Why federal funding of “wind & solar farms to nowhere” will succeed.

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Reminiscent of Alaska’s infamous bridge to nowhere, Congress stands poised to repeat their spending folly with wind and solar farms… with no transmission lines to urban service areas, and inadequate capacitance needs.

Pelosi, Al Gore, and an army of DNC gullible, are hell bent on forcing the nation to create, in essence, and new national power grid in an unrealistic time frame. And if refusing to allow the oil and gas industry to increase supply vs demand (by allowing additional exploration, leases and drilling) and instead keep gas prices high, they can force a desperate nation into compliance for the impossible. That will be fine with them…. damned be the consequences.

Only one problem… installing the solar panels in the SW deserts, and the wind farms in T-Boone Pickens’ “greatest wind energy potential in the world” – the Great Plains in flyover America – doesn’t get that energy from point A to point Z.

Al Gore’s challenge to be totally weaned off a petroleum or coal based power grid in 10 years is lofty in ideals, but more soaring in rhetoric… nay, BS… than all Obama speeches combined. As Kevin Bullis pointed out in his Technology Review article, “Al Gore’s Inconvenient Plan”,

But in 2006, the most recent year with complete figures, four billion megawatt-hours of electricity were produced in the United States. Eventually, wind, solar, and geothermal power could cover this. But right now, they account for a little more than 1 percent of the total. Going from 1 to 100 percent will require not only building the wind turbines and solar panels and steam turbines for harvesting geothermal energy: it will also require massive new transmission infrastructure for distributing this power, from the deserts or windy plains, where much of this energy can be found, to the coasts, where people actually live. And it will require massive amounts of energy storage, since solar power doesn’t work well at night, and wind power is erratic.

In light of this scale, even some truly ambitious schemes seem like a drop in the bucket. Over the past couple of weeks, T. Boone Pickens, an oil tycoon, has been using some of his billions to run television ads supporting his personal energy plan for the United States. Part of that plan is his project to build what seems to be the biggest wind farm in the country. It would nearly double the amount of wind produced in the state of Texas, the state with by far the most wind power. But that project will only produce 4,000 megawatts of power. (Total electricity generating capacity in the United States is about 1 million megawatts.) And it won’t be cheap. To cover transmission-line costs alone for that and other proposed wind projects, the state of Texas plans to spend about $5 billion.

Needless to say, I’m sure we all realize who will be paying for these new transmission lines. Texans, yes.. and every other state that benefits from these new power grids. But the rest of us will also feel the costs with subsidies and tax credits – revenue lost from the federal piggy banks that Congress will want refilled from taxpayers elsewhere.

Right when you think the “save the planet” types were going to walk hand in hand with DNC leadership into a pollution free sunset, the next predictable battle rolls around. It seems alternative energy isn’t going to please the “greens” either.

So it comes as no surprise to read WSJ’s Review and Outlook piece today, Wind Jammers, which points out not only the obvious transmission problems… but the development of such being thwarted by the enviros themselves.

Only last week, Duke Energy and American Electric Power announced a $1 billion joint venture to build a mere 240 miles of transmission line in Indiana necessary to accommodate new wind farms. Yet the utilities don’t expect to be able to complete the lines for six long years — until 2014, at the earliest, because of the time necessary to obtain regulatory approval and rights-of-way, plus the obligatory lawsuits.

In California, hundreds turned out at the end of July to protest a connection between the solar and geothermal fields of the Imperial Valley to Los Angeles and Orange County. The environmental class is likewise lobbying state commissioners to kill a 150-mile link between San Diego and solar panels because it would entail a 20-mile jaunt through Anza-Borrego state park.

“It’s kind of schizophrenic behavior,” Arnold Schwarzenegger said recently. “They say that we want renewable energy, but we don’t want you to put it anywhere.”

The Guvenator is only now learning of the NIMBY problem? Where was he when, then Governor, Mitt Romney and Ted Kennedy strolled arm in arm to kill the Nantucket wind farm because it would decrease property values?

It doesn’t surprise me that my own backyard is doing the same… despite all our snippy nosed enviromentalists and being home to ELF.

Wind power has also become contentious in oh-so-green Oregon, once people realized that transmission lines would cut through forests. Transmissions lines from a wind project on the Nevada-Idaho border are clogged because of possible effects on the greater sage grouse.

Similar melodramas are playing out in Arizona, the Dakotas, the Carolinas, Tennessee, West Virginia, northern Maine, upstate New York, and elsewhere.

But the enviros may have just met their match… they are now going up against their own power houses… the Al Gores and Nancy Pelosis of the world. And of course, their new darling, former oil man T Boone Pickens.

