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By Lester R. Brown
Environmental News Network
Gas-electric hybrids and wind power offer winning combination.
With the price of oil above $50 a barrel, with political instability in the Middle East on the rise, and with little slack in the world oil economy, we need a new energy strategy. Fortunately, the outline of a new strategy is emerging with two new technologies.
These technologies--gas-electric hybrid engines and advanced-design wind turbines--offer a way to wean ourselves from imported oil. If over the next decade we convert the U.S. automobile fleet to gas-electric hybrids with the efficiency of today's Toyota Prius, we could cut our gasoline use in half. No change in the number of vehicles, no change in miles driven--just doing it more efficiently.
There are now three gas-electric hybrid car models on the market: the Toyota Prius, the Honda Insight, and the hybrid version of the Honda Civic. The Prius--a midsize car on the cutting-edge of automotive technology--gets an astounding 55 mpg in combined city/highway driving. No wonder there are lists of eager buyers willing to wait six months for delivery.
Ford has just released a hybrid model of its Escape SUV. Honda is about to release a hybrid version of its popular Accord sedan. General Motors will offer hybrid versions of several of its cars beginning with the Saturn VUE in 2006, followed by the Chevy Tahoe and Chevy Malibu. Beyond this, GM has just delivered 235 hybrid-powered buses to Seattle with the potential to reduce gasoline use there by up to 60 percent. Other cities slated to get hybrid buses are Philadelphia, Houston, and Portland. Hybrid engines are catching on.
With gas-electric hybrid cars now on the market, the stage is set for the second step to reduce oil dependence, the use of wind-generated electricity to power automobiles. If we add to the gas-electric hybrid a plug-in capacity and a second battery to increase its electricity storage capacity, motorists could then do their commuting, shopping, and other short-distance travel largely with electricity, saving gasoline for the occasional long trip. This could lop another 20 percent off gasoline use in addition to the initial 50 percent cut from shifting to gas-electric hybrids, for a total reduction in gasoline use of 70 percent.
The plug-in capacity gives access to the country's vast, largely untapped, wind resources. In 1991, the U.S. Department of Energy published a National Wind Resource Inventory in which it pointed out that three of our 50 states--Kansas, North Dakota and Texas--have enough harnessable wind energy to satisfy national electricity needs. Many were astonished by this news since wind power was widely considered a marginal energy source.
Yet in retrospect, we know that this was a gross underestimate simply because it was based on the wind turbine technologies of 1991. Advances in design since then enable turbines to operate at lower wind speeds, to convert wind into electricity more efficiently, and to harness a much larger wind regime.
The average turbine in 1991 was roughly 120 feet tall, whereas new ones are 300 feet tall--the height of a 30-story building. Not only does this more than double the harvestable wind regime, but winds at the higher elevation are stronger and more reliable.
In Europe, which has emerged as the world leader in developing wind energy, wind farms now satisfy the residential electricity needs of 40 million consumers. Last year, the European Wind Energy Association projected that by 2020 this energy source would provide electricity for 195 million people--half the population of Western Europe. A 2004 assessment of Europe's offshore potential by the Garrad Hassan consulting group concluded that if European governments move vigorously to develop this potential, wind could supply all of the region's residential electricity by 2020. Wind power is growing fast because it is cheap, abundant, inexhaustible, widely distributed, clean, and climate-benign. No other energy source has all of these attributes. (See data at http://www.earth-policy.org/Updates/Update43_data.htm.)
The cost of wind-generated electricity has been in free fall over the last two decades. The early wind farms in California, where the modern wind industry was born in the early 1980s, generated electricity at a cost of 38 cents per kilowatt-hour. Now many wind farms are producing power at 4 cents per kilowatt-hour, and some long-term supply contracts have recently been signed at 3 cents per kilowatt-hour. And the price is still falling.
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