Al Gore's Inconvenient Plan

Yesterday, Al Gore said that the United States should produce all of its electricity from carbon-free, renewable energy within 10 years. Although he didn't lay out specifics, he seems to want to do it with wind, solar, and geothermal, although it's not clear from his speech whether nuclear would be acceptable. Can it be done? It isn't likely.

To get a sense of the scale of the problem, consider: last year, wind, solar, and geothermal power accounted for an impressive-sounding 48 million megawatt-hours of electricity. (I rounded up. If I had rounded down, it would have obliterated the contribution from solar, since it is such a small part of the total.)

But in 2006, the most recent year with complete figures, four billion megawatt-hours of electricity were produced in the United States. Eventually, wind, solar, and geothermal power could cover this. But right now, they account for a little more than 1 percent of the total. Going from 1 to 100 percent will require not only building the wind turbines and solar panels and steam turbines for harvesting geothermal energy: it will also require massive new transmission infrastructure for distributing this power, from the deserts or windy plains, where much of this energy can be found, to the coasts, where people actually live. And it will require massive amounts of energy storage, since solar power doesn't work well at night, and wind power is erratic.

In light of this scale, even some truly ambitious schemes seem like a drop in the bucket. Over the past couple of weeks, T. Boone Pickens, an oil tycoon, has been using some of his billions to run television ads supporting his personal energy plan for the United States. Part of that plan is his project to build what seems to be the biggest wind farm in the country. It would nearly double the amount of wind produced in the state of Texas, the state with by far the most wind power. But that project will only produce 4,000 megawatts of power. (Total electricity generating capacity in the United States is about 1 million megawatts.) And it won't be cheap. To cover transmission-line costs alone for that and other proposed wind projects, the state of Texas plans to spend about $5 billion.

Al Gore is right, of course, that the country needs to turn to renewable energy. And it's frustrating how slowly the change is coming. But as we've recently seen with biofuels and food prices, scaling up a new source of energy can bring unanticipated consequences. Careful planning is required. We need some realistic plans for making the switch to renewable electricity, not empty rhetoric with unachievable goals.

A Zero-Emissions City in the Desert

Last week, construction began on a huge renewable-energy and urban-planning experiment, and it will be funded by $120-a-barrel oil at an anticipated cost of $22 billion over about eight years. The Masdar Initiative, launched in 2006, is an ambitious project to build a city near Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. It will house 50,000 people but will produce zero net carbon dioxide emissions and zero waste. Construction just began on the solar power plant that will power the city's construction, and later the city itself. And the first building to go up will be part of the new Masdar Institute of Science and Technology (MIST), a school put together largely with the help of MIT that will be devoted to developing technologies for environmentally sustainable cities.

One of the best things about the project--which I'll write about more in the coming days--is that it provides a much needed way to test ideas for renewable energy and efficiency at a large scale. The hope is that the technology tested here can be applied throughout the world.

But while the project will no doubt provide valuable insights, its location and the circumstances of its construction will limit its applicability. While the Abu Dhabi government won't be providing all of the $22 billion--it's calling on private investment with the hope that the project will be profitable--not every country can count on windfall profits to fund similar projects. What's more, the solutions developed for use in a hot, dry, sunny climate won't necessarily apply to places like, say, New England. Indeed, Gerard Evenden, a senior partner at Foster + Partners, the firm hired to plan the city, says it's essential that cities and buildings be custom-built with the location in mind to maximize efficiency.

Finally, what's to be done with cities that already exist? Many of the approaches to be taken at Masdar--such as controlling the orientation and length of the city streets and the height and construction materials of buildings--won't work with places like New York and Mexico City. This morning at a symposium dedicated to the collaboration between MIT and Masdar, Ernest Moniz, the director of the MIT Energy Initiative, said that a more challenging task is finding ways to retrofit existing systems.

Green Light for Wind-Energy Project

On January 3, Maine's Land Use Regulation Commission approved the final design of the Stetson Wind Project--a 38-turbine wind farm to be built on Stetson Mountain, in Maine's Washington County. The $100 million project is headed by UPC Wind of Newton, MA, and will be the biggest source of wind energy for New England.

An illustration of the Stetson Ridge with wind turbines. Credit: Natural Resources Council of Maine.

The wind farm is expected to generate 57 megawatts of electricity annually, a number comparable to the yearly electricity use of roughly 27,000 Maine households. Each turbine tower will stand 262 feet tall with a blade diameter of 253 feet. Power from the wind farm will flow into the New England Power grid.

A 42-megawatt, 28-turbine wind farm already exists in Mars Hill, ME, but with rising oil prices and the push toward renewable energy sources, the Stetson project proposal received little resistance from residents and lawmakers. Additionally, the largest wind farms in the United States can be found in Texas, California, and the Midwest. According to the American Wind Energy Association's annual U.S. wind-power rankings (as of December 31, 2006), Texas has installed 2,763 megawatts of wind energy, California follows with 2,361, and Iowa with 936.

Overall, the United States ranks third in the world, behind Germany and Spain, with a total installed wind-power capacity of more than 11,600 megawatts.