Three weeks ago, Dan Henninger of the Wall Street
Journal
wrote about how under the Obama Administration the country is
really splitting into two economies, one public, one private. More
and more the government is trying to replace private markets in the
decision of what gets built, when and how.
Little did he know. As if on cue, the Administration a week
later announced it will be starting a full-scale initiative to
build wind and solar projects on federal Western lands, with
contributions coming from both the Bureau of Land Management and
the Department of Defense. The Pentagon’s contribution will be 16
million acres. In case you’re keeping score, that’s 25,000 square
miles or the size of West Virginia. Who knew they owned that much?
Yet the truth is, if you’re going to build wind and solar you’re
going to need that much space because both are hugely dilute and
can’t be scaled up except by occupying more land.
Although landowning and private property have been foundation of
American democracy since the time of the Revolution, in fact there
huge amounts of land still belong to the government — much more
even than in a place such as the United Kingdom, where large tracts
are still owned by “The Crown.” Things began to change in this
country around the beginning of the 20th century. Before that, the
Homestead Act, adopted under Abraham Lincoln in the midst of the
Civil War, had put land west of the Mississippi in the hands of
small farmers and property owners. Settlers were promised 160 acres
if they lived on the land for five years and made improvements. As
riverbeds lands were exhausted, the allotment was increased to 320
acres in 1909 to encourage dry land farming. With this acreage went
the mineral rights.
After 1900, however, Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot
became concerned that people were exploiting forest and mineral
resources and decided to halt the giveaway. The National Forests
were created in 1905 and after 1916 homesteaders were no longer
given the mineral rights to their land. All the unclaimed lands
were retained by the General Land Office, which merged with the
Federal Grazing Service in 1946 to become the Bureau of Land
Management. When the Homestead Act was finally terminated in 1934,
it had granted 420,000 square miles or 1/10th of the
United States into private hands. But the amount of land in the
National Forest Service remains at 360,000 square miles, and the
BLM retains another 400,000 square miles, meaning more than half
the land west of the Mississippi is still owned by the federal
government. On top of that, the BLM also retains the mineral rights
to a remarkable 1.1 million square miles, about 30 percent of the
entire U.S.
This continued federal ownership has created considerable
conflict. In western logging areas, for instance, private ownership
was originally granted to the railroads in a checkerboard pattern
that prevented the accumulation of large contiguous territories.
This pattern still exists and assures that any effort to develop
forest or mineral resources must take on the federal government as
a partner. The Forest Service was fairly cooperative in leasing
forest lands until environmental groups gained control in the
1970s. Logging was then slowed and eventually brought to a halt in
Oregon and Washington by the spotted owl decision. Federal
ownership of oil and gas rights has proceeded in the same way.
While leases were once granted at a fairly rapid pace, they have
now slowed to a crawl and as the influence of environmentalists
rises in the government. As has often been noted, natural gas
fracking never would have gotten off the ground except that most of
the reserves are the eastern half of the country where private
ownership prevails.
Now the tables are turning. Whereas most of the pressure from
environmental groups has been in
preventing the development of Western
lands, now these seemingly endless tracts are being regarded as a
fertile field of dreams for environmentalists to carry on their
experiments with wind and solar energy. Early this month, President
Obama proudly announced seven major projects on Western lands. The
largest will be a 3,000-MW-capacity wind farm covering 350 square
miles of Wyoming. The others include a 75-square-mile wind farm in
the Mojave Desert of Arizona and several-square-mile solar
complexes in California, Arizona, and Nevada.
All these projects will suffer the intermittency problems that
plague wind and solar generation everywhere. This intermittency
will create surges and voltage drops that destabilize a grid. Some
solar plants are now developing thermal storage that can carry them
through a few hours of the night, but only this reduces their
overall capacity by nearly one-half, so that instead of requiring
10 square miles of highly polished mirrors to generate 500
megawatts — the size of an average coal plant — it will take
twenty. These projects will also require hundreds of miles of
transmission lines to bring them to population centers. And the
electricity they produce will be ridiculously expensive.
Yet all will move ahead because federal-and-state-sponsored
renewable programs are being pursued without any regard for the
economic consequences. The electricity they produce will be
guaranteed a market at a price that makes them profitable, whatever
it may be. As David Crane, CEO of NRG Energy,
told the New York Times about California-sponsored
solar project his company is building: “I have never seen anything
that I have had to do in my 20 years in the power industry that
involved less risk. It is just filling the desert with panels.”
So as Daniel Henninger suggests, we are indeed moving toward two
separate energy economies. One will be based on market forces and
economic efficiency. The other will be driven by ideological
certainty. Renewable energy is the wave of the future, therefore we
must pursue it at any price. There is little question as to which
will make the greater contribution to the nation’s energy
budget.
