Who is leading in wind power deployment?

Iowa, for one.

Iowa wind power reached 27% market share in 2014, and they're on track to reach 34% in the next year or so, after they finish building another 1.2GW of wind capacity. Their most recent wind farms cost about $1.73 per watt to build - Iowa tends to achieve a 40% capacity factor, which suggests a pre-tax-credit cost of less than 4 cents per kWh, and a net cost (after Federal subsidies) of about 2 cents.  That helps explain average retail prices of about 7 cents - 60% of the US average.

Iowa's power imports peaked in 1997, at -13.3%, then declined to zero in 2008 and now Iowa exports about 10% of their generation.  They and their neighboring states are planning to expand exports of low cost wind power.

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Sources:
http://www.eia.gov/electricity/state/Iowa/

http://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/money/business/development/2014/10/10/midamerican-energy-terry-branstad-expansion/17027407/
MidAmerican expands Iowa wind foothold
Matthew Patane, mpatane@dmreg.com 12:02 a.m. CDT October 11, 2014
Iowa's reputation as a leader in wind energy production got another boost Friday when MidAmerican Energy announced plans to invest an additional $280 million in the renewable energy.
The Des Moines-based utility will add 67 wind turbines at two western Iowa locations.
Most of the turbines, 64 of them, will go to a new wind farm in Adams County in southwest Iowa. The other three will expand an existing O'Brien County wind farm in northwest Iowa.
The turbines have the potential to generate 162 megawatts of energy, enough to power 48,000 homes, company officials said.
Iowa is one of the leading states in the production of wind energy.
More than 27 percent of the state's energy comes from wind, the highest state percentage in the nation, according to a 2014 report by the American Wind Energy Association.
Iowa also has the seventh-best wind resource, or potential for wind energy generation, in the U.S.
William Fehrman, president and CEO of MidAmerican, said the company is continuing to invest in wind projects because they are a good way to reduce costs for customers and bring the state closer to meeting goals for reducing carbon emissions.
Wind generation "... continues the drive to reduce our overall carbon footprint and better position ourselves and our customers and our state to the changing regulatory environment," he said.
Last year MidAmerican began construction on $1.9 billion worth of turbines in five Iowa counties.
That project will add 450 turbines in Grundy, Madison, Marshall, O'Brien and Webster counties, and create 1,050 megawatts of energy, or enough to power 317,000 homes, according to the company.
Combined with the expansion announced Friday, Fehrman said the O'Brien County wind farm would be the largest in the state of Iowa and produce 502 megawatts of energy.
MidAmerican will contract with Siemens, a German-based engineering and electronics company, to build the blades and other components of the wind turbines. Siemens has a manufacturing plant in Fort Madison.
The Iowa Utilities Board still has to give regulatory approval for the $280 million project. Fehrman said his company would file its paperwork with the board Friday.
The utility is not asking for financial assistance from local or state officials, but MidAmerican will pursue federal tax credits offered for wind energy projects, Fehrman said.
If approved, MidAmerican said construction would start at the two sites next summer and be complete by the end of the year.
The two projects would create about 200 construction jobs, and once complete, MidAmerican said the sites would require at least 10 permanent positions.
The company made the announcement during a news conference with Gov. Terry Branstad and Lt. Gov. Kim Reynolds.
Branstad said the project is "the latest evidence of MidAmerican Energy's longstanding and ongoing commitment to renewable energy." He also said this and other wind projects help the state attract companies such as Microsoft and Google.
"Major companies from across the country and around the world are looking at Iowa as a place to locate facilities due to our commitment to providing sustainable, affordable energy solutions," Branstad said.
Earlier this year, MidAmerican signed an agreement with Google to provide 407 megawatts of wind-sourced energy for Google's Council Bluffs data center.
When its construction projects are complete, MidAmerican will have 21 wind-energy locations in the state.
Altogether, Fehrman said the company has invested about $6 billion in Iowa wind energy.

MidAmerican's wind projects
Once MidAmerican Energy's most recent projects are complete, here's how the utility's investment in wind will stack up:
21 wind projects across 22counties.
$6 billion invested.
3,500 megawatt production capacity.
More than 1 million homes that could be powered.
Source: MidAmerican Energy
Energy generated in Iowa
Iowans get their energy from a number of sources. This was the breakdown from a 2012 Iowa Utilities Board report:
62.3 percent coal.
24.8 percent wind.
7.7 percent nuclear.
3.4 percent natural gas.
1.4 percent hydropower.
Less than 1 percent other renewables and petroleum.

