So, about 35 years ago, I got a call one day from a fellow named Jeremy Stone.
And he said, Dennis, I've got a guy here I really want you to meet.
He's an environmentalist, but he's one of the smartest people I've ever met.
And I've been sort of processing this, he's an environmentalist, but he's smart, comment.
And from Jeremy, that was really something of a compliment, a fairly high bar.
For those of you of a certain age, he was I.F. Stone's son, so he spent his youth at
dinner with the leading leftist intellectuals of the Western hemisphere.
And he was then the executive director of something called the Federation of American
Scientists that had 90% of the Nobel Prize winners from the United States on its advisory
board.
So, my expectations in coming over to meet Phil Warburg were relatively high.
And I walked into the room and there's this guy sitting there, it looks like he's about
12 years old.
It was disconcerting, but we got into a conversation and in fact he presented a wealth of knowledge,
presented sort of humbly, and then talked strategically about a series of things that
were really important to me.
He was then working for Senator Percy on energy policy.
I had just taken a role in the Carter administration in energy policy.
And he was, well, those were the days when we had Republicans like John Lindsay, Bill
Ruckelshaus, Dan Evans, Chuck Percy.
I mean, they were very, very different from the kinds of polarized politics that we have
today.
And with guidance from Phil, Percy emerged as, on either side of the aisle, one of the
true energy leaders.
Among other things, he founded the Alliance to Save Energy, which is still arguably dominantly
the top lobbying group on industrial and commercial energy savings in the country.
And sort of from that beginning of kind of being awed by somebody who I was already at
the age that I was clearly capable of having been his father, this guy's career sort of
bounced around in a myriad of directions.
He went on to get his law degree from Harvard, which is the first indication that maybe he
wasn't quite as smart as Jeremy thought he was.
Went off to become a war correspondent in the Middle East.
Ran the largest environmental organization in Israel.
Did a number of projects in Jordan and in Gaza.
Was deeply involved in human rights issues.
And after things got particularly hairy over there, came back and took on the difficult
job of running the Conservation Law Foundation in New England, which is among regional environmental
groups in the United States, the premier organization.
It's the one that other, we don't have anything quite like it here.
We have the Northwest Energy Coalition, which does on energy regionally, what CLF does on
energy and toxics and wilderness and roads and what have you.
Just a super group.
Ran that for many years.
Got deeply involved in the Cape Wind Project, which everybody here mostly thinks of in terms
of the hypocrisy of the Kennedy family, but it was another one of these deep things.
He's been involved in nuclear issues.
It's how he cut his teeth on energy.
And in issue after issue after issue, war and peace, human rights, the environment,
sustainability, clean energy.
Phil has brought that same incisive intellect that he displayed that very first meeting
35 years ago.
So when I found out that he was writing a book on wind, I told him I'd love to do anything
that I could to promote it because I knew it would have a message that would be beautifully
crafted and persuasive.
And he's now completed the book.
He's here and delighted to introduce him to you.
Phil Warburg.
I want to talk about wind power tonight as a way to address three of the most critical
issues that we face in America today.
One of them is our lagging economy.
Wind power is a gateway to lots of American jobs, and I'll come back to describe some
of those jobs as we move through this discussion.
But they're well-paying jobs, and they're often jobs in remote areas where employment
is especially hard to come by.
The second issue is energy independence.
We get 45% of our oil today from foreign sources.
The good news is that's down from 60%, which was the percentage in 2005.
The bad news is that's still a staggering dependence upon a foreign energy resource,
and wind power can help us move away from that dependence upon foreign energy resources,
and I'll talk a little bit about how that's the case.
And the third issue that wind power helps us address is climate change.
I think of climate change as the Lord Voldemort of environmental issues in Washington.
It's the issue that can't be named because the fossil and nuclear fuel lobby is so powerful
in scaring Congress people away from even beginning to talk about climate change and
what we might do about it on a national level.
But it's an issue that we can't afford to ignore.
Global temperatures are rising.
Sea levels are rising.
Winds are acidifying.
Storm activity is increasing and intensifying.
I'm not sure what it will take to wake up the nation, and more particularly our nation's
sensible leaders, to how important and how crucial this issue is to address.
Wind power can help us begin to move in the right direction on that issue as well.
So how big a role can we expect wind power to play as we move toward the future?
Well, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the successor to the Solar Energy Research
Institute, produced this map showing the different levels of wind that are available across the
nation.
As you can see from the purple area stretching down from the Dakotas in the north on through
Texas in the south, that is our area of greatest wind resources.
However, we have superabundant wind resources across much of the nation, so much so that
the National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimates we could be getting 10 times our current total
power needs from land-based sources alone and from abundant wind areas alone.
If you throw offshore wind resources into the mix, that multiplier goes up to about
14 times our current power supply.
I have to be careful when I throw out those numbers.
In Chicago, I made a similar statement, and I was quoted, as you can see, saying, author
Philip Warburg says, America can increase electric power 10 times with wind.
Needless to say, as an environmentalist, my goal in life is not to get America to increase
its total power use by 10 times or, in fact, at all.
But it's to say that we can really turn to wind as a very significant power provider,
much more so than we are today, even though we're making a good start today.
What can we expect?
I talked about what the overall potential is, but what can we expect in the next few decades
if we were really to commit ourselves to developing wind power as a resource?
The Department of Energy under George Bush, interestingly, in 2008, came out with a study
called Wind Powering America 20% by 2030.
That study, as its title suggests, charts out a course to get us to be a fifth reliant
upon wind for our power needs by 2030, within two decades.
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory more recently has come out with a renewable electricity
futures study, and that study projects that wind and solar alone, using technology that
is commercially available today, could be providing half of our total power needs by
the middle of this century.
So we're not talking about some exotic hypothetical energy resource that we could have someday.
We're talking about a resource that is at hand and that could really be making a huge
dent in our fossil fuel emissions and our reliance upon nuclear energy.
Our use of wind power is by no means new.
Going back to colonial times, we used the wind to saw wood, to grind grain, to pump
water.
In fact, water pumping windmills like this one were used to open up vast stretches of
farmland and ranch land across the Midwest and the West in the late 19th century.
Hundreds of thousands of these were used at that time.
We often think about the railroads as opening up the West, which is in part true, but I
think we underrate the very, very important role that wind power, in fact, played in opening
up the West.
