Energy Crisis? What Energy Crisis?
As of December 2007, the Mideast War has cost a total of 1.4 Trillion dollars. That’s $1,400,000,000,000. It’s too big a number for most people to get a handle on, but not too big to do some calculations.
Many say the war is all about energy – oil, to be specific. And what do we use oil for? Primarily for transportation, but oil and natural gas can also be used to produce electricity. And vehicles can run on electricity even better than they can run on oil.
As a mental exercise, suppose we used all that money to build windmills to make electricity. $1.4 Trillion is enough to build over a MILLION of them! That’s one for every 300 people in the US. A million windmills could produce 24 billion kilowatt hours daily. That’s enough energy to provide 100% of the electricity used daily in the US, plus enough available energy to provide for the needs of the entire automobile and trucking fleets. And all that energy would be clean, non-polluting, and completely renewable. Don’t forget that windmills don’t need fuel, they require only to be built and maintained.
Just look at some numbers:
I know my numbers may be off quite a bit in terms of cost, but in volume production of windmills, the cost should be in the ballpark. In reality, a mix of wind, solar electric, geothermal, tidal and other renewable energy resources could produce even greater available output. The energy could also be used to generate hydrogen through electrolysis. The hydrogen could be locally produced at power plants and used to provide electricity for peak demands, thus evening-out the energy supply. It is assumed that, over time, the fleets could be replaced with plug-in electric, hybrid, or hydrogen-fueled vehicles.
