Read Power Hungry Online

Authors: Robert Bryce

Power Hungry (20 page)

Now there's an understatement. But it shouldn't be surprising. The Pickens Plan doesn't pencil. It never did. The entire concept was based on a set of faulty assumptions, the crux of which was this: Using more wind power would mean less natural gas consumption, and the extra natural gas could be used to fuel vehicles, meaning the United States could drastically cut its oil imports.
The reality is that Pickens launched his multimillion-dollar media campaign as part of an effort to backstop his own money-making ventures. In May 2008, he ordered $2 billion worth of wind turbines from General Electric.
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Two months later, he began selling the Pickens Plan, the first tenet of which was that wind power was the answer to America's concerns about foreign oil—and by swaddling himself in Old Glory, many Americans were duped into believing him.
The main fallacy in Pickens' proposal: Using more wind power would mean more natural gas availability for the automotive sector. The problem with that logic is obvious: Utilities and power-plant owners now burning natural gas are not going to shut down their plants in order to save gas unless it makes economic sense for them to do so. In addition, and perhaps more important, is this: Over the past few years, state and federal regulators have blocked a large number of proposed coal-fired power plants. As a result, natural gas has become the preferred fuel for new power generation projects. Between 1997 and 2008, the volume of gas used for electricity production in the United States increased by 64 percent.
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The same trend is evident around the world. Between 2000 and 2008, more than 75 percent of new global electricity demand was met with gas-fired power plants.
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Making fun of Pickens is easy, but to give him his due, he's right about wanting to increase the use of natural gas in the transportation sector. That concept makes economic sense for many fleet operators. But—and it's a big but—Pickens has grossly exaggerated the ability of the United States to make a quick transition to natural-gas-fueled vehicles. On the Pickens Plan website, the billionaire claims that using more wind power and “increasing the use of our natural gas resources can replace more than one-third of our foreign oil imports in 10 years.”
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That's an easy claim to make, but Pickens can't do it. And he couldn't do it even if he were somehow able to manage a one-hundred-fold increase in the number of natural-gas-fueled vehicles in the United States and do so in just ten years. Building a large fleet of natural-gas-fueled vehicles—and more importantly, the refueling infrastructure to support them—will take decades, not years.
The numbers simply don't work. Let's look at oil imports: In 2008, the United States imported an average of 12.9 million barrels of oil and oil products per day.
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One-third of that volume—the amount Pickens claims he can save—is about 4.25 million barrels of oil per day. Fine. Let's run the numbers.
According to Natural Gas Vehicles for America, a Washington, D.C.–based trade association, there are about 120,000 natural gas vehicles (NGVs) now in use in the United States.
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Each of those vehicles consumes about 1,500 gasoline-gallon-equivalents per year.
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Using that 1,500-gallon-per vehicle figure, those 120,000 NGVs conserve the equivalent of about 180 million gallons of oil per year.
Now let's multiply that number by 100. Doing so increases the U.S. fleet to 12 million NGVs, which could save 18 billion gallons of fuel per year, the equivalent of 1.17 million barrels of oil per day.
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That type of reduction is significant. But remember, Pickens promised to cut oil use by 4 million barrels a day. Furthermore, creating a NGV fleet that size would require a Herculean effort. If the United States had 12 million NGVs, that fleet would be larger than the current
global
fleet of NGVs, which numbers about 9.6 million vehicles.
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Pickens led a gullible media and an even more gullible public to believe that the evils of foreign oil could be overcome if only the public provided him with a few more subsidies for his pet projects. And he put forward his plan without discussing any fuels other than wind and natural gas. The fact that his unrealistic plan was so readily accepted by so many journalists and politicos provides additional evidence of the lack of skepticism about green energy in general and wind power in particular.
In particular, politicians and the media willingly accepted Pickens' claim that adding wind power would reduce the need for natural gas. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Bird Kills? What Bird Kills?
The Migratory Bird Treaty Act makes it illegal for anyone to kill a protected bird (including eagles and other raptors) by any means without first obtaining a permit.
