Obama's Energy Promises

I receive a newsletter called the The Energy Advocate whose author has little tolerance for most of the claims made for alternative/renewable energy sources and all that Obama and his minions have promised, particularly on the campaign trail. The facts usually prove troubling to politicians.

This is an example of a claim and the facts behind it that I couldn't pass up, so I'll pass it on.

TEA quotes an Obama promise: "...double the amount of energy that comes from renewable sources during my first term."

TEA analysis:

"This may sound may sound like an intention to bring common sense to Washington. But what does it mean? Almost all of our renewable energy - a total of 7% of our energy - comes from biomass and hydropower. Wind and solar together produce only 6% of that 7%, less than 1/2% of what we use.

If Obama's plan is to double the wind and solar, we would still be getting less than 1% of our energy from them, and all at very high cost. If his plan is to double the 7%, how might he accomplish it? Go find some undiscovered big rivers? Send more people out with chainsaws? In any case, the dubious doubling will come by executive fiat, not by market forces."

TEA also quotes Obama and provides his assessment:

The plan "to require that 25% of electricity consumed in the U.S. is derived form clean, sustainable energy sources like solar, wind and geothermal by 2025" is both delusional and coercive. Presently, the U.S. uses 444 GigaWatts of electrical power (averaged around the clock all year). Twenty five percent of that is 111 GigaWatts. Since it takes about 300 square miles (770 sq. km) for wind to produce a year round average of 1 GigaWatt, Obama is talking about 33,000 square miles cluttered up with industrial wind turbines. (We exclude both solar and geothermal from this discussion.) That's about 6 times the land area of Connecticut, or one third the land area of Colorado. Again, inflicting the expense and the blight on the landscape will come by executive fiat.

The 25% plan also assumes that that quantity of stochastically varying [Editor's note: A stochastic process is one whose behavior is non-deterministic in that a system's subsequent state is determined both by the process's predictable actions and by a random element] electricity could actually be integrated into the power grid, even though 10% is enough to make the life of a dispatcher worse than that of an air traffic controller."