We've also used wind power for quite some time to generate electricity, not abundant
amounts of electricity.
This is called a wind charger, and it was used quite widely on farmsteads across the
country in the 20s, 30s, and even into the 40s a bit in areas that had not yet been reached
by rural electrification.
As you can tell by the design and by the 12 volt battery at the bottom, we're not exactly
talking about a huge power supply, but it was enough to get a trickle of electricity
into these households, to light some light bulbs, and perhaps more significantly, to
open up the radio airwaves to farmers and ranchers who, until that point, had been isolated
from that 20th century communications medium.
The anecdotal use of wind power to keep a few farmsteads lit and connected to the world
was obviously no match for the very large scale wind projects that developed in the
20s, 30s, 40s, 50s in the United States.
Hydro dams like the Hoover Dam, I actually just visited the Hoover Dam for the first
time last week.
Huge coal plants, oil plants and the like, generating lots of electricity.
Seemingly without grave side effects, we've only come more recently to realize just how
misguided our over-reliance on those technologies are.
I'm not talking about hydro, I'm talking about the coal and the oil.
In fact, what happened in the 1950s was in many ways more disturbing, and that was we
had a technology that was a war technology that utterly devastated Nagasaki and Hiroshima,
and there was a feverish attempt to come up with some way to create uses for the peaceful
atom.
We began to generate nuclear power vastly subsidized by the federal government through
research and development and through a liability cap on nuclear accidents, without which nuclear
power would never have gone anywhere.
All of this really pushed renewable energy to the side until the 1970s.
Two events really happened, or two phenomena really happened during the 1970s.
The first, which we've talked about a little bit, was Earth Day, 1970s.
You may recognize the person in this photograph.
He's in this room.
The growth in environmental awareness and the sense that, well, there might not be the
free lunch that we thought there was in terms of burning fossil fuels and relying upon nuclear
power.
Then the second major event was the Arab oil embargo of 1973.
At that point, with gas lines stretching around blocks and people becoming quite alarmed at
the first experience in their lifetimes, most of them unless they lived through World War
II, of energy shortage, people began to say, well, we better really try to figure out what
to do about this.
It was actually Richard Nixon who in 1974 in the waning days of his presidency proclaimed
a new initiative called Project Independence.
This Project Independence was targeted at making America 100% independent of foreign
energy resources by 1980.
Needless to say, that target was far from met.
He was really talking about developing coal in the West, opening up federal lands for
drilling oil and gas, that might sound like a recent Republican candidate for the presidency,
and expediting nuclear power plant licensing.
Solar was mentioned very briefly and as a distant prospect, and wind wasn't mentioned
at all.
But at least Nixon was waking up to the challenge of how do we move toward a more energy independent
America.
It was really Jimmy Carter who was the first president to put renewable energy squarely
on the national political agenda.
Very early in his term, he called for an energy plan that would get us to 20% reliance on
renewable energy by the year 2000.
Needless to say, we didn't meet that target, but Carter was earnest in, no one would accuse
Carter being anything but earnest.
He was earnest in trying to lay out a plan that just might get us there.
That plan included new laws that provided a way for independent power producers, including
producers of electricity from wind and solar and other renewable resources, to sell their
power to electric utilities for the first time.
He also vastly expanded the renewable energy research and development budget, created the
Solar Energy Research Institute, and promoted federal tax incentives for wind energy, solar
energy, and other renewable energy developers.
Symbolically, but importantly, he installed solar panels on the roof of the White House
as a gesture in the right direction.
Jimmy Carter's aspirations were more impressive than his mode of delivery.
I can tell that at least some people recognize this sweater.
In February of 1977, just a month after being elected, he delivered what has now become
known as the sweater speech.
He sat beside a roaring fireplace in the White House wearing this sweater and counseled
America on how we could move to a brighter, happier energy future.
Unfortunately, his recipe was not exactly a winning one.
He proposed that we all turn our thermostats down to 65 degrees during the daytime and
a bone-chilling 55 degrees at night.
Needless to say, this didn't go over terribly well.
But it showed his seriousness in helping Americans begin to think about how we could achieve
a level of comfort without relying upon the fossil fuels that we had been so accustomed
to relying upon for so long.
Then came Ronald Reagan.
When he rode into town in 1981, he lacerated Carter for promoting what he called the sharing
of austerity.
He blamed him for our disintegrating economy.
He really returned America to a approach to energy development, which we've come to associate
with Sarah Palin, a kind of baby drill mentality.
He pushed for the expedited extraction of gas and oil and coal.
He was an ardent proponent of nuclear energy.
In a kind of negative, cynical, symbolic gesture, he stripped the panels off of the White House
roof.
He also dismantled the energy incentives that made it possible for wind energy, solar energy,
and other renewable technologies to begin to compete with fossil and nuclear fuels.
So predictably, by the mid 1980s, the wind movement went from boom to bust.
There was another significant factor there, and that was the deregulation of natural gas.
But Ronald Reagan really set a very negative tone, and he backed that tone by stripping
away research and development funding for renewable energy.
Dennis can tell you a lot about that.
And really moved us away from the kind of future that Jimmy Carter hoped we would be
moving toward.
Thankfully, wind power is back on track today.
During the first four years of the Obama administration, we doubled our reliance upon wind power.
We get about 4% of our total power needs from wind today.
And that's enough to provide the power needs for about 13 million American households.
Some states, however, are way ahead of that curve.
South Dakota gets 22% of its power from wind.
Iowa generates about 20% of its power from wind.
Even Texas, which we think of as the big oil state, and which by the way is the largest
power consumer in the country, despite not having the largest population, gets about
7% of its power from wind.
That is actually a staggering number to consider when you're thinking about this technology
is one that until a few years ago we really hadn't heard very much about.
We have a long way to go, but we're definitely heading in the right direction.
Beyond generating a lot of power, a lot more could come, but a lot of power, wind power
also creates jobs.
And it creates jobs in the manufacturing sector, for example.
About 75,000 people are right now employed by the wind industry directly or indirectly.
Many of those are in the manufacturing sector.
And what has happened in the manufacturing sector is actually quite interesting.
We've all been reading in the press lots of coverage of how the Chinese are eating our
renewable energy lunch in the manufacture of renewable energy technology.