Are renewables low density/diffuse?

No, they aren't - not if you compare apples to apples.

Wind and solar generate a very high "density" form of energy, electricity: electric wires can carry very high energy density thousands of km, to where its needed.  On the other hand, wind and solar require a "catchment" area which is no larger than the overall land requirements for producing oil and other fossil fuels.  For instance, the US government leases about 35 million acres of land for a minority of US oil production (http://www.ewg.org/oil_and_gas/execsumm.php), and since 1982, the federal government has leased or offered 229 million acres of public and private land in 12 western states for oil and gas drilling, an area greater than the combined size of Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona.  Another way to look at it: the US has about 500,000 producing oil wells*, each of which requires access and working areas, as well as water disposal wells, etc. - these require a minimu of 1 acre per well, and perhaps much more.  There are about 120,000 gas stations in the US, at perhaps 1 acre per (some cities require a minimum of 1 acre).  The wells and gas stations add up to a minimum of 720,000 acres.

Of course, we also need to include 185,000 miles of oil pipelines - at 75 feet of right-of-way, that's 1.7M acres. Then there's storage, refinery and port facilities. Not to mention dry/abandoned/capped wells, of which there are probably several million.   - 2.5 million acres total for the US industry appear to be a minimum.

If 2,500,000 acres are required for 9M bpd oil production, that works out to about 20 watts per sq meter, much less than solar power.

Looks like oil is pretty low density!

What about Coal?

Estimate: Solar thermal energy requires about 16.4% less land than coal, and wind power requires about 96.3% less land than coal, to produce a given amount of electricity over a 60-year period.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/The_footprint_of_coal

Liquid petroleum fuel is energy dense and portable. Doesn't that make it hard to replace?

No. The perfect is the enemy of the good. Diamonds are the hardest substance know to man: does that mean they're essential for daily tasks that require hardness?

Plug-in hybrids like the Chevy Volt can reduce light vehicle consumption by 90% with no sacrifice in convenience, and do so cheaply. Electric rail can do the same for freight. Batteries can do for water shipping some of what batteries do for surface plug-in cars. Only airplanes present any real difficulty: for them efficiency and rail substitution under 500 miles can probably reduce requirements by 60%.

For the residual 10-15% of fuel requirements, there are several solutions, including fuel cells; synthetic fuel (from atmospheric carbon, waste water and renewable electricity); and biofuels. They would be more expensive (maybe the equivalent of $5-$10 gasoline to do properly, especially biofuels), but the greatly reduced consumption would make that matter very little.

Batteries etcetera are good enough!

Some followup questions:

What's the source of the numbers that say consumption would be reduced by 90%?

This is from GM's observation of a reasonably large sample of real-world drivers, which found that 78% of miles driven would be within the Volt's 40 mile electric range. The remaining 22% would be on the backup ICE generator, which would give roughly 50 MPG, a 50% reduction in consumption compared to the average 22 MPG vehicle on the road today. That gives you an 89% reduction in fuel consumption.

Does this just include consumption of oil?

Yes. Fortunately, PHEV's have an elegant synergy with wind power (see my most recent post describing how PHEV's help buffer intermittency), so that PHEV's will promote and facilitate wind. This means that one doesn't need to be too worried about the CO2 emissions from existing grid power (which would be less than a Prius in any case).

Aren't little details like having to plug the car in every night important to consider?

Think of the inconvenience of stopping for gas at a service station. If people really find it annoying, undoubtedly someone will devise an automatic docking procedure, like that of many cell phones.

What about pure electric vehicles?

I think the Volt serial hybrid design is the practical solution. The infrastructure for gasoline will be far more extensive than that of electricity for quite some time.

OTOH, pure EVs will work for some quite nicely.

What about Vaclav Smil's discussion of energy intensity in Energy at the Crossroads?

First, V Smil greatly underestimates wind resources and power density. He uses average wind speed over the entire land mass, a bit like estimating the average oil content of the earths crust or the energy in hydro electricity on rainfall/m^2.   Solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, tidal energy are all concentrated in specific regions so using average power density is meaningless.

2nd, he's not making a proper comparison of the whole system land requirement, as discussed above.

