The REAL Pickens plan

I've heard of that.

Also that the hops or whatever they use to make the beer is being used for feed. I think there was an article in the local paper about a microbrewery and a goat farm working together. Don't remember what the goat farm supplied, but they got the whatever it was left over after the brew to feed the goats.

 

Probably not the hops but the barley.

 

That was it. The Barley. I knew it was a grain and knew it wasn't oats.

I'll bet those were some happy goats.

 

Back when I used to homebrew I always bought a little extra barley to chew on while brewing. Happy goats indeed.

 

The biggest problem with the 'pickens plan' is that it comes from 'pickens'. I am a liberal, and I get pretty sick of seeing liberals flip-off conservatives with good ideas - I have once thought that conservatives are the kings of painting things in 'us' vs 'them' terms, but liberals are just the same. Several arguments against the picken's plan is as follows: Picken's is in it for 'profit', pickens is a swiftboater, pickens supports bush, pickens wants to extract water from an aquifer and destroy the evironment, pickens is 'rich', etc. What do any of those things have to do the pickens plan? If this was coming from a Californian liberal working for a nonprofit, every liberal would be 100% behind it.

I am for the picken's plan. It starts with wind power and transmission - this is an absolute must if we are ever going to have clean energy. Every environmentalists should be behind this aspect. If we are to shoot for gore's plan of carbon free in 10 years, this is a huge must. Wind is the most economical carbon free source of energy in most of the country. I know Californian's have trouble looking past their own state and thus have trouble looking past solar, but solar just can't beat wind right now. If we had 10 billion dollars to invest in renewable energy, it is foolish not to plow all of that into developing wind energy. Solar has a future - especially for individual ownership on rooftops (kudos to California for pushing that), but for large scale energy production that has a chance at replacing carbon based fuels, wind is by and large the best choice. Also, don't get too caught up in the 'wind doesn't blow all of the time' argument - as long as the wind energy production is spread across a large geographic area and transmission lines and grid management is up-to-date and up-to-capacity (which is fairly easy to accomplish), wind provides a reliable source of power that can be counted on. Energy storage is also likely with a number of technologies under development, but that won't even be needed until wind reaches well over 20% of total energy production (which is about the percentage that pickens is relying on for his plan).
Check out this website to see where and how fast wind energy is being built across the country AWEA - Projects Currently, 19,500 MW of energy are produced by wind power generators, with 9000 MW under construction. Solar just can't come close to matching those numbers. Last I have read, solar energy sources still can't be produced at 1/15 that rate.

Part two of pickens plan is shutting down natural gas plants while converting cars to run on Compressed natural gas (CNG). This is the touchy part most environmentalists and liberals get up in arms about. Keep in mind that first we need the electrical production capacity which is all good. We can't do part two without part one first. Part two doesn't bother me that greatly for a number of points. For one, existing cars can be converted to CNG - thus, we can take that 5 year old Tahoe that gulps gasoline, and with a grand or so, make it run on natural gas that burns cleaner and is much more likely to be produced domestically. Electric vehicles are the future, but we can't convert existing vehicles to electric (well, not easily!). Also, not everybody needs to convert their cars to CNG - only a percentage of vehicles needs to do it to cut out oil imports. Thus these conversions can be limited to areas where it makes the most economical and practical sense. So, first, conversions can be concentrated in places like Texas, Oklahoma, etc, where there is a well-developed natural gas infrastructure and where several CNG filling stations already exist, hence, the whole country doesn't need to do this! Second, in other places, the conversions can be concentrated on municipal fleets (that all use the same municipal filling station).

So the overhaul to CNG by enough vehicles to cut imports of oil should not ring that many alarm bells. The net equation of the plan is this: Wind replaces natural gas (electrical equation), natural gas replaces oil (transportation equation), thus wind replaces oil (net energy equation), which is the same net equation that EVs will give us, but in a much shorter amount of time needed since it will take longer for EVs to replace the current fleet of vehicles than it will take for us to convert the same amount of vehicles with natural gas (due to the conversions of exisiting vehicles and current production capacity of new CNG vehicles). yeah, someday we will all have EVs, but admit the hard fact - It will take a long time till a siginficant fraction of new vehicles are EVs due to likely limitations on production, and we still will have all of these existing vehicles that are stuck running on oil. The pickens plan shows us a way that we can accomplish the net equation that EVs will eventually start to give us, but do it in a much shorter time frame. If anything EV production will also benefit - the electrical grid and wind/solar production will be built up for EVs as a result of the pickens plan.

Someone says a couple pages back that they would rather keep natural gas for electrical and use wind for coal power replacement - I like this idea, but here is some stuff to chew over. This choice hinges on the options of gas vs coal for electrical (wind replaces either gas or coal). This choice is of course gas as you said. But with the pickens plan, the option isn't gas or coal, it is oil or coal (pickens equation is wind replaces oil, your equation is wind replaces coal, so the option is oil or coal). This is a bit iffy of a choice - For mining, coal is more damaging to the environment, for burning, coal generally has more pollution (this depends on a lot of assumptions), but I still say I would rather use coal than oil for a couple of reasons, (1) coal is all domestic, oil is mostly imported, and (2) oil is a more limiting resource than coal is and thus its replacement for economic reasons is more important. Still, one can't help but think that if we commit to a picken's-ish plan, the build up in production for wind and solar technologies will be easy to continue once the picken's plan threshold is completed. Wind production wouldn't be limited to the 20% slice of the energy pie, it could probably be 50% (again, from what I have read - I am an environmental engineer PhD so I do read a lot of this stuff). So for electricity, once natural gas is replaced, coal could logically be next. And also, if the slight chance that electric cars are produced fast enough that CNG conversions seem silly (because the wind electricity could be used directly), then natural gas plants can continue to run.