And that in fact is not really the case with regard to wind.
China is the largest producer of wind technology, but almost all of that technology is still
used in China.
It's not true of its solar technology.
95% of the panels that are produced in China are exported from China.
But wind turbines are a different story.
The average wind turbine that is put up on American soil today, about two-thirds of its
value is American-made.
And that percentage has gone up very significantly from five years ago when about a third of
the value of that turbine was American-made.
So we're definitely heading in the right direction.
But beyond generating jobs in the manufacturing sector, and I should mention, by the way,
that our overall expectation for job creation by wind power, if we were to follow the 2008
plan put out by the Department of Energy, would get us beyond a quarter of a million
jobs in the wind energy sector as we approach that 2030 goal of producing a fifth of our
power from wind by that date.
Jobs in the manufacturing sector, jobs in construction of wind farms, and jobs in the
operation and maintenance of wind farms.
Again, I can't see you, but what is the tallest ladder any of you have climbed?
20 feet.
20 feet.
Okay.
So wind technicians on a daily basis, and sometimes three or four times a day, have
to climb a 270-foot ladder to get to the mechanical operations room of a typical wind turbine.
Some turbines today have small elevators, but a lot of them still do not.
So it takes a robust physique, and frankly, also someone who's not averse to enclosed
spaces.
I actually tried to climb a wind turbine, and I do not love enclosed spaces, and I wouldn't
exactly describe myself as robust.
I made it to about 70 feet, and then decided I'd probably had enough.
I was taken to this wind turbine by a two-time Iraqi veteran, and I was a little afraid of
the dressing down I was going to get when I came down from my failed climb.
He was actually quite kind to me, and I related to him what my two daughters said to me when
they heard I was planning on climbing a wind turbine.
One of them said, well, of course you have to try to do it.
You're writing a book about wind.
And the other, who's a kind gentle type, said, you've got to be out of your mind.
You shouldn't do that.
They were both right in a way.
I want to say a few words about my book, Harvest the Wind.
The subtitle, America's Journey to Jobs, Energy Independence, and Climate Stability, is the
big picture story.
But there's another journey that this book really involved, and it was a personal journey
that I took far from my native New England.
As Dennis alluded to, the Cape Wind offshore wind farm was a major challenge for me when
I headed up the Conservation Law Foundation.
New Englanders like to think of ourselves as a light unto the nation, so to speak, environmentally
progressive and moving ahead of the curve.
And it frankly shocked me how much resistance there was to the Cape Wind offshore wind farm.
Now this is a wind farm whose closest landfall is about five miles from the outermost turbine.
And that would mean that if you were to hold your arm at full arm's length, the nearest
turbine would be about the size of your thumbnail.
So we're not exactly talking about something that is in your face.
Yet that was too much of a visual insult for many well-heeled New England vacationers,
including sadly Ted Kennedy.
Ted Kennedy, who was really a leader of pushing for the right kinds of energy policies over
several decades.
But when it came to the thought of looking at an offshore wind farm from the Hyannis
Port family compound, some other set of values kicked into play.
And he was very determined to stop this wind farm and actually work behind closed doors
in Congress, as well as being public in his opposition to this wind farm.
It was really my frustration and embarrassment, frankly, with our inability to move wind power
forward on a scale that could make a difference in New England that sent me to far-flung corners
of the nation, the red states.
And Cloud County, Kansas was one of my first stops.
Cloud County, Kansas is located about 140 miles north of Salina.
It is a very remote county.
It was settled in the late 1800s when the Kansas Pacific Railroad rolled through.
Its population peaked around 1910, and it's been in decline ever since.
So much so that one local commentator observed, it used to be that you could commit suicide
by laying down in the middle of Main Street on a Saturday.
The problem was you wouldn't die until Monday because there were so few cars.
The person who made that comment was Kirk Lowell, and he is the head of the Cloud County
Economic Development Agency, otherwise known as Cloud Corp.
And Kirk is an avid wind booster because he sees the jobs that it brings to Cloud County,
because he sees the economic development that it brings.
He does not talk about climate change.
Climate change is, again, that taboo subject.
He does talk about energy independence.
He's seen many Kansans go off to fight wars in the Middle East that he sees as being fought
at least substantially over our super dependence upon foreign energy resources, and he wants
to see that decline.
He again doesn't mince words in how he phrases things.
What he said to me was, either we'll have to put wind turbines on our Kansas prairie,
or we'll have to continue burying our fine young men and women under it.
The Meridian Way Wind Farm went into operation in December of 2008, and it has 67 turbines.
Those 67 turbines generate enough electricity for 55,000 Kansas and Missouri households.
About 300 jobs were created during the construction of this wind farm, many of them local, and
dozens of jobs are involved in the ongoing operation and maintenance of the wind farm.
So it's a great economic boon to the area in terms of jobs, but perhaps the most remarkable
thing that happened in Cloud County took place at Cloud County Community College.
Cloud County Community College in 2007 made a strategic bet on wind.
It created a wind technology training program, and it appointed this man, Bruce Graham, a
former high school science teacher, to head up the program.
At the time, there were about five students who were interested in the program, so the
college administrators leased out a little bit of classroom space sandwiched between
a pawn shop and a Chinese restaurant in the local shopping mall, and they set Bruce on
his way.
Well, today, there are over 100 students enrolled in this program, and as you can see from this
photograph, they're not all fresh scrub kids fresh off the farm, they're former army careerists,
they're school teachers, they're office administrators, they're refugees from the construction trades,
all eager to get in on the ground floor of an exciting technology that they see as really
paving our way to the 21st century.
But it's not just the jobs and the job training that have resulted from the Meridian Way Wind
Program and Cloud County's commitment to wind.
The farmers and the ranchers are also very significant beneficiaries.
People like Kurt Core and his mother, Helen.
I like to consider this photograph my tribute to Grant Wood's American Gothic.
The Cores have been farming and ranching in Cloud County since the 1880s, and they get
tens of thousands of dollars in annual lease payments from the wind developer.
There are dozens of other families like them in Cloud County, and it's a great hedge in
their view against the ups and downs in cattle and grain prices and the uncertainties of
Midwestern weather.
You know, we've all read about and perhaps experienced the horrible drought of this past
summer.
The wind farm continues to generate power and continues to pay those lease payments
to farmers and ranchers like the Cores.