And why? Money, of course. All are mega-invested in the alternative energy personally. Al Gore’s financial empire spanning the climate change/alternative energy is well known. T-Boone has a pretty good chunk of his own cash in the kitty as well.

Mesa Power, a company Pickens created, is investing about $2 billion in a Texas wind plant that will generate enough electricity to power about 300,000 homes.

He’s also invested some of his $4 billion wealth into efforts to establish natural gas fueling centers in California.

Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, who proposes to get 20 percent of Kansas’ energy from wind by 2020, introduced Pickens in Topeka.

She praised him for his vision and “bold new ideas,” as well as his willingness to put his own money on the line.

Someone ought to let Gov. Sebelius know that T Boone’s a savvy business man… just like Al Gore. He’s not doing this as an act of charity…

Then, of course, there’s Ms. Pelosi… not so unsavvy herself. Last year – well in advance of his current defection from the “big oil” fold publicly – she invested in T Boone’s clean energy corporation, CLNE. From her 2007 House disclosure statement, she purchased stock/assets valued then at $100K-$250K. (see pg 7 of PDF, Clean Energies Fuel Corp)

Estimated values today, per a Yahoo stock item (no longer available on the Yahoo News, but duplicated at DontGoMovement.com,) suggest that Ms. Pelosi may have tripled her investment in just over a year.

UPDATE 8/12/08 2:16 PPM
The initial offering may have been only 22,000 or so shares, but according to a Yahoo news item: Item 8.01. Other Events.

On June 19, 2007, the Company issued a press release announcing that the underwriters of the Company’s initial public offering have elected to exercise in full their option to purchase an additional 1,500,000 shares of the Company’s common stock to cover over-allotments. A copy of the press release is attached as Exhibit 99.1 to this report and is incorporated herein by reference.

This means that Pelosi could have purchased around 20,000 shares at $3.86, or $50,000 to $100,000 worth, which are now worth 300% more than their original value.

Nancy Pelosi says that she is trying to save the planet and prevent global warming, but the reality is that, according to disclosure statements, in May 2007 she invested in T. Boone Picken’s clean energy fuels corp., CLNE, which is the sole sponsor of a proposal in California to funnel $5 billion in state funds and $5 billion in Federal funs to this corporation which will indirectly help them create a giant wind farm in the Texas panhandle.

I can’t vouch for that profit structure. Indeed, with the stock world bouncing up an down like an Obama bobble head, I’m sure that story changes daily. But it’s a real winner to get in low, and promises a healthy future for a product in demand… especially when you have investors with the “power of one” – able to guarantee that healthy future with legislation… not to mention the power to keep the US hostage to high gas prices.

But what is perhaps even more amusing a dichotomy is that CLNE is also heavily invested in liquid natural gas – another serious hot button for the enviros… Wonder how the Speaker feels about that.

What with all the rich and powerful, personally divesting themselves in this future energy grid, the enviros are bound to lose their battles and protests eventually. They may slow the process with lawsuits and civil disobedience. But they will, ultimately, lose.

Unfortunately, so will the rest of us. Unless we can keep producing, or increasing production, of what we use today… oil, natural gas, and coal… our transition to alternative fuels over time may just break the bank of the American economy.

“All of the above” is the only sane energy plan when we are at the mercy of an insane and corrupt Congress.

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Just a final thought…

While I would accuse them of bloviating in the wind on wind power, I would take seriously any reasonable proposal for a solar-thermal energy alternative. It’s safe, reliable (if set up in areas where cloud cover is minimal), cheap and easy to built. NOTE: I’m not talking “high tec” direct conversion of solar to electric via solar-panels, but “low-tec” steam turbine technology using parabolic mirrors to focus the sun’s energy.

Here are just a couple of examples of material I could find rather quickly via Google…

http://www.solardev.com/SEIA-makingelec.php

Ten Questions For SCHOTT About Solar Thermal Electricity Part 2 Of 3

While criticism of other schemes is deserved, criticism of this one is not. It CAN work, …which is probably why Lefties aren’t pushing it.

(No, it won’t work any better for a car than a sail, so please don’t even think of such a silly criticism. We are going to need gasoline to power our cars for some time to come.)

So then, what percentage of Pelosi’s assets are in Pickens’ CLNE? It looks like “not a lot” to me. The sum of her assets is roughly around $30 million (minimum), so CLNE’s paltry $0.5 million is a drop in the bucket.

Her largest stock holding is Apple: between $5 and $2 million. The next is eBay ($0.5 to $1 million).

