Of course extra capacity could be used to produce hydrogen which could be compressed, stored and used in a fuel cell to make up the difference. Its all a question of what we are willing to pay to cut this noose around our necks.

One thing that I think people haven’t commented on is that the move to natural gas cars greatly simplifies the production of automotive fuel from coal since syn-gas from coal was used interchangeable with natural gas from about a century.

Picken’s plan is genius for the simple reason that it might be doable. The perfect is the worst enemy of the good in this country. Its not perfect, by Picken’s own admission its only a stopgap to buy time, but it is a potential stopgap,

If Pickens is going to replace rather than compliment wind with gas, it wont work.

Its like everyone is living in some fantasy land , where if they talk about soemthing enough, it might seem close to becoming real!

And this nonsense is not restrained to the bizarro energy security issue.. it goes across all of them… that anyone thinks the Federal Govt is not free-falling into bankrupacy.. that a nuclear Iran is tolerable… that raising taxes on the people who actualy pay them wont hurt economy .. ugh. i cant take it sometimes.

To find those skill sets and willingness to do it 200 feet in the air in the winter with a major wind chill factor (they are installed where the wind is after all) and you don’t have enough people to support it unless they somehow build in elevators and closed rooms for the equipment.

Pickens is just trying to get more Fed/State funding for his Wind farms.

For wind, though, I don’t think you would need 100% backup in the form of nat gas plants

Yes, you would. Consider an event like an ice storm that covers several states. Such storms shutdown wind turbines for several days by coating their blades with crippling ice just as it would a helicopter. If you don’t have weather resistant generation, you’re boned.

Even if you go to a system of wind farms spread out over thousands of miles, you have to build in enough redundancy so that if half your turbines went offline, you would still have power from the remaining 50%. Factor in transmission losses and your looking at 60%+ redundancy in wind turbines alone. So you would need enough turbines to supply peak power requirements plus another 60%. All this redundancy really starts to add up.

Also, natural gas is the primary component of fertilizer so any upward pressure this plan would cause on natural gas prices would cause a rise in food prices as well.

Natural gas is significantly cheaper than gasoline right now. Hence the result Pickens envisions should be happening already.

By my calculations 1 mmbtu of gas =7.69 gallons = about 32.23$ at the moment where I live.
1 mmbtu of natural gas = 12.98$ today.

I may be too stupid and/or ignorant to understand what I’m looking at but in any case I used these two sites to conjure up my numbers: http://www.wtrg.com/daily/gasprice.html and www iowadnr gov air prof ghg files title_v_inventory_form xls

Of course, feel free to mock me if I screwed that up.

The flaws of this plan were well discussed on another blog within the past couple of days, but I don’t remember which blog it was.

For wind, though, I don’t think you would need 100% backup in the form of nat gas plants. If the wind network covers a broad enough area, then geographical diversity should provide some inherent ability to ride through periods of low wind. This is highly susceptible to modeling by putting together the wind data for various locations.

Some work is being done, by GE and others, on wind energy storage via compressed air. Not clear yet how real this is.

One advantage of hybrid-electric vs nat gas for vehicles is that the batteries will tend to be charged at off-peak times and also, given appropriate pricing, at times when plentiful wind or other intermittent source is available.

There is also the tiny problem that wind power cannot replace natural gas plants. They can only reduce their natural gas consumption under ideal conditions. That means we will have to pay the cost of the wind farms plus the cost of a 100% redundant backup in the form of natural gas burning plants. The likely savings in natural gas will be far lower than the Pickens expects.

By the time you add in the energy cost of building the plants and refitting vehicles, it will actually cause a short term i.e. less than 5 years, increase in oil consumption. Cost equals resources. Anything that cost more takes more resources. Its just that simple.