Kurt has two sons who are now in college, and he's very hopeful that at least one of
them will come back to run the family farm.
And he feels that the guaranteed annuity that the wind farm developer pays over the next
25 years and maybe beyond that will be a major draw to bring perhaps one, perhaps two of
his sons back to the farm.
I don't want to paint an unqualifiedly rosy picture of how wind power is received, even
in a place like Kansas.
I went to another part of the state called the Flint Hills.
The Flint Hills is a stretch of tall grass prairie covering about 11,000 square miles.
It's a very large area.
It's the last large remaining stretch of untrammeled tall grass prairie.
And there are cow men and cow women who live in the Flint Hills who are dead set against
seeing vertical wind towers imposed upon their very horizontal horizon.
One of those opponents and really one of the ringleaders is a woman named Rose Bacon.
Rose actually grew up in Iowa, but she came to the Flint Hills when she was 11 years old
with her father to buy cattle, and she fell in love with the place.
Took a long time to get back there, but 20 years ago bought a farm and a ranch in the
Flint Hills and together with her husband Kent, a Vietnam War veteran, set up a cattle
operation.
I mentioned that Kent has a prosthetic leg that is especially bowed so that he can actually
sit on a horse and herd cattle.
They're devoted to the ranching tradition and they are adamant opponents of wind power.
Rose puts it in pretty unsparing terms when she talks about wind power.
She calls it a rape of the landscape.
Somewhat more temperate in his description of wind farms is Bill Browning.
Bill Browning is the guy in the white t-shirt on the left and he is a physician as well
as a multi-generational rancher.
Here's how he describes what he thinks wind power would do to the Flint Hills.
The beauty of the Flint Hills for me is where the hills meet the sky morning and evening
and the shadows come across the hills and make all the contours stand out.
If you're going to put a string of 400 foot steel behemoths across the horizon, it's gone.
The loneliness, the emptiness, the absence of the intrusions of people, all that would
be lost.
Rose and Bill and the people who are working with them to oppose wind power in the Flint
Hills will never forgive Pete Farrell for opening up his ranch to wind development about a decade
ago.
Pete decided that he felt it was time to move beyond fossil fuels.
He also saw the economic benefits of building a wind farm and he solicited wind developers
to come to his ranch and develop a project.
At the time I don't think he had a clue how vehement the opposition was going to be.
Once he pressed ahead, here's how he described what the situation was.
We had TV cameras in the courtrooms.
We had people pounding podiums and shaking their fists.
You think abortion is a hot issue.
Just try to build a wind farm in the Flint Hills.
Pete really sees himself as helping wean America off of fossil fuels.
Rose sees him as chasing after money.
Pete in fact won the battle in that there is a wind farm on his property, the Elk River
wind farm, but Rose won the war.
Governor Sam Brownback last year declared through executive order the creation of a
tall grass heartland.
That tall grass heartland covering about 11,000 square miles is now off bounds to future wind
development.
To be sure, wind power does have its downsides beyond the visuals.
We can debate the visuals.
I happen to think wind turbines are beautiful.
Other people think they're ugly.
Leaving that aside, there are some real environmental issues pertaining to wind power.
Some of those issues really derived from the wind farms that were built in a very hurried,
somewhat slapdash manner in the 1980s.
Wind farms that looked like this one.
This wind farm is just west of Palm Springs, California.
As you can see, the wind turbines are spaced very close to one another.
Their blades sweep close to the ground.
Though you can't tell from this picture, they spin at a very rapid rate of 30 to 40 revolutions
per minute.
Wind farms like this have been responsible for a disturbing number of birds being killed,
and in particular, raptors or predatory birds, and in particular, golden eagles at a few
of these wind farms.
A serious problem.
Fortunately, today, wind farms look very different and function very differently.
This again is Pete Farrell's wind farm on his ranch.
As you can see, the turbines stand much taller.
They're much more generously spaced across the landscape, and they actually spin at a
much slower speed of about 16 revolutions per minute.
Birds can navigate their way between them, can actually see the turbine blades spinning.
It doesn't mean that there's no risk to bird life.
There is a risk to bird life.
Smart sighting of wind turbines so that they're not sighted in areas where there are endangered
species, so that they're not sighted in major migratory flyways, can make a big difference.
Some wind farms are in fact sighted in migratory areas, and there is a wind farm in Bulgaria
that has used an interesting combination of human smarts and modern technology to minimize
any damage to bird life.
There's an on-site ornithologist at this wind farm, day in and day out, and that ornithologist
uses radar as well as visual sightings to determine when the wind farm should be shut
down.
He said in 2010 a flock of 30,000 white storks was passing through the area.
He ordered the wind farm shut down 37 times in two days, and not a single white stork
was harmed.
There are ways to get smarter about how we manage this technology.
There are issues with bats that I won't take the time to talk about right now, but there
are also smart ways to minimize the damage to bats from wind farms.
A further challenge facing wind power is, well, you can generate it in Wyoming or South
Dakota or North Dakota, but how do you get it to the population centers where it's really
most needed?
The answer is you have to build transmission lines.
Before people get too alarmed about that, I just want to remind you that there are now
2.4 million miles of gas pipelines in America, and we're going to see that number increase
very substantially with the fracking boom that is now upon us.
So yes, transmission is a challenge facing wind power as we begin to develop it on a
very substantial scale, but there is a market for this technology.
Renewable portfolio standards in places like California—by the way, California has the
most ambitious standard in the country, which is that it will be 33 percent reliant on renewable
resources for its power supply by 2020, which is a pretty remarkable goal.
I want to tell you about this guy before I get to the other challenge.
This is Bob Whitten, and he is a Wyoming rancher, and he has created an association.
It's called the Renewable Energy Alliance of Landowners, or REEL.
This alliance of landowners has assembled parcels of land totaling about 800,000 acres,
and they are marketing this acreage to various wind developers.
The challenge will be, again, to get the wind from those ranches down into the Las Vegas
area and on into Southern California.
But it's an interesting approach to be proactive in going after wind developers rather than
wind developers actually coming to individual landowners and cutting separate deals with
the landowners.
I'm very proud of the fact that he and his fellow REEL members are taking the challenge
upon themselves to line up wind development that can benefit them as well as our renewable
energy economy.