There are so many big reasons why she shouldn’t be in the Senate, but this isn’t one of them.

Wind power? OK, as long as the wind isn’t blowing (and it doesn’t interfere with Senator Kennedy’s view), but it doesn’t blow 24/7. We have wind farms in Southern California, but I doubt they contribute much the the whole state. Solar power? OK for the Southwest, where you might get sunshine 60% of all the hours in a year, but what about nighttime and long cloudy spells? Yes, we know, batteries. Giant blockhouses full of batteries (just like the phone companies). Most common are lead-acid batteries. Nice ecological disaster waiting there.

#42’s comment about houses being hydrogen bombs was the best laugh I’ve had all day. I wonder if he worries about too many atoms being in one place – could get you an atom bomb.

“#42’s comment about houses being hydrogen bombs was the best laugh I’ve had all day. I wonder if he worries about too many atoms being in one place – could get you an atom bomb.” –ZZMike

These clowns are sooooo dense!

“hydrogen may lead to a series of accident types that can pose a severe threat for property and public safety. Moreover, computational estimation of the dispersion resulting from liquefied hydrogen spills showed that the resulting cloud behaves as a heavy rather than a light gas, remaining in flammable concentrations at low heights above the ground and increasing, therefore, substantially the risk for accidental fires and explosions.” — National Technical University of Athens, School of Chemical Engineering, 15700 Athens, Greece [Science Direct]

“Solar power? OK for the Southwest, where you might get sunshine 60% of all the hours in a year, but what about nighttime and long cloudy spells? Yes, we know, batteries” — ZZMike

Storing electricity is expensive and not very efficient. Heat storage isn’t, AND we know how to do it.

Is ZZMike WitlessDork’s brother? Or maybe Stoner’s sister? It sure sounds like a close relative of theirs.

ZZ Mike,
My beef with Pelosi on this wind farm/water issue is that if fuel prices stay up she profits.. not the degree of profit.
Now, she’s blocking drilling and lower fuel prices blatantly, much to her benefit.
That’s just plain wrong and we’re paying for it.

Lithium Hydride…
http://chemicalland21.com/industrialchem/inorganic/LITHIUM%20HYDRIDE.htm
…and Lithium Hydroxide…
http://chemicalland21.com/industrialchem/inorganic/LITHIUM%20HYDROXIDE%20MONOHYDRATE.htm
…are well know reagents. Mr. Fak couldn’t have “discovered” them, or their properties.

And, they are VERY hazardous: even more so than Hydrogen.
Lithium Hydride
Lithium Hydroxide

Anyone who tells you that’s a solution, to have those substances in everyone’s possession, is either a con artist or a fool.

With Lithium Hydride you now have a compound that can break down to release not only Hydrogen, which is flammable/explosive, but also Lithium, which is also flammable/explosive, and Lithium, unlike Hydrogen, is also HIGHLY TOXIC.

Brilliant solution, …NOT for everyone.

But then, Lefties don’t want EVERYONE to have technology, only themselves. So, if shifting to a hydrogen economy is the way they go, most of us will be forced to give up our cars, and hope the bureaucrats will give us enough public transportation, and have it run on time. Yeah, riiiiiiggggghhhhht!

UPDATE: NewScientist misread the abstract. It isn’t “Zhigang Fak.” It’s Zhigang Zak Fang [Phyllis Diller’s husband?]. There are also some other folks from some other institutions.

OK, Here’s a brief note in which they say their unique mix can store 7% to 8% by weight in H2, which means that 100 pounds of it could store 7 to 8 pounds of H2, which is the equivalent of 21 to 24 pounds of gasoline, which is roughly equal to 4 gallons.

My car has about a 17 gallon capacity, which would mean an equivalent H2 “tank” would have to weigh a minimum of about 400 pounds (empty), not including the weight of whatever containment apparatus was required, which would have to be VERY sturdy, considering a puncture could result in a significant hazardous waste spill.

It would also have to be regenerated/recharged, and that’s not addressed in sufficient detail in the note, but it would be much more complicated than a standard fill-up. [Their graph is confusing, but it looks like it has to be heated in order to “regenerate” it, and it looks like it requires high temps (up to 200 deg centagrade which is 392 deg fahrenheit) for extended time periods (2 hours and 20 minutes) – and they don’t give sample size, so it might be small, in which case a large amount could take much longer. If that’s correct, then it might take as long to fill-er-up as it would for the trip.] They also give no idea of the lifetime of their device, or how expensive it would be to replace/maintain.

Sounds like it isn’t quite ready for prime time yet.