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Originally Posted by UtahBill  There is a serious flaw here. Natural gas makes up 22% of the fuels used to produce electricity. He wants to stop using natural gas in the production of electricity, and instead use that in our cars. He wants to use wind power to replace the gas that was used to make electricity.
Makes sense at first. But consider this....natural gas is the fuel we use for combined cycle gas turbine plants. The advantage of the gas turbine plants is that they can be used as peaking plants. Peaking plants get cycled on and off as load demands dictate. They can be started and shut down almost as easily as starting up your car. Coal and nuclear supply most of our base load, natural gas is used for peaking plants.
And peaking plants will be needed to produce electricity when the wind stops blowing.......
So, if we don't have natural gas to run the peaking plants, how to we maintain electrical generating capacity that is responsive to demand?
What do we do when the wind stops blowing? |
That isn't a flaw. His plan is to start with wind generation, and as that replaces natural gas for power generation, natural gas can then be used for cars:
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My plan calls for taking the energy generated by wind and using it to replace a significant percentage of the natural gas that is now being used to fuel our power plants. Today, natural gas accounts for about 22% of our electricity generation in the U.S. We can use new wind capacity to free up the natural gas for use as a transportation fuel. That would displace more than one-third of our foreign oil imports. Natural gas is the only domestic energy of size that can be used to replace oil used for transportation, and it is abundant in the U.S. It is cheap and it is clean.
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My Plan to Escape the Grip of Foreign Oil - WSJ.com
This will happen over a ten year period. Meanwhile, we will be investing in our own power transmission infrastructure and paying Americans to do the work.