The other important piece of the puzzle in terms of transmission and how you manage wind
power is how do you deal with the fact that the wind doesn't always blow?
Same thing with solar energy.
You have abundant energy during the daytime.
You have none at night.
With wind, the pattern is somewhat different, but you've got to be able to manage a smart
grid.
You can't simply rely upon the kind of dumb grid that we've been using for the past several
decades where you turn on a coal plant or turn on a nuclear plant and it operates until
the day you decommission it.
Wind power is variable.
Well, there's a good news side of the story, and that is if we were to develop a network
of millions of electric vehicles, we would be providing a storage resource for wind generated
power.
Most of us don't drive more if we drive at all, and in Seattle I'm happy to see that
it looks like a lot of people actually don't drive, but those of us who do drive probably
don't drive more than a half hour, an hour, hour and a half, maybe two hours a day.
That means that there are 22 hours a day where you could be plugging in your vehicle and
having your local utility determine when to charge that vehicle and in fact when to very
carefully draw power off of that vehicle to even out the bumps in the wind generated power.
This is not high in the sky.
This can happen.
We're developing a smart grid on various levels.
Various appliances can be managed in this way.
I met with the head of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and he talked about
a refrigerator as not a single unit but as multiple units.
There's a defrost unit, there's a cooling unit, there's an ice maker, there are other
units I forgot which they are.
He said basically you don't care when each of those different units is operating.
What you want is to know that your beer is going to be cold when you want it and that
you've got ice.
The same thing with a car.
As long as you can get in the car in the morning and start it up and go to work, do whatever
you need to do, it can provide a wonderfully flexible battery resource that can get us
off of foreign oil because this is the linkage to energy independence.
Often people think, well, you're talking about oil and you're talking about wind power.
I don't get it because we don't generate that much power from oil these days.
Well, if we were to switch over a substantial portion of our car fleet to electricity, then
we would be serving that purpose of getting us off of foreign oil at least to a substantial
degree while creating the kind of storage resource that could really benefit a renewable
energy economy.
When we think about wind power, we can't think about it in a vacuum.
I often say wind power isn't clean energy, it's cleaner energy.
Every energy production technology creates some environmental harm.
The question is what is the lesser evil and what is the greater evil?
What wind power will allow us to do is move away from our dependence upon more harmful
forms of energy production, electricity production, one of those obviously being nuclear.
I had a professor in graduate school who taught me statistics and I don't remember much about
the course, but I do remember his mantra which was, rare events do happen.
We've seen, unfortunately, with the Fukushima disaster, with the Chernobyl disaster, that
these kinds of rare events actually do happen and they cause havoc to hundreds of thousands
of people.
They create devastated landscapes for decades.
In addition, nuclear power is a technology that does not have all the pieces in place
yet.
The other day I was trying to find the Yucca Mountain Reserve in Nevada.
It's a hidden reserve down a long, dusty road.
There is no acceptable long-term means of nuclear waste storage and disposal today.
If you read the news about what is happening in Iran, the slippery slope between civilian
uses of nuclear power and weapons production is a very precarious one and may well lead
us into the next major regional war in the Middle East.
Wind power also lets us move off of coal.
To get coal, you create mines like this, open pit mines in the west or mountaintop removal
mines in the east.
Terrible damage to the environment, but beyond the damage caused by mining, the burning of
coal obviously creates huge problems for human health and even huger problems for the global
environment in terms of the greenhouse gas emissions that are going to compromise our
children's and our grandchildren's livelihoods and well-being.
Wind power is not a panacea, but it is a very promising technology.
It's a technology that is known today.
We've worked out a lot of the kinks in the technology.
What we need is really the political will to move it forward on a scale that can really
help us create a more sustainable energy future.
That's what I'd like to say.
Could you put some dollars to some of these farms and stuff like, for example, the gentleman
in that area where wind power is generally unpopular who went ahead and installed some
wind things.
How much money does he get per acre, say, for his cattle or wheat or whatever he does
there versus how much he can get for the turbines?
It's a huge difference.
The average wind turbine takes up a quarter to a half of an acre.
It cannot be used for anything else?
It cannot be used for anything else.
If you have a 2,000-acre farm, and a lot of these farms are very big, and you have four
to eight turbines on your property, you're talking about taking a couple of acres out
of production.
Negligible.
The equivalent, if you're raising cattle on that land or growing wheat on that land, you're
probably getting in the hundreds of dollars.
If you're getting $8,000 per turbine, which is a typical price that you would be getting
per year for leasing your land, it's a very real advantage.
You also get paid for the access roads to the turbines.
The Core family, which I portrayed here, has a transformer station on their property.
Altogether, they actually get very close to $100,000 for their lease payments.
They also get... By the way, they don't talk about... It was a secret agreement, so I
don't know why I'm surmising, but that's a responsible guess.
They also get a royalty per kilowatt hour produced.
They get substantial payments, and it can make a big difference to people out there
working hard to make a living.
Do you think those parts of the country that are now agricultural, but are running out
of water, could just become wind farmers instead of...
I think one of the things that's appealing about wind power is actually it's not an
either or choice.
You can continue to farm, you can continue to ranch, because you're basically taking
almost no land out of production.
You can farm your crops right around the wind turbine and let your cattle graze right around
the wind turbine.
Yeah, but if the water becomes so short that you can't do any of those normal farming
kind of things, could you still just become wind farmers?
Sure.
Absolutely.
In arid parts of the country, solar energy becomes a very viable option where you actually
really can't grow anything.
A lot of the areas I'm showing have a reasonable amount of water, so that's not been such an
issue and cattle are not terribly water intensive.
In the ranch lands I was showing you, again, I don't think it's a trade off.
Who owns the electrical grids?
I know in Germany some people got together and purchased the grids and it was kind of
a co-op thing.
I, in fact, know a person that lives here in Seattle where that's what they did.
What do we need to do here in America so that we can make those grids available to people
who want to put up the wind farms?
It seems like in North Dakota, for example, it's very difficult to get wind electricity
on those grids.
Grids are often owned by individual utilities.
There are some merchant developers of new transmission lines.
For example, coming out of Wyoming, there are some private developers who are banking
on wind.
They're lining up a certain number of wind farms and on that basis they'll build new
transmission corridors that are wind dedicated, you could say, going down into, again, Las
Vegas and over into California.
