Oil shale is one possibility, as are oil sands and coal liquefaction. I actually meant extracting crude from deeper and more remote locations. I don’t t know the economics of oil shale; I do know that it takes a considerable amount of heat to extract the kerogen from the shale.
Nuclear plants are terribly expensive to build and also suffer from NIMBY politics. Currently we generate 20% of our electricity from nuke plants. Wind is a feel good measure. A typical wind mill is roughly 1 MW when the wind is blowing. My dual fuel plant (#6 oil/natural gas) is 1200 MW. You could probably fit about 8 to 12 windmills in the space if you removed my plant. For comparison, we generate less than 2.5% of electricity from renewable resources (not including hydro), less than 1.5% from petroleum, and a little over 20% from natural gas. 50% of our power comes from coal.
Regardless of where the electrical power comes from (and currently only a fraction is from crude oil derived products), to convert the 200 million cars in the US to plug in hybrids will require a significant upgrade in the distribution grid. Unless you can get everyone to plug their car in around midnight. I suspect people would just plug it in when they get home from work, then turn on the TV, A/C, and heat up their dinner. (A simple solution would be a timer however. If you can get people to care.)
I guess it all comes down to where you want spend the money. Infrastructure to continue driving internal combustion vehicles or infrastructure to drive electric vehicles. As for me, I don’t care. I don’t have a car. I walk to work. That and my Harley gets 50mpg on the highway and averaged 35mpg over the last year.
Good analysis. Price mechanisms cause people to care. Plain and simple. If electricity is expensive at peak hours they will use less at peak hours and or buy their own generation capacity.
In terms of wind to land use, the cost of a 1MW of wind energy has been dropping rapidly, and is becoming more competitive. If you price in the cost of security to other fuels, it looks even better. There are consistency problems, but the wind is generally blowing somewhere. There are lots of smart people working on storage options too.
The experiences of Europe shows that wind can easily provide a significant percentage of power - and it is growing.
I am not too sure about your argument regarding the space required for windmills. I was not under the impression that lack of space was the major constraint in the use. It is the excess of space and the lack of infrastructure to transmittthe electricity that will be the real true invest that will almost certainly have to come from the government vis a vis the interstate highway system.