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Making Gore's Switch Isn't Quite So Simple
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Which makes people ask him: Is all that really feasible?
"I ask them, 'What's your plan?' " Pickens said in a telephone interview.
3. "Carbon capture" may still be years away.
If renewable energy sources can't fill the gap, environmentalists will push instead to find a way to stop fossil-fuel plants from producing harmful emissions. But the technology these plants want -- devices that would absorb carbon dioxide out of smokestack gases, then store it underground -- isn't ready for commercial use yet. The Energy Department estimates that it might not be widespread until 2020. The current prototypes would be very expensive to manufacture, doubling the price of producing power at these plants.
Looming above all this is the country's growing thirst for power. Federal projections show that annual power usage will grow 1.1 percent per year until 2030, driven up by factors that include a growing population, bigger homes and more electronic devices.
Perhaps the best way to describe the scope of Gore's challenge is to shrink it. What if you wanted to tackle a slice of the problem in just a slice of the United States -- the region around Washington? What if, instead of switching the entire region to renewable electricity, you wanted just enough clean power to meet the increase in electricity demand expected over the next 10 years?
You would need about 3,700 windmills.
Here's the math: Peak demand -- the amount of electricity needed on the hottest summer days -- is expected to grow by more than 5,500 megawatts for the three utilities that serve this area. A megawatt is roughly enough to power 700 to 1,000 homes. So, at roughly 1.5 megawatts per wind turbine -- the current going rate -- you would need 3,700 turbines.
Right now, from the Delaware Coast to the West Virginia mountains, there are 44 turbines producing power on a significant scale. Add in all the renewable energy projects on the drawing boards in this area, including the large wind farm planned off Rehoboth Beach, Del., and . . .
And you're still nowhere close.
"I am personally skeptical that we can fulfill our energy-demand needs solely with renewable resources," said L. Preston Bryant Jr., Virginia's secretary of natural resources.