One of the challenges we face with our grid in America is that it really grew from the
ground up.
That is to say, first it was local, now it's essentially dominated by states and we don't
have a very coherent federal framework for the development of a transmission grid.
We have various associations that try to make the grid more coherent, but federal policy
is much weaker in developing transmission corridors than it is in, for example, developing
gas pipelines.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Authority controls the siting of gas pipelines.
It does not control the siting of transmission lines.
People are working to create more coherent multi-state, what are called balancing authorities,
so that you can actually create a better integrated grid.
It is a situation where the regulatory framework is rushing to catch up with the technological
reality.
Hi, Phil.
Nancy Hirsch with the Northwest Energy Coalition.
Again, I want to thank you for coming to Seattle and telling really wonderful stories about
the people you met and the issues you've dealt with.
It really creates a nice picture for folks to be able to think about a technical issue
in real terms.
I wanted to make two comments and one question, if I could sneak in two comments.
One, on your comment about electric vehicles, in the Pacific Northwest we've had a pilot
project where we're using water heaters to store electricity, just like you would use
the electric battery to store electricity.
Now they can put a monitor on your water heater and raise the temperature just a little and
lower the temperature just a little and store excess electricity in your water heater.
It's been very successful, very interesting.
People don't know the difference in the temperature of their water.
Again, an effective use of existing technology.
The second comment is about the intersection between retiring coal plants and building
new renewable energy projects and the transmission lines.
There are a lot of coal plants out in the rural areas and that's where a lot of wind
resource and solar resources are.
We may not need to build as much new transmission as we think we might if we're retiring coal
and putting wind on those existing power lines.
Again, it's something we're looking at in the West and trying to explore the connection
of those two issues.
My question relates to mobilization and politics.
You said you visited a lot of the red states.
We find in the Northwest that a lot of our wind and renewable energy resources is east
of the mountains in areas a little less progressive than the Western Washington, Western Oregon.
Even though communities benefit from renewable energy and have economic development opportunities,
mobilizing them to engage in the policy debate to support broad statewide or regional policy
or national policy in support of renewable energy development is still a challenge.
I'm wondering if you have experiences where the folks in those heartland states have turned
the corner to actually engage in the political debate against their natural political party
leanings to promote renewable energy.
Thank you.
First, that's great to hear the experimentation that's happening here with the water heaters.
There are a whole variety of ways you can store wind generated electricity.
Another way that is used out here that is more conventional and less innovative is pumped
storage.
You pump water into storage reservoirs and then release that water when you need to to
even out the grid.
That's terrific.
One of the interesting things I think about wind power is that it really does cut across
partisan lines.
This is where I think Mitt Romney frankly really missed the boat.
He came out very explicitly opposed to the extension of the production tax credit for
wind energy.
Many Republican members of Congress and governors took him to task for that because they felt
that he was not representing the interest of core Republican constituency.
I don't think it's really a partisan issue and it has been used as a political football
during the presidential campaign.
But when you really look at district by district, there are several members of Congress in Kansas
for example who have come out very explicitly in favor of renewing the production tax credit.
So I think there's hope in that regard.
There are obviously various third rails.
Talking about a carbon tax or any kind of a carbon management regime is something that
you're not going to get people in those constituencies to really talk about or engage.
But I think if you're just looking at wind and jobs and energy independence, good American
issues, apple pie, that's fine.
And frankly my book was written very explicitly to emphasize those pieces of the puzzle.
It's not a coincidence that climate stability comes at the end of the list because I really
wanted to talk about the kinds of issues that can cross cut various constituencies in America.
If wind power continues to grow and looking at places that don't have access to hydro
is back up, how much fossil fuel generation will we need to build to provide for reserves
and who's going to pay for that?
Well the reality is we're not going to see fossil fuel use disappear in the coming decades.
Natural gas is very cheap today.
It will not remain that cheap.
I think we've seen the fluctuations in natural gas prices over past years and decades.
My question more is in terms of the fact that the wind power is not consistent and when
it goes down, you've got to have something ready to go and it's hard to power.
I mean hydro you can do instantaneously pretty much.
But other things have to be at least sort of humming along and unfortunately those other
systems only operate efficiently at full capacity.
So how are we going to balance that out and who will pay for that?
I mean we've got an issue here with wind producers sometimes wanting payment for, I mean you
can sometimes have more than you can use and you can't store the energy and distance does
matter.
So it's not that easy to get things, I mean we can definitely improve but it's not that
easy to get it from that wind corridor or someplace else.
I think there are various ways that we can create a smarter grid.
One of the ways frankly is to create a larger more integrated grid so that if you have what's
called a balancing area that encompasses multiple states, you might have a wind farm in the
Columbia Gorge that is not producing very much at a certain point in time but a wind
farm in Wyoming may be producing a huge amount of wind.
And if they're part of the same general power network, you're going to create a much more
even flow of power across that network.
I don't think there's a unitary answer.
I think we've gotten too used to simple technology fixes whether it's nuclear power or fracked
natural gas or whatever it might be.
We have to create a more complex, more sophisticated grid that involves demand management so that
whether it's water storage or operating commercial refrigerators or operating air conditioning
units, there are a whole variety of technologies that we can control in a much more modulated
way and that we have the wherewithal to do so because of computer technology today.
And that will take an investment but it needs to happen.
Denmark is an interesting example.
Denmark has a commission on climate change that has come out with a roadmap to a non-fossil
fuel future by 2050.
And they expect that by 2050 they will be 80% reliant upon wind power to generate their
electricity.
And they'll do so to a substantial degree by drawing Norwegian hydropower into their
network when they need to.
I mean, that hydropower is a backup.
I understand.
It works but otherwise it doesn't.
As I said, there's no simple unitary solution.
I think it's a combination of various technologies, various management tools that we are going
to need to use.
And we're going to be, for better or for worse, using natural gas for decades to come to a
certain degree.
My question is about transmission lines, alternating current, direct current.
Is there some slicker way to do transmission?
The solar start with indirect or direct and goes to indirect.
I think transmission is viewed as a bigger obstacle than it needs to be.
Some people talk about, well, there are enormous losses involved in transmitting electricity
over great distances.
If you are transmitting electricity over 1,000 miles, you're probably losing about 5% of
the electricity over 1,000 miles.