*The total number of producing oil wells in the U.S. increased at a steady pace in 2011, reflecting stepped-up drilling programs spurred by $100/bbl prices. World Oil’s estimate of producing wells, based on surveys of state agencies and company sources, indicates a rise of over 16,000 wells to 535,951. This is up 3.2% over 2010. http://www.worldoil.com/magazine/2012/february-2012/special-focus/2012-forecast-us-oil-well-counts-rise-in-all-regions

How expensive is the wind power needed to eliminate Chinese coal??

Previously, I asked How expensive is the wind power needed to eliminate coal in the US??

Well, China's emissions are just as high.

What would it cost in China?

It turns out: not much, in the grand scheme of things. Only about 7.5 cents per KWH http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/23460/

“Sept. 11 (Bloomberg) -- Barren, windy stretches of the Tibetan plateau and grasslands in northeastern China hold untapped value in a country searching for more energy and cleaner air.

China, the biggest polluter from burning fossil fuels, has enough wind-energy potential to generate seven times its current power consumption, said Michael McElroy, a researcher at Harvard University. To develop that capacity and meet rising demand would cost about $900 billion, he wrote in a study published yesterday in Science.”

This is only $90B per year for 10 years, which really isn't much, expecially given that other power sources wouldn't be much cheaper.

How's wind doing?

Very well.

Wind was 42% of new capacity in 2008, and there's an enormous backlog of projects in the pipeline (about 300GW!). See here.

An interesting note - local grids are handling up to about 16% in wind market penetration without problems. The DOE report says: "Recent wind integration studies continue to show that wind integration costs rise with higher levels of wind penetration, but are below $10/MWh – and often below $5/MWh – for wind capacity penetrations of as much as 30% of the peak load of the system in which the wind power is delivered."

I understand that to mean the following: for a system with 100GW average load, and 150GW peak load (as a wild guess), wind capacity could rise to 45GW and still have low integration costs (well below one cent per KWH). The report indicated that capacity factors were around 35% for recent projects, so that gives us 15.75GW average, or 15.75% market penetration of KWH production.

This study doesn't say we can't get well above 16%. It just says that with current grid engineering, we can achieve at least 16% without a problem.

And that's pretty good. It's consistent with a lot of such studies: none of them found a maximum for renewables. I've seen some that showed that something in the range of 20% was possible just for wind, but weren't testing the hypothesis that more than that could be done. IOW, most of them said it was the minimum that could be done, based on current grid technology. They didn't test such things as expanded long-distance transmission, greatly expanded Demand Side Management, a large fleet of PHEV/EVs providing demand buffering and V2G; greatly expanded storage; etc.

Here's a good example: This modelling study* says that given current tech and some modest assumptions on price change, that 20% wind penetration is likely in 2050. It doesn't say that it's a maximum, and it doesn't take into account the effect of an aggressive policy push toward wind, and new conditions, such as 230M PHEV/EVs.

There's enormous potential out there.


*The study just gives a result of 300GW of wind power, so we have to do some calculations.

The DOE reports that new farms in the last several years are achieving an average of 35% capacity factor. The modelling study doesn't give the total generation in 2050, so we have to guess that it assumes something like DOE projections of 1200 GW system capacity. That gives us 11.6% growth (1200/1075 currently).

If we use 35% and 11.6% growth that gives 20.1%.

Is there enough wind resource to provide all of our electricity?

Yes.

A peer-reviewed study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences indicates that "a network of land-based 2.5-megawatt (MW) turbines restricted to nonforested, ice-free, nonurban areas operating at as little as 20%of their rated capacity could supply >40 times current worldwide consumption of electricity, >5 times total global use of energy in all forms.

Resources in the contiguous United States, specifically in the central plain states, could accommodate as much as 16 times total current demand for electricity in the United States. "

This study doesn't address changes to the grid that would be needed to supply all of our electricity from wind and solar:

"...Wind power accounted for 42% of all new electrical capacity added to the United States electrical system in 2008 although wind continues to account for a relatively small fraction of
the total electricity-generating capacity [25.4 gigawatts (GW) of a total of 1,075 GW] ...Short et al. , using the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’sWinDs model, concluded that wind could account for as much as 25% of U.S. electricity by 2050 (corresponding to an installed wind capacity of 300 GW). "

But 25% is a good start.

See here the full study in PDF form.

How quickly is wind growing?

Wind power in the US in 2008 added 21.2 Terawatt hours (8.4GW nameplate @29% capacity factor).

