So T. Boone Pickens is now pushing for massive implementation of wind power. Bully. I'm delighted. I strongly recommend watching his video and looking at one of the interview transcripts. Of course, anything from an oilman with his political and business track record deserves a boulder of salt, but I'm willing to give his plan the benefit of the doubt for now. Even if a project meant to repurpose natural gas for use in vehicles is, urm, interesting coming from a guy who is seriously invested in technology for natural gas engines. I must admit his statements that if the Texas power lines aren't made available for his wind plant, he'll just build his own does tickle me no end. But, let's face it, it does sound an awful lot like he wants the government to subsidize the building of many billions of dollars worth of wind turbines while allowing the builders to then keep all the resultant revenue. Not ideal though no worse than is typical for most other kinds of power generation.
If, that is, you only look at megaprojects.
And why is it that that's what most people do?
Why is it taken for granted (outside the west coast, that is) that power generation is a thing to be done by huge corporations and routed through thousands of miles of power lines? Power lines, I might add, whose electrically resistive properties greatly reduce the net power available and whose construction and maintenance eat up yet more resources including, of course, more energy. I'm not even getting into the energy used by stepping power up, then back down again, or the concentration of toxins most power plants become, or half a dozen other factors.
He talks about natural gas. Gives some really nice figures and facts. Well, "natural gas" is pretty much the same as methane. And we all know that methane generation doesn't require a billion dollar facility. All bean jokes aside, one of the first small scale facilities I ever studied the plans for, way back about 1978, was an anerobic methane digester. It worked with late sixties technology and was meant to be about three meters across. That's fifteen feet in American.
And it doesn't take millions to set up your own wind turbine. Used ones are pretty easy to find and really don't cost that much. I've heard and seen very good things about the Whisper, just to mention one. There was a time when just about every farm in America had a wind turbine, if only to run the well. We should get those back, with every farm having at least a few thousand watts of power generated by the clear wind coming off those nicely flat fields. If it were up to me, that would be the first thing the federal government would subsidize. Would cut the cost of farming, too. Put some PV on all the barns and we would really be ahead.
So let me take this chance to say bravo to T. Boone Pickens and his team. I think that the 'Pickens Plan" and all the press and legislative hubbub it will engender could do us a lot of good. If, that is, it doesn't turn into another corn-source biofuels-type fiasco.
But let me also take this chance to ask, if you aren't putting money and time towards some sort of power-generating capacity that you will own your very own self, then why haven't you? It only takes a few dollars to get started and you don't need to own your home to do something. A solar panel to put in your window to charge your batteries. Or replacing some lights with LEDs powered by their own PV. You can do it for the cost of a night out. And you can scale up for a few hundred bucks and significantly cut your energy costs.
There is no reason that we need to sit around and wait for somebody else to get us out of this hole. And every watt of power generation you buy and use is not only one watt less we need to buy oil for, it's that much less money you'll need to spend in coming years.
Me? I'm sitting here with a nice little 3.2 watt panel I'll be putting in one of my windows, and I'm working to get funding in place to have several kilowatts of power put in on the building where I rent my workspace. And a wind turbine. And a buildout of the hydrogen maker now being prototyped by one of my cotenants. Of course, I've also bought, and use, quite a lot of LED lighting. I'm writing by it right now. And all of it is meant to eventually help cut my energy usage down enough to let me live off the grid. Living for now in a basement apartment with windows that are obscured by bushes, I'm not going to be generating any significant power here. But I'm kicking in where I can and investing in equipment as it becomes available.
I strongly recommend that you do the same.
*sigh*
Actually, I had a really sweet PV unit from Gaiam until a fire four years ago trashed my place right after I bought the panel. That piece of kit cost me a bit over two hundred bucks and I never even got to plug it in.
Posted by: RustinHWright | July 10, 2008 at 01:32 AM
There is a public discussion forum about Pickens Energy Plan Called :
www.pickensenergyplan.com
Cheers !
Posted by: scotty | July 10, 2008 at 10:23 PM