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service press release, 2009
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On August 13, 2009, Exxon Mobil pled guilty in federal court to charges that it killed 85 birds—all of which were protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA). The company agreed to pay $600,000 in fines and fees for the bird kills, which occurred after the animals came in contact with hydrocarbons in uncovered tanks and wastewater facilities on company properties located in five western states.
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The Exxon Mobil prosecution is the latest of hundreds of cases that federal officials have brought against oil and gas companies over the past two decades for violations of the MBTA, a statute that has been on the books since 1918.
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But the oil and gas companies are not alone in having run afoul of this law. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has also brought MBTA cases against electric utilities. On July 10, 2009, for example, Oregon-based PacifiCorp agreed to pay $1.4 million in fines and restitution for killing 232 eagles in Wyoming over a two-year period. The birds were electrocuted by the company's poorly designed power lines.
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Those cases are clearly justified. But they also underscore a pernicious double standard in the enforcement of federal wildlife laws: At the very same time that federal law enforcement officials are bringing cases against oil and gas companies and electric utilities under the MBTA, they have exempted the wind industry from any enforcement action under that statute and a similar one, the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act, enacted in 1940.
Once again, the numbers behind the story are essential. As it turns out, the number of birds being killed by wind turbines dwarfs the numbers involved in the prosecution of Exxon Mobil. A July 2008 study of bird kills by
wind turbines at Altamont Pass, California, estimated that the massive wind farm was killing 80 golden eagles
per year
.
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In addition, the study, funded by the Alameda County Community Development Agency, estimated that about 2,400 other raptors, including burrowing owls, American kestrels, and red-tailed hawks—as well as about 7,500 other birds, nearly all of which are protected under the MBTA—were being whacked every year at Altamont.
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To recap: Exxon Mobil was prosecuted for killing 85 birds over a five-year period. The wind turbines at Altamont, located about 30 miles east of Oakland, are killing more than one hundred times as many birds as were involved in the Exxon case, and they are doing it
every year
. Furthermore, the bird-kill problems at Altamont have been documented repeatedly. A 1994 study documented numerous raptor kills, a finding that has been corroborated by essentially all of the subsequent studies.
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To be sure, the number of birds killed by wind turbines is highly variable—and biologists believe the situation at Altamont, which uses older turbine technology, may be the worst example of bird kills by wind turbines.
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That said, the carnage at Altamont likely represents only a fraction of the number of birds being killed by wind power every year. Michael Fry of the American Bird Conservancy estimates that between 75,000 and 275,000 birds per year are being killed by U.S. wind turbines. And yet, the Department of Justice won't press charges. “Somebody has given the wind industry a get-out-of-jail-free card,” Fry told me.
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According to the American Wind Energy Association, each megawatt of installed wind power capacity results in the death of between one and six birds per year.
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At the end of 2008, the United States had about 25,000 megawatts of wind turbines, and environmental and lobby groups are pushing for the country to be producing 20 percent of its electricity from wind by 2030. Meeting that goal, according to the Department of Energy, will require the United States to have about 300,000 megawatts of wind capacity, a twelve-fold increase over 2008 levels.
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If that target is achieved, it will likely mean that at least 300,000—and perhaps as many as 1.8 million—birds will die each year from collisions with wind turbines.
The American Wind Energy Association dismisses the problem as insignificant, saying that the bird kills are a “very small fraction of those caused by other commonly accepted human activities and structures—
house cats kill an estimated 1 billion birds annually.”
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That may be true. But cats rarely get frog-marched to the courthouse in handcuffs. Nor are they killing many golden eagles.
Wind turbines are also killing other flying animals. A study of a 44-turbine wind farm in West Virginia found that up to 4,000 bats had been killed by the turbines in 2004 alone.
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A 2008 study of dead bats found on the ground near a Canadian wind farm found that many of the bats had been killed by a change in air pressure near the turbine blades that caused fatal damage to their lungs, a condition known as “barotrauma.”