That was 32% of our 10-year growth of 66 Twhrs per year, and about 60% higher than the installations in 2007. At that growth rate wind could provide 100% of new power in less than 4 years, and after that start replacing coal.

There's no reason we couldn't resume that growth curve, should we decide to. Obviously, wind isn't growing as fast right now due to our current financial problems, but I imagine nuclear isn't helped by the financial mess, either (also, 2009 may well show zero or very small electricity demand growth, so there's a nice match there of supply and demand side stagnation).

How expensive is the wind power needed to eliminate coal??

In my previous post, I said we could build enough wind capacity to replace coal for $400 billion. Coal supplies half our electricity - can we really do that?

Sure. Here's how I came up with that number:

The US generates about 50% of our electricity from coal, which amounts to an average of 220 gigawatts. Wind, on average, produces power at 30% of it's nameplate rating, so we'd need about 733GW of wind. Wind costs about $2/W, so that would cost about $1,466 billion. Transmission might raise that about 10%, to about $1,613 billion.

Now, roughly 50% of coal plants need to be replaced in the next 20 years, so about 50% of the $1.6T coal replacement investment is needed anyway; new coal plants are just as expensive per KWH as wind, so that half, or $800B of the investment can be eliminated from our considerations.

Coal plants cost about $.035/KWH to fuel and operate, which is about 50% of the cost of wind. That's an expense that we'll have either way, so we can eliminate 50% of the remainder, which is about $400B: all told, we can discount the wind investment by 75%!

Wind's intermittency is often raised as another source of cost: I address that here.

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So, that gives us a cost of roughly $400B, or $40B per year for 10 years. That's about 5% of US manufacturing (less than the currently idle manufacturing capacity!), and .3% of GDP.

A bargain.

Would dramatically reducing CO2 emissions be expensive?

No, surprisingly enough.

The British Stern report projected a cost of 1% of GDP per year, and later Stern revised that to 2%. I think that's too high. Fortunately, we don't have to rely on some kind of authority to figure this out - at least for the US, I think we can do the calculations ourselves.

Most CO2 emissions in the US come from coal - a solution that eliminates coal and a large % of oil consumption will get us most of the way.

Well, replacing coal with wind in the US would only have a net cost of about $400 billion*. Light vehicle transportation accounts for 45% of US oil consumption - replacing it wouldn't cost anything at all, if you include all costs and savings over the vehicle lifecycle**.

$400B divided into a $14T economy is 3%. Over 20 years, that's only .15% per year. Not much, really.

*, ** I'll show the calculations for this on following days.

Is wind growth stopping, and hurting wind manufacturers - can we see this in the stock market?

Yes, partly.

GE, of course, has seen it's stock fall, but that's because of their finance arm. IOW, they're not a "pure play". Vestas is the other large player: I took a look at them, and they seemed to be doing
pretty well especially for a large, capital stock manufacturer. Such manufacturers are always hit hard by the stock market in a recession like this. They still seem to be profitable - and orders are increasing a bit from last year. It's not clear if world wind installations will be as high as last year (that was also affected by the US's delay in extending the PTC - that killed some early 2009 deals), but they'll still be quite healthy from a longer-term point of view.

Will wind grow in a free market?

Yes, with regulations: CAFE, cap and trade, feed-in tariffs, and utility market share requirements are all compatible with free markets - they just provide guidance to the market.

Can renewables compete with dirt cheap oil and coal ?

Not until recently, when better regulation arrived, and sparked dramatic growth in the market,which produced economies of scale, new engineering, and thus much cheaper prices.

Now, let's be clear on wind's competitiveness. Coal is the big problem: old, dirty plants are dirt cheap. They will be for 50 years, if we continue to build and use them. We don't need wind to deal with PO, we need it to deal with climate change. We may or may not decide to aggressively replace coal with wind, but it's useful to know that it wouldn't be all that expensive: just $2T, less than the cost of a lot of other things: Iraq war, the US finance bailout, etc, etc. Of course, wind has a payback, unlike war, and parts of the finance bailout - in the long run, and counting all costs, it's likely to more than pay for itself.

The main problem with energy isn't technical, it's political: the 20% of the workforce who would be made obsolete will fight it quite hard. But, it's useful to come to consensus that this is the case, and that the technical barriers aren't that big a deal.

What about oil?

The short term problem isn't electricity, at least in the US. It's more moving to PHEV/EV's, and we are, in fact, doing that. The Volt will be in large scale production in 2 years (GM is building it's future around it), and others will be as well.

