I came down to West Texas, the Saudi Arabia of wind, to find out how it
all happened. Pat Wood, a friend of the president, was chairman of
Texas's Public Utility Commission when the push for wind energy started.
"At the end of a meeting on transmission policy in mid-1996," he
recalled, "I was on my way out the door of the governor's office, when
Governor Bush said to me, `Pat, we like wind.´ He was at his desk. I
said, `We what?´ He said: `You heard me. Go get smart on wind.´ "
Mr. Wood, his fellow commissioners and the Texas utilities did just
that. They conducted polls and were stunned by the results: Texas
electricity customers were ready to pay a little extra to get more clean
renewable energy. So Mr. Bush instructed Mr. Wood to work on wind with
the utilities and the environmentalists. Together, they created the
Texas Renewable Portfolio Mandate, which Mr. Bush got passed by the
Texas Legislature in 1999, as part of a power competition bill. The
mandate stipulated that Texas power companies had to produce 2,000 new
megawatts of electricity from renewables, mostly wind, by 2009.
What happened? A dozen new companies jumped into the Texas market and
built wind turbines to meet the mandate - so many that the
2,000-megawatt goal was reached in 2005. So now the Texas Legislature
has upped the mandate to 5,000 megawatts by 2015. Everyone knows they'll
beat that, too, because all this investment has driven down the costs
and made wind power in Texas competitive with clean coal, nuclear and
natural gas, even without the temporary tax break. Mr. Wood says he
thinks Texas could be producing 15 percent of all its energy from
renewables by 2015. An energy wiz, Mr. Wood now advises Airtricity, an
Irish wind-power company that also entered the Texas market. He and I
toured its new wind farm near Midland, which will provide enough wind
electricity - 125 megawatts - to power 40,000 homes in Dallas, replacing
gas, nuclear and coal. The farm consists of giant turbines that sprout
like Star Wars machine-monsters from the hardscrabble plains around
Midland - amid the mesquite, rattlesnakes and oil-pumping jacks. When
Mr. Bush ran for governor, his motto was: "What Texans can dream, Texans
can do." Just substitute "Americans" for "Texans," and he's already got
the last line of his next State of the Union. What would the substance
be? First, let's set a Texas-like renewable energy mandate for every
state. Second, let's forge a national electricity transmission grid from
the Dakotas to Texas to take wind electricity from where it is best
produced to the big cities where it is most needed. Finally, let's
create a long-term tax subsidy for building and buying plug-in hybrid
cars. Wind energy is produced abundantly at night, when demand is
lowest. Electric hybrids would be charged at night. That would mean
hybrid electric cars, which emit virtually no carbon, could be powered
by wind, which produces no carbon. If that scaled, it could be better
than Kyoto.
You got something better to do, Mr. President?
Pulitzer-Prize winning columnist Thomas Friedman, author of "The World
is Flat," has been a frequent voice on PHEVs: see especially the columns
and his TV documentary, "Addicted to Oil," all found especially between
April-June 2006 in
and his January 26, 2005
draft of what the President should say in his 2005 State of the Union
Address. We hope he's as prescient this year.