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Bat Conservation International, an Austin-based group dedicated to preserving the flying mammals and their habitats, has called the proliferation of wind turbines “a lethal crisis.” In September 2009, I interviewed Ed Arnett, who heads the group's research efforts on wind power. He said that the headlong rush to develop wind power is having major detrimental effects on bat populations, but few environmental groups are willing to discuss the problem because they are so focused on the issue of carbon dioxide emissions and the possibility of global warming. “To compromise today's wildlife values and environmental impacts for tomorrow's speculated hopes is irresponsible,” Arnett said. He added that only a handful of bat species are protected by federal law, and therefore, the killing of bats by wind turbines gets little attention from the media.
But the bat-kill problem has begun getting some attention. In December 2009, a federal court halted the construction of a wind project in West Virginia over concerns that the 122-turbine facility would harm the Indiana bat, which is protected by the Endangered Species Act. In his ruling on the case, a federal judge wrote that “there is a virtual certainty that Indiana bats will be harmed, wounded, or killed” by the proposed wind farm. The developers of the wind farm must now apply for a special permit from the Fish and Wildlife Service that will allow the project to proceed.
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But the ruling in the West Virginia case brings up the obvious question: Why aren't federal wildlife officials doing more to protect birds from wind turbines? During the late 1980s and early 1990s, Rob Lee was one of the Fish and Wildlife Service's lead law-enforcement investigators on the problem of bird kills in western oil fields. Now retired and living in Lubbock, Texas, Lee told me that solving the problem of bird kills in the oil fields
was relatively easy and not very expensive. Lee said the oil companies only had to put netting over their tanks and waste facilities, or close them. Asked why wind power companies aren't being prosecuted for killing eagles and other birds, Lee told me that “the fix here is not easy or cheap.” Nor does Lee expect to see any prosecutions. “It's economics. The wind industry has a lot of economic muscle behind it.”
In other words, what's good for the goose is not good for the gander. When it comes to energy production and the protection of America's wildlife, federal law-enforcement officials are favoring the wind industry over other industries. And that favoritism occurs because of the myth that wind power is “green.”
CHAPTER 12
Wind Power Reduces the Need for Natural Gas
T
HE PICKENS PLAN relies on the theory that increasing the use of wind power will allow the United States to reduce its oil imports, because lots of wind turbines will save natural gas that can then be redirected to the transportation sector.
As I've mentioned, there are two problems with that claim: U.S. natural-gas-fired electricity generation is soaring, and the United States doesn't have nearly enough natural-gas-fueled vehicles to make a significant dent in its oil imports. But there's another problem, one that Pickens and other wind promoters don't talk about: Wind power increases the need for natural gas. Pickens himself admits as much. In January 2010, when I challenged him about the merits of wind power, he replied, “I'm not saying wind replaces natural gas.”
Wind power production is highly variable. For instance, on February 7, 2008, Colorado electric utilities had to scramble to keep the lights on after the state's wind power output declined by about 485 megawatts in an hour. And that sudden collapse in wind power availability occurred just as demand for electricity was reaching its morning peak. To keep the power grid stable, the state's utilities had to quickly start up a bank of gas-fired generators and buy electricity from neighboring utilities.
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Or consider the problems that hit the Bonneville Power Administration in January 2009. The federal agency, which supplies electricity to much of the Pacific Northwest, reported that between January 14 and 25, it could not use any of the 1,700 megawatts of installed wind power capacity in its service area. The agency said that wind generation during that time period was “essentially zero,” a condition that was “due to extreme temperature inversion conditions” in eastern Washington and Oregon.
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The agency was able to offset the lack of wind by using some of its hydropower capacity. But the Bonneville Power Administration is an exception. Most of the regions in the United States that have significant wind resources do not have hydropower assets that can be used to provide power when the wind stops blowing. And the United States isn't building dams, it's taking them down. Over the past decade, more than two hundred dams in the United States have been dismantled.
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