What if we have a sudden oil shortage?

We have more than enough energy to build new vehicles. For that matter, we can carpool and telecommute during the transition. We really can. I'm often baffled by the lack of awareness of the potential of carpooling: the US could cut it's oil consumption by 25% in 3 months, if it chose to. It would be inconvenient, and require an emergency to do, but everyone would still get to work.

Do wind & solar need storage?

No. It is often argued that wind and solar intermittency create a need for expensive utility electricity storage facilities. I would argue that there several much more cost-effective alternatives: demand side management; geographical dispersion; and using existing generation as backup.

First, covering demand from storage for any significant time would be very, very expensive. Better to handle as much as possible with almost anything else, and use storage as a much lower priority resource.

Second, I believe there is general agreement that wind can achieve a market share of at least 10%, and probably 20%, with current load-following techniques (including modest levels of the alternatives I'll describe below), so wind can grow quite a bit without anything that might seem exotic. If wind captured only 20% of the market, it could displace 40% of coal, or 20% of coal and 50% of natural gas.

1) The first alternative is Demand Side Management (DSM): short term intermittency is far better handled with DSM than with central storage, especially as the number of plug-ins and EV's grows. DSM is almost free to utilities, and has both effectively instant response times and enormous capacity.

Plug-in/EV charging can be scheduled when it's needed. If your problem is too much wind in the middle of the night, charging can go there, and easily be 1/2 of demand. Heck, for short periods it could be as much as you wanted: visualize 150M plug-in's pulling 6KW each, for a total of 900GW!

Plug-in/EV's could also provide V2G, and provide additional supply in similar numbers.
Does it seem hard to imagine that many plug-in/EV's, or hard to imagine them ramping up quickly enough? Well, the thing to keep in mind is that they can grow as quickly as wind and solar: we could easily produce 10M plug-in/EV's per year in 10 years.

We should note that DSM for PHEV/EV's is more important than V2G. It sidesteps battery cost issues, as well as other complexities that come from using wires in two directions. OTOH, it's highly likely that the 2nd generation Li-ion batteries now being put into production will last longer than the vehicles they power, rendering the cost per cycle question unimportant for V2G.

It's important to maintain clarity about the timeframe and context of our discussion. If we're really talking about a grid that has a very large % of renewables, we're either talking about decades in the future, or a world in which our society makes a much, much larger commitment to dealing with energy issues than it has so far. In such a world, a very large number of PHEV/EV's with relatively large batteries is extremely likely. In that case, it's reasonable to assume that we're talking about over 100 million PHEV/EV's, with batteries that can effectively hold 25KHW or more. Such batteries could power vehicles for days between charges, and provide enormous flexibility for DSM (much more than a 8 hour scenario one might consider).

There is enormous potential from creative use of PHEV/EV's, potential that we are far from understanding. I would note just one: the motors in PHEV's are extremely efficient, on the order of diesels. A fleet of PHEV's would provide backup capacity on the order of 500GW that could be sustained for days, using engines that would be as efficient and far cleaner than most diesel generators. Would we want to use such a capability often? Of course not, but it's availability would be enormously valuable.

3) it's easy to exaggerate the intermittency we need to handle: it wouldn't take much interconnectedness to take advantage of geographical dispersion of negatively correlated wind and sources.

4) solar is negatively correlated with wind, both on a daily basis and seasonally.

5) we also have the option of backup by (hopefully) largely obsolete FF generation plants, so DSM (or storage) wouldn't have to handle very long (but rare) events. The US has slightly less than 1,000GW of nameplate capacity. US average generation is about 450GW, so the overall US capacity utilization is less than 50% - that's useful for people to keep in mind: we have lots of extra generating capacity, which would provide a lot of buffer, especially from Natural Gas, which is the most flexible source. That would help make it possible to dramatically expand wind generation.

I'd love to see a really good simulation of these methods. Unfortunately, no one has seen the need, as 10-20% market penetration seemed distant. There have been analyses of the benefits of combining geographically separated wind sites: they found that variance was dramatically reduced, to the point that it seemed reasonable to describe wind as base-load.

Finally, if we insist on storage, it wouldn't cost that much. A kilowatt (nameplate) of wind costs about $2,000. It might need 4 hours of storage at $120 using lead-acid (1KW x 30% capacity factor x 4 x $100/KWH) - that's not so much.

