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A Civil War Between the Greens

By Tom Bethell on 6.16.05 @ 12:06AM

(Page 2 of 2)

ONE THING WE DO KNOW about renewable energy sources like wind and solar is that they are not getting the job done. In 1979, President Carter called for a "national commitment to solar energy," with the goal of producing 20 percent of the nation's energy from various renewable sources by the year 2000. Remarkably, their actual contribution to the energy pie, in percentage terms, declined from 1980 to 2000. And that despite all the tax credits and subsidies.

The latest figures show that renewables contributed 5.9 percent of the nation's energy in 2002. But that includes hydroelectricity, which makes by far the greatest contribution. And the enviros want to tear down as many dams as they can. President Clinton's EPA head Carol Browner removed hydro from the list of "renewable" sources because dams are politically incorrect.

Leave out hydropower and firewood, Howard Hayden says, and the residual "high-tech" sources, meaning photovoltaics ("solar") and wind, contribute a mere 0.19 percent of total U.S. energy needs. Hopeless, in other words.

It's hard to disguise these numbers, although the media sometimes try, for example by claiming that wind is the most rapidly increasing source of energy in the country. (Yes, but increasing from a minuscule base.) In its bat-kill story the Washington Post reported that the wind-turbine industry "provided nearly 17 billion kilowatt hours, enough to serve some 1.6 million households -- less than 1 percent of the country's electricity production."

DON'T EVEN ASK about the environmental impact of generating commercial amounts of electricity from sunlight, because the enviros cringe when the subject is brought up. And rightly so. There's a demonstration project called Solar Two in the Mojave Desert, and that is pretty much where they have to put these things, to have any chance at all. To remind: solar power needs sunlight, which means that it works quite well in places like Barstow, California, at mid-day.

The basic problem with wind and solar is that they are already "dilute" sources of energy. A magnifying glass can "concentrate" sunlight on a spot of paper, but that is only one spot. Same problem with photovoltaic cells. Small PV cells can power an electronic calculator, but not even the dimmest light bulb.

For an installation of solar reflectors to produce as much power as a typical nuclear plant in a year, Hayden writes, "it would have to cover 127 square miles." In other words, an area twice the size of Washington, D.C. has to be covered with movable mirrors. And to maintain their efficiency these mirrors must be washed every few days. Oh, and there has to be a natural gas back-up system to keep the therminol (fluid) bubbling when it's cloudy, or when the sun has set.

Tax credits determine all business decisions in this field, and to qualify for the credits, natural gas can be used to supply no more than 25 percent of the energy generated. "And that's about how much they do use," Hayden says.

How much land does commercial wind power really need? Imagine a one-mile wide swath of windmills extending all the way from San Francisco to Los Angeles (400 miles). "That land area is what would be required to produce as much power around the clock as one large coal, natural gas or nuclear power station that normally occupies one square kilometer of land."

As to the lawsuit, it surely is not appropriate to say that a builder "kills" a bird if it flies into whatever he builds. But on one point I do agree with the environmentalists. Tax subsidies make them (and us all) unwilling participants in the whole exercise. I would be all in favor of wind projects if they could compete with other energy sources without subsidies. Clearly they cannot. The expiration of the Renewable Energy production tax credit at the end of 2003 "caused a dramatic slowdown in wind projects around the country," according to one report. The wind business went back to work as soon as a one-year extension was signed into law last October.

BY THE WAY, whatever happened to that old E.F. Schumaker, small-is-beautiful vision? That's how it all began. Maybe you're too young to remember! It was a hippie Whole Earth Catalog ecology thing. You could be off the grid, independent of the utilities. Grow your own vegetables, and grass, hole up in your cabin, roll your own joint, and even partake of a little home-brewed electricity so you can read your Thoreau or Buckminster Fuller by night. And if the sun shone all day the solar panel on the roof might even take the chill off the bath water.

That's all gone. It's as though we once had this small town amateur team that started up in a wild burst of enthusiasm and then was somehow persuaded it could compete in the major leagues. It was all a fantasy.

There are still lots of true believers, such as Bill McKibben, who worry that the renewable cause is dividing environmentalists into "bitter factions." Which it is. We've got to stop worrying about bats and Golden Eagles, the true believers say. They beseech us to love those behemoth cranes reaching up above the sky-line. They can think of nothing but global warming and greenhouse gases, and there's one word they don't want to hear: the n word. But nuclear power surely is coming back. All we have to regret is the 25-year delay.

Tom Bethell is a senior editor of The American Spectator, where his "Capitol Ideas" column appears each month. This article appears in the current June issue. To subscribe to The American Spectator, click here.

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