Pickens Plan
Billionaire T. Boone Picken's campaign for government subsidies for wind power, advertised in a full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal seems erroneous in several respects. Pickens Plan Bad Policy First, our reliance on imported oil is not a "crisis" unless
we allow it to become one. There are cheaper more effective supplies of
alternative
energy already available, and the high prices we currently
are paying would bring those supplies and technology to consumers were
it not for anti-energy policies
preventing implementation and use of today's alternative resources.
Those policies ought to be changed, rather than executing this
elaborate and expensive build-around. Second, we do not need a single "plan" to transition from oil
to some other fuel or fuels. We need to allow millions, even billions,
of consumers producers to make their own plans, and the transition will
occur naturally. As suggested in the Environment &
Climate News, Pickens should find a copy of Friedrich Hayek's
classic essay, "The Use of Knowledge in Society."
and apply it to the current situation. Pickens Plan Poor Option Pickens plan calls for taxpayers to make massive investments
in wind
power, (which on a large massive scale, can't compete with
other forms of alternative energy such as solar
power) and power lines
(because the wind often blows most in areas where people don't want to
live and work), in order to free up natural gas currently being used to
generate electricity (much of that in new facilities built and being
built to comply with the Clean Air standards, which I guess he thinks
we should just discard), which can then be used to fuel cars and trucks
(increasing the cost per vehicle by $3,500 to $6,000 and reducing a
vehicle's range per tank of fuel by as much as 50 percent, and posing
new safety issues), all to reduce our reliance on oil.
Better Alternatives Maybe it's just me, but why not build clean burning coal
plants, or producing better and more efficient power transmission
lines, (thereby increasing electricity output and reducing the amount
of energy needed to produce the electricity),instead of windmills?
Clean burning coal plants can be built at a fraction of the cost on a
fraction of the land. And solar energy can be implemented with nearly
zero environmental impact, and by upgrading our current power lines to
be more efficient, can all be done at a fraction of the cost and
without invoking eminent domain to steal peoples property and kick
people off their land. If people had their own off grid energy producing systems, we
could then plug in our hybrid cars at night and cut our gasoline
consumption by 70 percent or more, without running natural gas lines to
every gas station and turning our cars and trucks into mobile bombs! It just seems simpler. By now, everyone knows the limitations
of windmills for use in massive nation wide use. Vast areas of land
would have to be covered with windmills, we'd have to rely on the
efficiency and competence of government employee's to maintain and
repair the windmills only to generate a very small fraction of our
energy. Not to mention, the government would have to create yet another
government agency, filled with government employee's recieving
government benefits (paid for with taxpayer dollars) adding to the
already fragil financial economy. Under Pickens plan, intermittency would still be a major problem, so we would still need conventional plants to provide base-load capacity for "spinning reserves."  Subsidy Hound The real reason behind his scheme is very simple. Pickens is looking for subsidies and eminent domain to run the new transmission lines and build windmills on private land, subsidies to build new power lines, and production subsidies to windmill farms operated by big business or the government. Taking the message to the people is one thing. Sticking them with the bill is another. And that’s one potential hitch to his grand plan: While he’s cracking the whip on politicians to change U.S. energy policy, he has to figure out how to crack the chicken-and-egg connundrum that stands in his way. Wind power needs hundreds of billions of dollars in investment
in new transmission networks to make it a
big contributor to the U.S. electricity mix; today it
provides just over 1% of power in the U.S. And converting any sizeable
portion of the U.S. vehicle fleet to run on natural gas also requires a
hefty investment in new transportation infrastructure, like natural gas
filling stations. Adam Smith warned us more than two centuries ago, in "The
Theory of Moral Sentiments," to look out for "the man of
system," who "is apt to be very wise in his own conceit" and imagines
he can "arrange the different members of a great society with as much
ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chessboard. Sorry Mr. Pickens. Americans are tired of being used as pawns
by the greedy, wealthy, powerful, influencial, lobbiest, big business,
Wall Street CEO"s, banking CEO's and the incompetent, corrupt
government officials. We Americans are not chess pieces, and America is
not your chessboard! |