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Here's an article about Google's effort to facilitate such things with in-home power monitoring (hat tip to Bob G).

Is wind/solar intermittency a fatal problem?

No.

There are many solutions to wind & solar intermittency, each of which is very expensive if taken to an extreme, including pumped storage, CAES, or a planet girdling HVDC system. If you combine the best of each, you're likely to get a much lower cost system.

More importantly, Demand Side Management is very, very cheap, and extremely effective. It's overlooked because it's not "incented" by utility rate regulation.

220M plug-in's and EV's could provide all of the demand buffering that wind could every want. Add V2G (see here for a UK-oriented discussion), which is a bit more expensive but very practical, and you get all of the capacity you need for handling system variance on an hourly or daily basis.

All you'd need is to retain large fossil fuel plants for the 5-10% of the time when wind was calm for a week or more.

The obstacles to a renewable grid aren't technical, they're social: up to 20% of the workforce would be made obsolete. They have an enormous incentive to fight change.

Do you have references for this?

Here's a discussion by Amory Lovins's RMI: http://www.rmi.org/images/PDFs/Transportation/RMIPHEV_decouple_AESP.pdf.

On the other hand, it's very easy to analyze - no experts or peer-reviewed papers are needed.

Take 220M vehicles, with 25KWH effective capacity battery (3x that of the Volt), for a total of 5.5 Terawatt hours. Charging them using 220 volt, 30 amp connections will take about 4 hours, but create peak demand of more than the grid's current capacity, so vehicle charging would be spread out over several days, giving lots of leeway for dynamic scheduling.

If you want, say, 50% of KWH from wind then you need an average of 225 gigawatts from wind. At 30% capacity factor, that's about 750GW of nameplate capacity. An individual wind turbine can hit 100% of capacity, but a windfarm rarely goes above 85%, and a nationwide network would very rarely go above 50%, just based on the laws of large numbers (variance rises more slowly than the mean), and the fact that many windfarms would be negatively correlated to each other (one part of the country is windy, and another is calm).

That means peak wind generation might be 375GW. Night time demand might be 200GW, so we need to soak up 175GW. Our 5.5Twhr plug-in/EV fleet could draw that for 10 hours, using less than 1/3 of it's capacity.

Similar calculations apply for V2G.

Solar appears to have more short-term intermittency, which suggests that PHEV/EV buffering, with it's very fast response time, would be especially valuable for solar.

Can we replace oil in general?

People who are pessimistic about dealing with Peak Oil wonder: which processes happen to use oil today, because of historical accident, and which truly have to do so? What part of manufacturing, transportation etc, is specifically reliant only on oil?

So many things run on oil - can we possible replace oil in all of these applications?

The answer is yes, primarily through electrification of surface transportation and building heating. Aviation and long-haul trucking can be replaced with electric rail and water shipping, and aviation will transition to substitutes.

This will proceed through several phases. The first is greater efficiency. The second phase is hybrid liquid fuel-electric operation, where the Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) is dominant - examples include the Prius and, at a lower price point about $20K, the Honda Insight. The 3rd phase is hybrid liquid fuel-electric operation, where electric operation is dominant. Good examples here are diesel locomotives, hybrid locomotives, and the Chevy Volt. The Volt will reduce fuel consumption by close to 90% over the average ICE light vehicle. This phase will last a very long time, with batteries and all-electric range getting larger, and fuel consumption falling.
The last phase is, of course, all electric vehicles, which are are slowly expanding, and being implemented widely (Here's the Tesla, here's the Nissan Leaf). Electric bicycles have been around for a long time, but they're getting better. China is pursuing plug-ins and EV's aggressively. Here's an OEM Ford Ranger EV Pickup, and a EREV light truck (F-150).

Here are electric UPS trucks. Here is a hybrid bus. Here is an electric bus. An electric dump truck. Electric trucks have much less maintenance.

Kenworth Truck Company, a division of PACCAR, already offers a T270 Class 6 hybrid-electric truck. Kenworth has introduced a new Kenworth T370 Class 7 diesel-electric hybrid tractor for local haul applications, including beverage, general freight, and grocery distribution. Daimler Trucks and Walmart developed a Class 8 tractor-trailer which reduces fuel consumption about 6%.

Volvo is moving toward hybrid heavy vehicles, including garbage trucks and buses. Here is the heaviest-duty EV so far. Here's a recent order for hybrid trucks, and here's expanding production of an eight ton electric delivery truck, with many customers. Here are electric local delivery vehicles, and short range heavy trucks. Here are electric UPS trucks, and EREV UPS trucks. Here's a good general article and discussion of heavy-duty electric vehicles.