And if you're generating electricity basically for nothing in Wyoming because you don't pay
for the wind, then it's not such a problem.
And you're getting a super abundant resource that you're able to tap and you're losing
a certain small percentage of it along the way.
So it's 5% per 1,000 miles.
Roughly speaking, yeah.
Okay.
Thank you so much.
My name is Craig Zumbrunnen.
I'm one of those people that is doing penance in my current life because as a teenager,
I paid for college by removing windmills in Minnesota.
And now teach a lot of courses dealing with energy and renewable energy and climate change
at the University of Washington.
I'm intrigued about North Dakota and the Bakken formation and fracking at the same time as
underground, above ground, the potential there for I think pretty major wind development.
Do you know of any effort for the people to really be talking to each other about that?
Tell me more about the problem.
Well, I mean, more I mean, on the one hand, I see the fracking as a problem we're developing
that really could have very, very long-term negative implications for groundwater contamination
and so forth.
But to get these same some of the people to talk together, see if they can find some things
in common positive or is it an area of conflict?
Well, I think one thing that is going to happen with wind powers compared to gas over the
coming years is wind power's price is going to come down because the technology is getting
cheaper.
Gas is going to go up.
We're seeing a heyday in cheap gas.
And when I was working for the Conservation Law Foundation, we were concerned about a
number of natural gas terminals that were going to be built in New England to bring
natural gas from abroad because we were over consuming.
Right?
Now those same terminals are being discussed for export purposes.
Once we begin to export natural gas, that price is going to go up.
Right now, natural gas in Asia is about 10 times as expensive as it is in America.
In Europe, it's about six times as expensive as it is in America.
We're enjoying this moment in time, but I don't think it will go on for very long.
This onboard tracking here of the natural gas, just the last few years, has that come
in place as a real obstacle to wind power?
In terms of price right now, wind power is cheaper, much cheaper than building a new
coal plant, especially with the greenhouse gas regulations that the Obama administration
has put into place on new coal-fired power plants.
It's much cheaper than new nuclear power.
The competitor is gas.
And gas right now is somewhat cheaper than wind.
And that's why the production tax credit is so crucial, because it levels a very uneven
playing field.
Barack Obama tried to strip away some of the enormous tax benefits to the oil and gas industries
and was shot down by the Senate.
If we can't politically reduce those subsidies, then we have to be subsidizing the right technologies
from an environmental standpoint.
And again, if we can't get to the point where we can tax carbon emissions, then a good surrogate
is a production tax credit and various other incentives for the wind industry and the solar
industry.
I guess we have...
Okay, you've partly answered my question, but if we were to look per kilowatt hour at
the cost of electricity and say we have a nuclear plant, we have a coal plant, we have
a natural gas plant, and we have a wind farm, getting rid of all the subsidies and say this
is the actual cost of producing a kilowatt hour and hydroelectric, which I assume is
the cheapest.
But if you looked at all the subsidies gone, what's the cheapest?
What is the price ratio?
I think you have to look at the full costs of every energy technology.
And if you were to strip away the subsidies, you're still left with the situation where
you're not having the coal industry, having the gas industry, having the oil industry,
having the nuclear industry.
They are the full costs, environmental costs of the technology that they're creating.
We're not paying for carbon emissions.
We're not paying for the enormous damage we're doing to the global environment through allowing
our greenhouse gas emissions to continue unabated.
And if we're not able politically to tax those emissions, it's very hard to say, then it's
not a level playing field.
Simply removing subsidies is not creating a level playing field.
You haven't really answered my question, though.
If I'm Joe Businessman and I want to start a factory and I want to buy electricity, or
I'm China, or anywhere I am, and I want to know how much does it cost me per kilowatt
hour to produce this electricity?
Forget the carbon emissions.
Forget all the other stuff, because I just want to produce electricity for my consumption
in business.
Right?
And as I said, the coal industry right now is not building new power plants because it
regards those power plants as too expensive.
So wind is a winner with respect to coal.
The nuclear industry has very, very, very few plants in the pipeline because it is so
expensive to build those plants.
And post-Fukushima in particular, because people are all of a sudden saying, hmm, maybe
the safeguards we've got aren't sufficient.
Gas is the big question mark in that gas is very cheap right now, and we're producing
it in very large quantities.
And without any subsidies, gas will win.
I have to say there's a non-market factor that is a very important factor, and that
is the fact that over, that 29 states plus the District of Columbia have what are called
renewable portfolio standards, which set a minimum amount of electricity that utilities
in those states have to get from renewable resources.
So that's a significant driver as well in moving people toward renewable energy, and
I think it's a very important driver.
Yeah, I was just going to say, what I think you were talking about is the externalities
of the production.
And there are many countries around the world that calculate the pollution that coal and
other greenhouse gas producers into the cost.
And so there is no basic cost when you have a regulatory framework that says the damage
you do is also a cost.
So I think that if I understood right, that you were, that's what we're getting at.
But my own, I have one slight point and one slight question.
And the point was about the people on the other side of the mountains, although we shouldn't
characterize or caricature them.
If they took a little history lesson, they would look back before John Lindsay and some
of the people of the 60s and the 70s, they could look back very easily to the period
of the 1920s and 30s at people like Gifford Pinchot and George Norris, who were among
the key proponents.
And surprisingly, in Democratic administration of Franklin Roosevelt, Republicans were among
the key proponents of rural electrification.
And that's a history that they don't know or don't remember or don't want to remember.
So I think in terms of having a public relations strategy, a history lesson would be helpful
to those people.
And I'm not just saying that because I'm a historian.
The second point was to make a distinction between transmission and distribution lines.
If I understand correctly, this also involves a matter of regulation.
If you have got a wind plant somewhere out in the middle of Kansas, yes, you have to
build, it's not a distribution line, it's a transmission line, but it's a short transmission
line to a national or to a big transmission line.
So when it gets to the big transmission line, it's not like you've got to build a line
from Wyoming all the way to New York or all the way somewhere else.
They can use the existing transmission lines or it's a question, and this is a question,
or it's a question of passing the appropriate regulation that allows open access.
And this is what they do in oil pipelines and gas pipelines.
It's common all around the world to have one company own the actual stanchions or the actual
pipe, but the laws permit everyone to use it and not to be gouged for the fact that
they use it as long as there's capacity.
