And it bears repeating that while T. Boone is claiming using natural gas would reduce our foreign energy dependence, we are importing about 20% of our natural gas NOW. Just changing what it’s used for will not reduce imports–DUH!

Meanwhile we are the Saudi Arabia of coal, that other power-generating fuel that produces fully half of our electricity already, and we have enough coal to last us centuries. As SHOULD be well-known, coal can also be used to make synthetic crude oil at a cost of about $40/barrel.

So why is T. Boone not advocating switching over some of our coal usage to power generation and syncrude conversion, which would actually reduce our combined national oil/natural gas imports through direct substitution?

Well, T. Boone doesn’t have billions of dollars invested in coal production and coal distribution. He does however have billions invested in natural gas and natural gas distribution and a major wind farm.

It’s tough to paint a much clearer picture–T. Boone’s "plan" is to make T. Boone money. As a national plan, it’s a pipe dream.

However, natural gas is much more efficiently used by power plants than by internal combustion engines, so diverting it to power vehicles would be wasteful.  It’d be better to use that natural gas to generate electricity to power plug-in hybrid cars.  Obviously that would require producing lots of plug-in hybrids,  but I’d be more efficient than natural gas powered hybrids.

The problem as I see it is 4 dollar gas and climbing.  What are we going to do about it now.  Not in 2030 or 2020 or even 2013.

Now.   At this rate gasoline is going to be so pricey that it will start shutting down automakers, travel industry, airlines.  By election day gasoline will be 5.50 to 6 dollars per gallon.  Im betting it gets Obama trounced at the polls and it will be the democratic parties fault and not his.

Coincidentally, T. Boone got state law changed on his behalf to set up a teeny-weeny duly and legally established official state water district* entirely under his control, one with full state-backed legal powers of bond issue and eminent domain. Coincidentally, T. Boone’s proposed water pipelines would follow the same route as his proposed electrical transmission lines, now allowable thanks to another little change in state law…arranged by T. Boone.

Conclusion: T. Boone wants to corner the utilities markets of Texas–water, gas, and electric. T. Boone is ALL about T. Boone.

Fact–it’s simply not possible to replace 22% of current U.S. power generation with wind power in anything like the time he proposes, and maybe not at all. Current share of wind power in the US is 0.7% of all generation. T. Boone’s windfarm at full claimed capacity would boost that by 20% or so. To actually replace 22% of American electrical production with wind power would require something on the order of 40 times as many wind generators as currently exist, pretty much blanketing the "wind corridor" of the Great Plains–and would still require keeping at least half of the "replaced" gas generation facilities fully operational  and ready to roll as backup facilitiess to cover those variability problems.

T. Boone is ALL about T. Boone.

[*--size, eight acres, population, TWO. On Picken's ranch, and both residents are his employees. The powers of bonding and eminent domain are exercisable throughout the state. And thanks to the Kelo decision, they can be exercised on behalf of private developers--such as T. Boone.]

When you visit his site on Obama dot com you get the full run down.

HE will fix everything by 2030.  he is in love with the date 2030.

In the meantime we get to watch gasoline become so outrageous that all the automakers die.  Millions of autoworkers are out of a job.  The travel industry collapses.  Trailer sales drop to nothing.  Winnebago goes belly up. 100’s of thousands of gas stations go out of business.  Mechanics, too many to count are on welfare lines.

 
I thought we were in Iraq for oil.  Damnit.  Wheres my oil at???

In addition to the wind farm, Mesa plans a 750-megawatt coal-fired plant to supply energy when the wind isn’t blowing and a 600-megawatt natural gas-fired plant to handle peak loads.

There’s a clear acknowledgment of (and plan for) wind’s intermittent nature.  It’s actually a pretty impressive plan, though I’m not sold on the natural gas-powered transportation aspects.

I’m a big fan of wind farms, but the glaring flaw in this particular plan is that wind is a highly variable power source, whereas natural gas is not, and you cannot produce wind on demand. Peak wind generation is generally at night, not afternoon/evening during peak load. You can’t whistle up the wind, or accurately predict the load provided.

As I’ve repeatedly pointed out, there is currently no way for power producers to store excess power generation, nor do we have the  grid infrastructure required to push stored energy back into the grid at peak load. Peak is peak, and full capacity means FULL capacity. Picken’s plan has no provision for expanding grid capacity and infrastructure–it’s a straight substitution deal for existing power generation, and by the nature of that substitute would actually make the grid less reliable, particularly during peak load periods.

So it would in theory provide more fuel (natural gas) for vehicles, but only at a cost of making electrical supply less reliable. Nor would that necessarily lower "dollar exports" for imported fuel, as we import about 18-19% of our natural gas consumption NOW. Placing added demand on LPG while reducing oil demand would simply be price-swapping unless we could somehow eliminate the import factor. His plan relies on a lower fuel cost for natural gas than for oil, but prices are fungible.

And to the extent that electricity moves into the transportation market in the form of plug-in hybrids and vehicles, that will be placing added demand on the grid as well.

As I said, there’s some points to consider in Picken’s plan, but it is certainly no panacaea and it ignores some uncomfortable realities. First task for us is to increase grid capacity and infrastructure so as to enable electrical new energy and alt-energy to actually be distributed if and when it’s produced. Second is to diversify transportation energy sources, and once again that means the capacity and infrastructure to distribute them. And third is to generate more portable fuel domestically (oil, LPG, whatever including electricity) to reduce reliance on imports. Gotta do all three or at best we’re just applying Bandaids® and urinating into the prevailing breeze.

I agree.