According to the June 16, 2010 report of the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the net generation of electric power from all sources in the United States was 311,933 thousand megawatthours in March of 2010. Petroleum products amounted to less than 1% of that total–see details below.
Here’s the report, which is part of the US Department of Energy (DOE): http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/tablees1a.html
The numbers below come from the March 2010 column in the first table, “Total Electric Power Industry Summary Statistics,” right on the top of the first page.
Of that total (still measured in units of 1000 megawatthours), here is how many thousand megawatthours came from each of the following sources during March 2010:
Coal: 145,198 (about 46.5%)
Nuclear: 64,639 (about 20.7%)
Natural Gas: 62,882 (about 20.1%)
Hydroelectric: 20,574 (about 6.6%)
Wind: 8,196 (about 2.6%)
Wood & wood derived fuels: 3,306 (about 1.1%)
Petroleum Liquids 1,249 (about 0.4%)
Petroleum Coke 1,210 (about 0.4%)
Solar 64 (about 0.0%)
(There are a few other minor sources, including biomass, geothermal, etc., each with tiny amounts)
You can see that in March 2010, if you combine both petroleum liquids and petroleum coke (anything used in the USA that is derived from oil), only about eight-tenths of one percent came from those sources…by far the lions share of our electricity comes from coal, with natural gas and nuclear fighting for second/third place, and hydroelectric “in fourth place.” Wind energy only accounted for 2.6% of our electricity in March 2010.
This means that the arguments that we need wind energy to reduce our dependence on foreign oil are…to put it in a word…ridiculous. They are not based on anything factual at all. It represents a smart ploy on the part of the wind industry’s public relations firms, however, to use the general public’s ignorance of where our electricity actually comes from, along with the public’s distaste of relying on oil from foreign countries and fear of terrorist regimes in order to gain public support for wind development by saying we need to use turbines to replace foreign oil.
I noticed that most of the speakers at the Adams County Public Hearing who spoke in favor of wind development in Adams County mentioned our need to eliminate our dependence on foreign oil. I don’t disagree that it would be good to do that, but the way to do that is ride bicycles instead of drive cars, or buy more electric cars, or find other ways to cut down on burning gasoline in automobiles.
It is amazing, and a little frightening, that so many otherwise intelligent Americans have “bought” this idea about wind energy without giving it any critical thought. But let us be smarter than that. One commercial aired on CNN showing military vehicles being blown up by roadside bombs, ending with an appeal to “bring our boys home” and then showing wind turbines as the “answer.” We can all look forward to the day when, in peace, our troops can return home. However, just a tiny bit of reasonable thinking reveals that cars use gasoline, which is the real “culprit” behind our dependence on foreign oil–and covering the whole nation with wind turbines will not change the amount of foreign oil we burn in our automobiles.
The statistics above prove that electricity mainly comes from coal, nuclear, and natural gas–all of which are produced domestically and create scores of jobs in the United States–far more than mostly foreign-owned wind companies produce as they win big in our massive give-away of American tax dollars to subsidize wind development. The “war of words” between wind and oil is a 2.6% producer of electricity (wind) telling the nation that we need wind to replace a 0.8% producer of electricity (oil).
But don’t be too hasty about eliminating that 0.8% producer. Not all electric generation plants perform the same function on our nation’s grid. Petroleum products are normally burned in what are called “Peaker Plants.” Those generate electricity on demand during times of peak electric demand; they have to be ready to fire up quickly to balance the demand on the grid with an equivalent supply. Wind energy, by contrast, cannot ever serve this function on the grid, because it only offers electricity when the wind blows–not “on demand.” So, to replace oil burning peaker plants, we need some other form of electricity generation that is “on demand,” and wind is not a candidate for that.
Even if we cover the entire nation with wind turbines, we cannot dismantle even one oil-burning “peaker plant,” unless we’re willing to have all the lights go out when everyone turns on their air conditioners on a hot, still day. Because wind energy generation is completely dependant on something out of our control–the wind speed–we must have enough electric generating capacity available from other sources–coal, nuclear, or other non-wind sources–to meet 100% of our needs at all times. That means that wind’s current function on the electric grid is simply to create excess electricity and ”replace” power purchased (not produced) from the other sources on the grid. The effect of this is to take purchases (money) away from nuclear or coal or other sources, without enabling them to cut down on production–so what do you think that does to the price of electricity from those sources? This excess production of electricity by wind turbines happens on a moment-by-moment basis (whenever the wind blows), eliminating the possibility to plan ahead for even a brief period of time when we could “switch on wind” and “switch off coal.” Because we cannot depend on wind, we cannot tell an eight hour shift over at the coal-burning plant to stay home, for example–they have to keep their coal burning and be ready to “carry” wind turbines by “switching on” at any moment. That means that even when we “switch on wind,” we cannot stop burning coal.
It would be a good thing for wind energy to actually help our nation cut back on burning coal someday (although it would eliminate domestic jobs in the coal industry), but first we would need the ability to store the intermittent power that wind turbines produce, and make it something we can control and plan ahead to use. Unfortunately, we do not have that ability at this time; batteries that would store the amounts of power needed are too expensive and impractical. Other ideas have been proposed, such as using turbines to pump water from a river below a hydroelectric dam back up into the reservoir, so that we could get “double” use of the same water in hydroelectric generation. In that scenario, extra water could be released at times of peak electric need, and create more electricity in a predictable way. Ideas such as this are prohibitively expensive at this time (have you priced hydroelectric dams lately?), and could not make enough of a impact in the total picture, but still deserve further study as a possible useful role for wind turbines. If this is a future possibility, more turbines should be built near hydroelectric dams, and not 1000 feet from people’s homes in rural America.
I hope Americans stop to think just a little bit before we wreck every scenic vista in the nation, destabilize our electric grid, raise the cost of our own electricity, and give mostly foreign companies huge American tax subsidies over a terribly expensive and half-baked idea, all because we believed the wind companies commercials that told us we could eliminate our dependence on foreign oil while driving our cars around under 400 foot wind turbines.
A Concerned Citizen