Diesel will be around for decades for essential uses, and in a transitional period commercial consumption will out-bid personal transportation consumers for fuel.

Mining is a common concern. Much mining, especially underground coal mining (where ICEs can cause explosions), has been electric for some time - here's a source of electrical mining equipment. Caterpillar manufactures 200-ton and above mining trucks with both drives. Caterpillar will produce mining trucks for every application—uphill, downhill, flat or extreme conditions — with electric as well as mechanical drive. Here's an electric earth moving truck. Here's an electric mobile strip mining machine, the largest tracked vehicle in the world at 13,500 tons.

Water shipping and aviation can also eliminate oil: see my separate post on that topic.

Here's a terminal tractor that reduces fuel consumption by 60%.

Farm tractors can be electric, or hybrid . Here's a light electric tractor . Farm tractors are a fleet application, so they're not subject to the same limitations as cars and other light road vehicles(i.e., the need for small, light batteries and a charging network). Providing swap-in batteries is much easier and more practical: batteries can be trucked to the field in swappable packs, and swapping would be automated, a la Better Place. Zinc-air fuel cells can just be refueled. Many sources of power are within the weight parameters to power modern farm tractors, including lithium-ion, Zebra batteries, ZAFC's and the lead-acid developed by Firefly Energy (before their demise), and others.

It's very likely that an electric combine would be an Extended Range EV: it would have a small onboard generator, like the Chevy Volt. Such a design would be more more efficient than a traditional diesel only combine, and would allow extended operation in a weather emergency.

Most farmers are small and suffering, but most farm acreage is being managed by large organizations, and is much more profitable. Those organizations will just raise their food prices, and out-bid personal transportation (commuters and leisure travel) for fuel, so they'll do just fine. As farm commodities are only a small %of the final price of food, it won't make much difference to food prices. The distribution system, too, will outbid personal transportation for fuel. Given that overall liquid fuel supplies are likely to only decline 20% in the next 20 years, that gives plenty of time for a transition.

Even hydrogen fuel cells could be used, though they're not likely to be cost-competitive soon with the alternatives. PV roofs certainly could be used to extend battery life, though the cost effectiveness of that will depend on how much of the year the tractor is in the field. Electric drive trains are likely to be much more cost-effective than liquid fuels, but locally produced bio-fuels would certainly work. Also, fuels synthesized from renewable electricity, seawater and atmospheric CO2 would certainly work, though it would be rather more expensive than any of the above.

Any and all of these is several orders of magnitude cheaper and more powerful than animal-pulled equipment. One sees occasionally the idea that we'll go back to horses or mules - this is entirely unrealistic.

The easiest transitional solution may be running diesel farm tractors on vegetable oil, with minor modifications. Ultimately, farmers are net energy exporters (whether it's food, oil or ethanol), and will actually do better in an environment of energy scarcity.

Iron smelting currently uses a lot of coal, which isn't oil, but is a fossil fuel which we'd like to eliminate. Iron used to be made with charcoal, and iron oxide can be reduced either with direct electrolysis, or with hydrogen from any source.  Eventually smelting will become much smaller - most of the steel used in the USA is reclaimed from scrap (and when industries mature, essentially all of their steel can be recycled);  an electric furnace can re-melt it, and the electricity can come from anything. About 30% of world steel production recycles scrap with electric arc furnaces (http://www.worldcoal.org/resources/coal-statistics/coal-steel-statistics/ ).

The US Navy plans to go reduce it's 50,000 vehicle fleet's oil consumption by 50% by 2015. They plan by 2020 to produce at least half of its shore-based energy requirements on its bases from alternative sources ( solar, wind, ocean, or geothermal sources - they're already doing this at China Lake, where on-base systems generate 20 times the load of the base), and it's overall fossil fuel consumption by 50% by 2020 with EVs and biofuel.  Here's a base that replaced on-base vehicles with EVs - http://www.af.mil/news/story.asp?id=123331090

Some question the stability of the electrical grid, in an environment of expensive fuel. Utilities like the idea of "eating their own cooking". Here's an electric utility boom lift. Here's a consortium of utilities considering a bulk purchase of plug-ins (and a good article). Here's an individual utility buying electric cars. Similarly, utilities are buying hybrid bucket trucks and digger derricks. Here's a large commitment by two major utilities .