So I think what you're saying is we shouldn't over-exaggerate the need to build pylons.
It's just getting solar and wind energy from the source to the main transmission.
Am I hitting the right direction there?
I wish you were, honestly, because it would make my case easier.
In some cases, all you have to do is create what's called a connector line from your wind
farm to a transmission line.
Distribution lines actually happen at the other end.
They happen from the transmission line to the household or to whatever.
And that is, for example, the Meridian Way Wind Farm in Cloud County was sited very close
to an existing transmission line, which made it a lot cheaper for it to go forward.
If you're talking about opening up major new areas to wind development, rural areas where
there aren't necessarily those transmission lines, you're going to have to build new transmission
lines.
So there really is a long-range transmission challenge that we can't duck.
It's part of the, I think, development of a 21st century power-generating infrastructure.
Yeah.
Just a quick follow-up.
If there were transmission lines, is it a question of technical ability to carry them,
or is it a question of regulatory changes?
First, there is an open access requirement by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission
in terms of getting onto that transmission line.
But transmission lines have a maximum capacity, and a lot of them are already maxed out.
That's a lot of the challenge.
So it's a dual problem, but part of it is regulatory and part of it is technical.
If I'm saving myself on that.
Yes.
Okay.
Thank you.
My comment and question closely follow this gentleman's in terms of transmission lines.
I understand that there is a very long process for citing and permitting new transmission
lines.
I've heard numbers in up to 8 to 12 years for that.
About a year ago, I was driving from Austin across West Texas and was quite impressed
by the number of wind turbines I saw out there.
As I traveled along the freeway, it was kind of speculating on the amount of space available
in the median of the freeway that is already dedicated to a purpose and is not going to
be used for anything else.
What's the possibility of citing transmission lines along those rights of way?
You often see I was driving through much of Nevada last week.
Many of the larger transmission lines actually do parallel.
They're not necessarily in the median strip, but they parallel highways and gas pipelines
and other transmission corridors.
So there is a possibility to aggregate those different transmission resources.
I'm not sure you're going to gain too much by literally putting those stanchions in the
median.
They could even be buried in the median.
That's a very costly enterprise.
Thank you.
I think there are two more questions.
While I've been standing here, three other issues have come up.
I'm very lucky, I think in most cases, to be bicoastal these days.
Live in Redmond eight months of the year and then four months on Block Island, Rhode Island.
I know Cape Wind very much.
I was going to start to talk about public process, but I can't help myself to talk about
costs.
I think all of us tend to, those of us that have considered ourselves green long before
it was PC, we like to think of ourselves as analytical, logical, and we never make decisions
based on emotion.
What I have learned is that even environmentalists have heartstrings that get pulled, and they
get pulled on very often.
When we see the picture of the farmers who obviously are struggling, and it's part of
our DNA in the United States about how important farming is, although we are learning what
can be farmed in cities.
I'm a real believer these days in generating as much energy where we use it, so we don't
need those big installations.
I think there's no discussion about the farmer that gets paid, and the comment was, well,
it gets paid the annuity by the developer.
In reality, the developer is making a tremendous return on investment.
That farmer is really being paid by rates that are raised on regular rate payers.
I don't think it's as forthcoming.
It sounds like there's somebody out there, but in reality, that developer is getting
the PTCs.
The developers are not in this business for altruism.
They're in to make money.
I would question the costs.
You know much more about Cape Wind, but when other renewables are available in the United
States at 11 cents or 12 cents, Cape Wind at 18.9, or deep water wind that I know really,
really well, and I have a piece of property on Block Island if you'd like to buy it and
look at 65-story turbines at two miles, so how big is the thumb?
I use the analogy.
I was a former elected official, and Dennis knows my track record.
I was very green, and it's very hard to oppose offshore wind, but I feel like I have a lot
more knowledge and facts.
The question is going to be about his comment about who really is paying for renewables,
and I think that it's very different based on the technology.
Then I did want to ask a question about public process, because in the Northwest, we believe
in a public process, but when it comes to renewables and the siting of renewables, the
process is really, as a person who's tried to be involved in it, is very complex.
It is very exclusive.
You have to hire utility attorneys and experts to make the case, and I'd like your reflection
on is public process really serving the public and the common good, and about the costs,
about who's really paying and to what extent.
When we first got recycled paper, we were all willing to pay 10% more.
Okay.
I got the idea.
But do we want to pay 100% more?
Right.
Well, as I've said, I think wind power is significantly cheaper than other energy technologies,
so we're not talking about a fantastically expensive technology.
Offshore wind is more expensive.
One of the reasons that I was very interested in traveling across much of the nation was
to see wind power developed in areas where it really is almost as cheap as natural gas.
When I started out, natural gas was more expensive, in fact, it was cheaper than natural gas.
I don't think that there's some boondoggle there going on.
We're looking at hard-headed business people who are going to make a responsible decision
about whether they build a wind farm or build a gas-fired power plant.
Many of them are opting for wind, not because it's some hugely profitable enterprise, but
because there might be some marginal benefit to their developing a wind project.
I frankly don't see anything wrong with that.
In terms of public process, I'm not quite sure what your point is.
One of the problems with the Cape Wind project was the public process has gone on now for
11 years.
It's not as if there's been a lack of public process there.
It's been a painstaking process of review and then revision and then review and then
revision, and finally they're at the end of that road.
But 17 different federal and state agencies were involved in reviewing that project, and
there were endless public meetings, believe me, on the subject.
So there's one more comment.
Thank you all for listening to all this.
My question is, do you think there's any connection between the fact that wind power prices were
pushing down, according to something I read, the conventional electric prices in Texas
and in Colorado, and that natural gas prices just went, boom, dropped at about the same
time that Congress was starting to talk about renewing the wind tax credits with this kind
of competition being set up.
I think there was, am I paranoid or was there collusion with natural gas to try and predatory
price down and keep the credits from coming?
My gut says that natural gas is becoming cheaper because fracking is so poorly regulated, so
if there are environmental externalities associated with natural gas, we're not paying them yet.
So I think that's part of the deal where the business sector is way ahead of the regulatory
process and we're not yet really looking very seriously at what the full consequences are
of natural gas development.
I don't think it's collusion.
I think it's regulatory lag.
So thank you all very much for coming.