Green Energy Potential in the US

The Natural Resources Defense Council has a new ugly map of green energy potential in the United States.



In the map layer shown above, darker shades of blue indicate higher wind energy potential. You can click on wind turbine icons to see details on individual facilities; it's a lot of good information, even if it is unattractively presented. It also has layers showing cellulosic biomass, biogas, and solar energy potential. The detail on the left shows the very high solar potential in the Southwest. The NRDC also has profiles on a few selected states, with more profiles in the offing.

The map complements this one, which they released a month ago, that looks at areas that would be harmed by the development of new renewable energy infrasructure. It appears to be the continuation of an effort on the part of the NRDC to try to define the terms of the debate as plans to invest in renewable energy go forward. Seems like a savvy thing to do.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory also has several good maps on green energy potential.

Environmentalists vs. Environmentalists

The Natural Resources Defense Council has worked with Google to create a Google Earth mapping tool which shows environmentally sensitive areas of the American West.



The NRDC, like a lot of environmental groups, is especially concerned about the potential damage to wildlife and ecosystems of developing the region's prodigious energy potential. The irony is that much of this energy is in the form of wind and solar power - the very resources which need to be developed if we have any chance of doing anything about global warming. Obama has made some pretty bold moves to invest in those renewable energy resources in the west: a big chunk of the recent stimulus was devoted to building up the infrastructure that is sorely needed if that energy is to be brought to market.

The problem is that that infrastructure - the wind towers and solar panels, and all the high-voltage electrical lines that will connect them to the national grid - can cause problems for wildlife. From a New York Times article on the NRDC map:

The wind industry publishes photos of cows grazing placidly around towers, and argues it is compatible with nature. But Brian A. Rutledge, executive director of the Audubon Society of Wyoming, said wildlife and domesticated species were different. “We have species of birds, for example, that won’t nest within 200 yards of a road, period,’’ he said. Some prairie birds will not venture anywhere near a vertical object like a tower or a power-line pylon, he said, probably because they are genetically imprinted to avoid natural vertical features, like trees, where predators perch. The lesser prairie chicken, he said, will not cross under a power line, even between widely spaced towers. “It becomes like a river down the middle of their population base,’’ he said.

One such species is the sage grouse, the range of which sits right in the middle of an area where a lot of new transmission lines are likely to be needed.

As the Times puts it, the map amounts to the "battle lines being drawn" by the NRDC and like-minded organizations - a declaration of where they intend to fight development. It depicts areas that are prohibited, such as natural parks and wilderness areas, where devlopment is already prohibited; restricted areas, where rules on the books limit development, often because of threatened species; and "areas that should be avoided" - where, in other words, development may be permitted, but the NRDC is prepared to fight it.

I'm sympathetic to the NRDC, and we should all hope that development takes place in the most ecologically sensitive way possible, yadda yadda. But this framing, from the Times article, really seems to miss the forest for the trees (or the world for the forest):

And while the battle lines are quite literally available with a few mouse clicks, the intent is not entirely hostile, with the national groups recognizing that the issue is environmental balance, pitting prairie species like the greater sage-grouse against animals like the polar bear, which lives on ice that is melting because of global warming, some of it probably caused by coal-fired power plants that wind and sun could partly replace.

What a trivialization of what global warming is all about! Polar bears pulling a dodo is the least of our worries when it comes to global warming. It's not the sage-grouse vs. the polar bear; it's the sage grouse versus massive ecological calamity and the possible meltdown of entire ecosystems, not to mention famine and the mass dislocation of human populations. I'm all for sage or any other kind of grouses; but if legal wrangling over their protected status holds up the development of one of the few promising options we have for getting off of fossil fuels, then I will be mighty annoyed.

But because I am a fair man, I will let the sage-grouse have the last word. Here is a detail of their range from the Google Earth map.

Renewable Energy and the Electrical Grid

Matt Yglesias posts a simple but interesting map of the United States' high-voltage electricity grid.



Yglesias quotes Bracken Hendricks, who says in an article for the Center for American Progress:

Although the United States has vast onshore wind resources—more than enough to supply 20 percent of the nation’s electricity demand by 2030, according to a recent Department of Energy study—the best of these wind resources are located primarily in remote regions of the country. These areas are generally located far from major centers of electricity demand and have little or no access to the “backbone” extra- high-voltage transmission lines that would be required in order to transmit power efficiently from these regions to major electricity markets.

Indeed, if you compare the power lines to the areas with wind and solar energy potential, it almost looks like they were trying to avoid those areas, especially the windy ones, as these maps from Hendricks' article show:




Of course, the people who built the grid weren't trying to avoid those areas - renewable energy production just wasn't a concern back then. This is a problem the United States has in a lot of areas - it was a world leader at building infrastructure back in the day, but all that once-state-of-the-art stuff is now getting old and obsolete. But instead of just throwing up a whole new infrastructure, like China can do in many cases, the US has to work with and around all the stuff that's already there. It's like learning to dance in middle age: the process is clumsy, slow, and generally awkward for everyone involved.

UPDATE: Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag just said this at a press conference:

In energy, reduce dependency on foreign oil and improve operational efficiency of gov't by 25% by 2013. $15 billion/year in energy efficiency investments, including creating an electricity superhighway that would allow transportation of wind energy from the Dakotas to the population centers that need the energy. This expenditure would be financed through cap-and-trade, in a "market-friendly" way.

You see the sort of influence this blog has?