Llewellyn

King

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January 15, 2009

The Greening of Energy: Not So Fast

Giving away money is hard to do. Just ask President-elect Barack Obama.

The government has innumerable ways to collect money from the populace and none to give it back, except through tax rebates. Now the president-elect is proposing a “green” way to put money in our pockets.

There are those around Obama who believe – as maybe he does himself – jobs can be provided and the world's energy balance can be shifted through public financing of green energy projects. Green to them probably means wind and solar, and possibly ethanol and biodiesel.

Of the whole panoply of green energy technologies, only one is really ready to go – wind power. It has the potential to make it without government incentives beyond the tax breaks it already enjoys.

Yet wind power faces the same hurdle as other large industrial installations – permitting. For years, the well-connected residents of Cape Cod have been opposing a wind farm in Nantucket Sound. People love forests of windmills, so long as someone else has to look at them.

Obama and his advisers have a strong ally in British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who has signed on to the same set of ideas with brio. Incidentally, Germany leads the world in green power, but the windfall of green jobs has not resulted.

Oil billionaire T. Boone Pickens is sinking millions of his own dollars into developing a vast wind power corridor, running from the Texas Panhandle to North Dakota. It is a compelling idea, except the generation from thousands of windmills has to be collected and fed into a transmission system that has yet to be built. And even if it is built, the real need for electricity is along the two coasts. Unfortunately, electricity does not travel well. It needs to be used near to where it is generated.

Obama's advisers hope that their energy policies will create many jobs. But the fact is that electric utilities have had a problem finding new workers, particularly on their lines.

Since the 1970s, various technologies have had their adherents. In addition to wind power, they have included low-head hydro, wave power, ocean thermal gradients, solar panels, solar towers and hydrogen. So far, wind power is the only technology that has delivered on a commercial scale. Solar works for remote installations, but powering cities would require planting panels on tens of thousands of acres of land.

If the real problem is the nation's dependence on foreign oil, the Obama proposals come up short. Natural gas and oil remain the two most versatile fuels. The best way off oil is through electric vehicles – first hybrids then totally electric cars. Trouble is, hybrids have yet to capture significant market share and all-electric cars are still in the future.

Unfortunately, green advocates can be pretty disingenuous. Their real mission is to stop the nation's return to nuclear power. They know what they are against as much as what they are for.

If there are so many jobs to be created from going green, one wonders how these jobs, if they materialize, will affect the cost of electricity. Traditionally, energy has been capital but not labor intensive. Big payrolls push up costs no matter how virtuous the project.

Of course coal, which is the unloved fuel that supplies more than half of our electricity, would like to get a green label. Ergo, the political label “clean coal.” There is no such thing, although through carbon capture or gasification, coal state legislators are glad to paint the black stuff green and splash research money on it.

Oh well, back to free money, also known as “long green.”

© 2009 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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