T. Boone Pickens says that he has the solution to all of our problems for the next century: wind farms for electric power and natural gas to power our transportation systems. The fact that he has millions invested in natural gas reserves has nothing to do with the nature of his solution. Yeah, right.
Carl Jung pointed out that mental illness is the avoidance of necessary pain. The phasing out of fossil fuels as the source material for most of our day-to-day energy demands is written into our future as surely as night follows day. The only question is: will it be on our terms or Mother Earth's.
There is a finite amount of petroleum, natural gas, and coal beneath the Earth's surface. Sometime in the next couple of hundred years, we will exhaust those resources; sooner rather than later if the human race and its demand for energy continue growing, and we do not find alternatives. The sooner we make the transition to renewable energy sources, the less painful the transition.
Wind farms, solar panels and other renewable energy sources for electricity do not have the destructive waste products of coal (mercury and sulphur) and nuclear (radioactive waste) power plants, and cost less to build. The big problem is that renewable energy production tends to be—by its nature—less centralized than traditional production and distribution. This makes it more difficult for the energy syndicates (such as Con Ed, PG&E, and Excel) to dominate the nation's electric power production and distribution, and maximize their profits.
I have a vision of wind turbines at the corners of every quarter section (160 acres) of farmland from North Dakota to West Texas. If, on average, you used the third largest wind turbine generally available—one and-one-half megawatts—every square mile of farmland (four quarter sections), would have nine machines producing a maximum of thirteen and-one-half megawatts of electricity. If you had one of the nine turbines down for routine maintenance at any given time, this would provide electricity for 11,200 households on average, which is roughly equal to a town of 30,000 people. As many of these farmers are part of rural electric co-ops, the land for the turbine should be leased from the farmers (not sold to the power companies) and paid for with some mixture of electric power and cash. The reason for this is that we want to keep the farmers in business, and eventually replace all of their fossil fuel farm machinery with new machines using electric motors.
Tesla Motors Roadster is pointing in the general direction we need to go with electric powered road vehicles. It goes 0-60mph in under four seconds, has a maximum speed of 125 mph, and can travel 220 miles on a single charge. It has two problems: it is hand-built (like a Ferrari) so it costs $109,000.00, and it takes three and one-half hours to recharge its lithium ion battery.
Mass production and economies of scale should reduce the cost of electric vehicles. When Professor Joel Schindall and his MIT colleagues perfect their super battery, based on carbon nano-tube technology, the rest of the puzzle should fall into place.
Professor Schindall and his colleagues are developing technology where a capacitor has the same density of storage, or capacitance, as a battery per unit of volume. This has always been the disadvantage of capacitors to batteries: it currently requires a capacitor with many times the volume of a comparable battery to provide an equal quantity of electrical energy. The advantage of a capacitor is it can be recharged more quickly and an almost unlimited number of times. The Tesla Roadster with a Schindall Super Battery, could (in theory) be recharged in under four minutes.
This “super battery” should also solve the problem of storage for people with photo-voltaic solar panels, or personal wind turbines. “Super batteries” on a large scale could power farm and construction machinery, buses, trains, etc.
John McCain and the oil apologists are in the same position as buggy makers and harness manufacturers in 1890: they presume we will always need buggy whips… er, petroleum. Some of us see the writing on the wall, and prefer to move towards the inevitable at our pace, not Mother Earth's.
After all she uses a whip.
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