One more thing, if Pickens was mostly concerned with his own profit, he would limit these ideas to himself and insiders and spend his money on lobbying for special bills under the radar of the public. By giving this plan to the public domain, he is giving up control. He is allowing the media and public to have control and oversight over the legislation that the bill requires. He is giving other businesses the ability to position themselves to compete for the opportunities that the plan will give. Businesses make money off of the government by keeping things hushed and out of sight.

 

That exact point was what the very first post stated.

 

Ah, but NG is a limited resource too. It is also more limited than coal and from an efficiency stand point, I'd wager that it's more efficient to run EV/PHEVs off of NG fired electricity than burn it in CNGVs.

Also, wind w/o storage does NOT replace NG or coal completely because wind w/o storage is not capable of providing baseload power without a truely massive deployment that would be extremely expensive. I think it's better to firm CSP and wind with NG and waste the NG in the transportation sector where a legion of those freshly converted Tahoes will slaughter our NG reserves and we'll be right back to imported energy for the transportation sector while we move to yet another solution to the problem. It's not efficient and we'll exhaust our reserves quite quickly. I applaud Pickens for thinking outside the box and I don't care about the politics. I think the plan is flawed and doesn't solve the problem, it merely delays the inevitable conversion to an electrified transportation sector. I like his commitment to wind. We have just about the best wind "reserves" in the world and US wind generates more power than that of any other country (even though we trail the Germans by several GW of installed capacity, our production factor is a lot higher).

Coal is pretty much always more polluting than NG. The extraction is more energy intensive and environmentally severe and the combustion of it is defo worse. More CO2 more HG more SOx and NOx too. IGCC plants could improve this situation a bit, but coal will always be fraught with problems if we're to be responsible about the way we produce energy.

 

This I don't agree with. I don't see how his plan delays the development to EVs. The automakers don't need R & D into CNG vehicles - the technology is already there and employed worldwide, and so EV R&D funds would not be diverted. Also, from my guestimates, only a small percentage of fueling stations would need to install CNG fueling 'pumps', and the rest of the natural gas infrastructure is already there, so the capital investment for this is not that huge or burdensome. Thus, R and D into EVs should continue just as fast with or without Pickens plan (though, because automakers have a herd mentality, there might need to be government policies to insure that automakers don't have the false impression that CNG is the 'new' future - so yeah, care needs to take place to limit CNG use to not overload the capacity). The thrust of this plan is to allow immediate decreases in oil imports to help us in the next 10-20 years before EV vehicles are mainstream. The Pickens plan is a bridge, or a crutch, to the future, not the future itself.

About your first comment - It would be wonderful if we had EV vehicles in production to use natural gas electricity in our EVs, but we don't have them yet and may not have them for a few years, and then it will take a couple decades before EVs are likely to dominate transportation. Pickens plan looks at the reality we face today, and that reality is that we don't have EVs, and we won't have EVs soon enough.

As for coal vs oil, yeah, it is a tough call and a strong argument can be made there. The economics point to oil being a bigger problem, but the environment calls to coal being a bigger problem. It would be wonderful when we could tackle both, but there has to be a priority, and the economics of oil is pretty scary to me (which is important if we are to have the wealth in this country to continue towards carbon free energy).

Finally, the picken's plan is a massive deployment of wind energy, it will cost a lot of money (not as much as we spend on imported oil though), and so it will provide a reliable amount of wind energy. The wind through the 'wind corridor' is pretty darn reliable in any given spot at any given time, and it is nearly a 100% certainty when it can be drawn and balanced from a large area. I don't foresee needing storage technology under the requirements and boundaries of picken's plan.

 

The Pickens' plan really ignores a core issue. Who pays all the NG power plants to shut down and provides their return on investment?

I find this whole Picken's nonsense rather fun. Here is why:

1) This is a political initiative, called a plan. It depends on governments to make and change legislation and provide great amounts of subsidies to conform to the Pickens' path. A huge amount of money is involved. Who pays? (Clue - Pickens does not.)

2) The idea of increasing wind power is already at full speed. I bet it is rather agitating to the many investors and wind developers to have Pickens claim what they are doing is part of "his" plan.

3) Apparently, quite a few are unaware that South of Kentucky and East of Texas, commercial windpower is not viable at all.

 

Well, yes, actually. Though you may be confusing proprietary charging stations with electric outlets. The former was required for the first set of production EVs. The latter will be all that's needed in at least the near future for the promised EVs from the majors.

Rhetorical or real question? I assume you can find an outlet or two around where you live. If you are asking about the thousands of operational, installed, proprietary 220V chargers... well, I've got them for you right here. Several of us spend countless unpaid hours maintaining these lists:
EV Charger News - Home

To get you started on your cross-state journey, you can see the ones just North of you graphically here: EVChargerMaps You can pan/zoom as desired.

You get the modern, 200+ mile EV, and I'll show you how it can be easily done.

A bit less than 100 years ago for the outlets. About 12 years ago for the thousands of dedicated EV chargers.

Here is one of the more obvious ones. Any more, and we'd have to bonk you over the head. This is at the Sacramento International Airport.

Plenty more that I have personally visited here: Public Charging And of course thousands of them shown at the evchargernews link above.

Due to the tone of your questions, I assume that none of this is what you were looking for.