09/12/2008 07:38 AM

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A Better Way to Power Your Car: Use the Breeze Page 1

By Lester Brown

Legendary Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens is half right. We do need to harness this country's wind resources for a homegrown source of electricity, as he has been urging this summer in expensive television ads. And we do need to reduce the $700 billion we may soon be paying annually for imported oil. But part two of Pickens's plan - to move natural gas out of electricity production and use it to fuel cars instead -- just doesn't make sense.

Why not use wind-generated electricity to power cars directly? Natural gas is still a fossil fuel that emits climate-changing gases when burned. Let's cut the natural-gas middleman.

Plug-in cars are here, nearly ready to market. We just need to put wind in the driver's seat. Several major auto manufacturers, including GM, Toyota, Ford and Nissan are producing plug-in hybrids. Toyota and GM are committed to marketing plug-in hybrids in 2010. Toyota may even deliver a plug-in version of the Prius next year.

Some Prius owners aren't even waiting for Toyota. They've jumped the gun, converting their cars to plug-ins simply by adding a second storage battery, which increases the distance you can drive between recharges, and an extension cord that you can plug into any wall socket to recharge the batteries from the electrical grid. This lets them push the car's already exceptional gas mileage in routine daily driving of 46 miles per gallon to more than 100 miles per gallon.

GM is in the game, too, with its Chevrolet Volt. This plug-in car is essentially an electric car with an auxiliary gasoline engine that generates electricity to recharge the batteries when needed. It boasts an all-electric range of 40 miles, more than adequate for most daily driving. GM reports that under typical driving conditions, the Volt averages 151 miles per gallon.

Where Wind Comes In

This new car technology is matched by new wind-turbine technology, setting the stage for an automotive-fuel economy powered largely by cheap wind energy. The Energy Department notes that North Dakota, Kansas and Texas alone have enough wind energy to easily satisfy national electricity needs. To actually put wind power on the road, of course, we would have to tap the wind resources in nearly all states, plus those that are off-shore, which the department says can meet 70% of national electricity needs.

Texas, this country's leading oil producer for the last century, is now our leading generator of wind electricity, having eclipsed California two years ago. With over 5,500 megawatts (MW) of wind-generating capacity now in operation and two vast wind-farm complexes under development, the state will have more than 20,000 MW of wind-generating capacity (think 20 coal-fired power plants). Pickens, with his own 4,000 MW wind farm under development in the Texas Panhandle, is one of the largest investors. These wind farms could satisfy the residential electricity needs of nearly half the state's 24 million people.

The key to this massive development is the state government's participation. The state facilitated the construction of transmission lines that link the strong wind resources in West Texas and the Panhandle to major markets - known as "load centers" - in Dallas, Fort Worth and Houston.

While many residents in some places, such as Cape Cod, take a NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) view of wind farms, the opposite is true in much of the rest of the country - including ranch country which extends from Texas north through the Dakotas. There, it's a PIMBY (Put It in My Backyard) issue. In ranching regions, competition among communities for these wind farms, and the jobs and tax revenues that come with them, is intense. Each wind turbine on a rancher's land typically brings a royalty of $3,000 to $10,000 per year, with no investment on the landowner's part. And the ranchers can continue to graze cattle on the land.

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