Doug's post on conservative positions started me thinking about something. Of the two energy sources agreed to as green by the full spectrum of folks: solar and wind, we find that California has been lagging well behind Texas.
For example, I compiled the following list from http://www.awea.org/projects/ cal texas nation 2005 68 672 2006 212 774 2007 63 1398 2008 q1 45 790 total 2439 4354 18303 beingbuilt 290 1998 5736 We see that Texas has almost twice the wind energy of California and that the total of what's been built from Jan 1 2005 to March 31, 2008 and the present contruction is 9 times larger for Texas than California. Yet, I've read may posters here say that it's the manipulation of the big powerful energy companies, not market forces, that determine what gets built and what doesn't. So, my question is why is California so much more under the thumb of Big Oil than Texas? It follows from that arguement, right, since Texas has built and is building about 6 GW of wind power since 2005 and California has only managed less than 700 MW. Now one might argue that California's photovoltic initiative means that large scale (GW) installations of solar photovoltic power is just being done instead of wind, but as we see at http://tinyurl.com/4pwbhf California has installed a lot more wind energy than solar over the last 5 years or so. In fact the record total of solar energy capacity over the past year in the US has been less than 150 MW....which is about 10% of the first quarter of '08 for wind. And, the big wind symposium will be held right down the road from me...in Houston the first week in June. So, my question is, given the fact that California is far more liberal than Texas, how did this happen? Dan M. (Yes, this post is tounge-in-cheek, but I think it is a valid use of the reasoning that the use of alternative energy is determined by whether an area is dominated by Big Oil). -------------------------------------------------------------------- mail2web.com - Microsoft® Exchange solutions from a leading provider - http://link.mail2web.com/Business/Exchange _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
