import oil. Compare that to the stimulus checks that the government just sent out for a total cost of $150 billion. That money outflow is like a tax that slows down our economy while producing no benefit.
The problem I see with his plan is that is requires the construction of a large electric distribution system. Wind power is not dependable. When the wind blows it’s great, but doesn’t work when the wind stops. You can compensate for this by distributing the wind farms over a very large area and distributing the power over a very large area. This minimizes the fluctuations in power produced and decreases the percentage of wind power distributed to any single utility. A very large distribution grid for many Giga Watts (GW) of power is going to be very difficult to build and very expensive.
(An alternative to large scale distribution is power storage. Electric storage is very expensive.)
Our government could help facilitate this type of project by making it easier to build the large electric distribution grid. This could be done by helping create right-of-ways for power transmission lines and setting up approval systems that would allow decisions about power line projects to be made in a timely manner. The cost of these projects would be much larger if every decision and approval had to go through many years of litigation by people who file serial legal challenges as a tactic to stop development projects they don’t like.
This is the type of project that the government should become involved in. They are not being asked to put up any of the funding, but for very small cost, could facilitate this project. If Boone Pickens is successful with this project, there will be more follow-on projects funded with private capital so the government could get a lot of renewable energy development for very little government cost.
Another thing the government could do is seed the development of natural gas powered cars. We already have a very large distribution system in this country for natural gas. Natural gas cars the advantage of using a cleaner burning domestically produced fuel to replace imported oil. Given the current financial state of our auto companies, they might need an inducement like a tax credit to finance the manufacture of these cars in this country. There are currently a limited number of stations that sell natural gas for cars. If the government offered a large tax credit for a limited number of American built natural gas cars, that could get the cars produced and cause suppliers to offer natural gas in more locations. (Natural gas cars might also be filled at home.)
Solving the problem of global warming is going to require the building of a huge new renewable energy infrastructure. The government can not possibly build and finance this enormous task by itself with tax dollars. What the government should do is look at its limited tax dollars as seed capital. They should provide incentives to maximize the amount of private investment in renewable energy technology. The government should provide credits to emerging technologies like solar energy. Solar energy costs are coming down as demand grows due to government incentives. The government should provide partial funding (grants) for new technologies like cellulosic ethanol plants.
