Take a minute to go over this article concerning Wind Energy and our other sources of energy.
A Clean, Green Non Sequitur
By Jane Van Ryan | Friday 8 April 2011"These are not your father's windmills," President Obama said this week during a visit to the Gamesa wind turbine plant outside Philadelphia. "This is the future of American energy." That's a strong statement coming from the President of the United States, and it has some critics shaking their heads over the administration's energy policy. As the president has stated, his goal is to reduce oil imports by a third by 2025 and produce 80 percent of America's electricity from alternative and renewable sources by 2035.
Are his objectives realistic? In an Op-Ed published in the Houston Chronicle, Robert L. Bradley Jr. of the Institute for Energy Research says the administration's proposals are not based on "an objective analysis of the facts."
Image Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration
The chart above comes from the U.S. government's own U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), which is responsible for examining and reporting U.S. energy statistics. As the chart shows, renewables accounted for about 7.7 percent of America's total energy consumption in 2009, and wind power accounted for only 0.7 quadrillion BTUs of the total estimated 90 quadrillion BTUs consumed in the United States that year.
Also, the amount of energy provided by wind and other renewables for transportation is quite small. EIA analysis shows that oil provides 94 percent of U.S. transportation fuels. With an estimated 250 million vehicles in the United States, EIA also forecasts that oil will continue to provide at least a third of U.S. energy supplies by 2035. The majority of cars on the road today will never run on anything but oil products; they won't plug in to use electricity of any sort--wind, coal, solar or nuclear.
Image Source: Energizing America, page 24
The president also said on Wednesday that "energy should not be a polarizing issue," pitting a "pointy-headed environmentalist type" against the "tough guy" who favors more oil drilling. API agrees that energy policy should be nonpartisan and based on the facts, but the president himself has turned energy policy into a divisive topic of conversation. His administration has a clear record of actions, including an offshore moratorium and permitorium, that have reduced U.S. oil and natural gas development.
The last time we checked, there were some 9.2 million Americans whose jobs were supported by U.S. oil and natural gas industry, including me. If that makes me a tough guy who supports drilling for America's own energy resources, so be it. I'm honored to wear the label.
Information about other tough guys in the industry can be found here.
I agree that we need to have multiple resources for energy, but let's continue to use oil until everything else is as efficient! Now that's the All Right Idea!