Here's a good quote from the Governor of Michigan: "For automakers, replacing the internal-combustion engine with an electric powertrain is both revolutionary and daunting. In a world where economic Darwinism threatens slow adapters with extinction, U.S. automakers know that they can either lead this historic transformation or become history themselves. Even today, as they engage in a struggle to survive, the Big Three are leading the way: General Motors, Ford and Chrysler are scheduled to introduce electrified vehicles next year."

France is planning for a market share for EV's of 7% by 2015, rising to 27% in 2025.
http://www.greencarcongress.com/2009/10/france-20091002.html#more

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What if our current system is less like a train running out of power, where it will just slow down and stop, and more like a jetliner running out of power, energy which it crucially needs to have a safe landing? Do we really have the resources to build out an alternate energy infrastructure?

Well, at least in the US, there's so much energy used for things with very marginal value that we have a very big cushion. We have an enormous surplus of energy (used for single-commuter SUVs, for example) , so we have quite a lot of flexibility.

EVs don't require significantly more energy than ICEs to manufacture. Wind turbines have a very high E-ROI.

Even if PO reduces the energy we have available, we currently have such a large surplus that we have plenty of leeway to reduce consumption in some places to free up the oil needed for such an investment.

Isn't this a tricky transition, with fragile balances between politics, communications, labor, logistics, public-calm, etc?

It's true - a transition away from oil will put stress on a lot of institutions. On the other hand, this isn't any bigger than similar transitions, like going from coal to oil, or from mules to tractors. And, isn't it good to know that there technical solutions?

Where will the needed electricity come from?

From wind, mostly. Wind has a very high E-ROI, and is plentiful. Solar, nuclear, geothermal, etc will also be important. Coal is extremely abundant, but we have to hope that we don't use it.

Aren't we going to have to live within the limits of our environment?

Sure. Fortunately, energy isn't one of those limits. I'd say that climate change and species extinctions are much larger problems.

What about the invested-in infra-structure for our oil-based life style and what it will take to tear down the old infra structure and replace it with an entirely different one? Won't we have to tear down the suburbs, and similiar infrastructure?

Yes, we'll have to toss out some ICE trucks and cars before the end of their natural lifetime. On the other hand, we do that all of the time: the average US car/SUV/pickup gets 50% of it's lifetime mileage by the time it's 7 years old. They could last 25+ years, if we wanted them to, but we throw them away. The premature retirement of commercial trucks will hurt investors in some trucking companies, but that's a sunk cost.

The real question is, can we afford to build new infrastructure, and the answer is clearly yes: new rail tracks and rolling stock aren't that expensive, and EVs are no more expensive than ICEs.

We won't have to toss out housing - Kunstler is just wrong, completely wrong. A Nissan Leaf will allow a 50 mile commute, or 100 miles with workplace charging.

EVs can be built with the same factories - for instance, the Volt shares a factory with 2 other cars. They drive on the same roads.

Do we have enough energy in the long run?

Yes.

This raises a lot of issues, including scalability, E-ROI, cost, capital expense, infrastructure, convenience, reliability, storage and portability. I believe it’s established that wind and solar are scalable, and have good E-ROI, and that the other issues can be handled in various ways.

The other measures are a long discussion. Here’s a quote from a source with credibility in this area: Kenneth Deffeyes, author of both "Hubbert's Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage" and "Beyond Oil: The View From Hubbert's Peak," writes that "there are plenty of energy sources other than fossil fuels. Running out of energy in the long run is not the problem. The bind comes during the next 10 years: getting over our dependence on crude oil."

Mathew Simmons says: "I happen to think the world can make the transition into what we might call the post-Saudi oil era in some very rational way that will limit economic disruption. As a perpetual optimist, I believe the world still works beyond Peak Oil. While oil prices in this new world will obviously rise, this rise can be a blessing, not a curse. Far higher oil prices make all other forms of energy more competitive and spur on energy research programs that might discover some real long-term fixes."

I envision a grid powered by a complementary mix of sources in roughly the following proportions: 25% wind, 25% solar, 20% nuclear, 20% smaller renewables (hydro, geothermal, wave, etc) 10% various storeable fuels such as gasified biomass, synthetic hydrocarbons, hydrogen, ammonia, etc. Nuclear could be eliminated if desired, though at a significant price in transitional excess CO2 emissions, cost and reliability.