The former vice president, now in his second career as a climate Cassandra, has spent the past few weeks pushing the notion that the United States can be "repowered" -- that all its electricity needs can be met without producing greenhouse gases. He says it can be done within a decade. ...The problem is that, despite the current boom in green power, renewable sources such as the sun and the wind still provide just a tiny fraction of the U.S. electricity supply. The rest is mainly dirty stuff: coal, gas, oil. To replace one with the other over the course of a decade, energy experts say, would make the Manhattan Project look like a science-fair volcano.

Wind power is often portrayed as a feel-good substitute for big power plants, but it has severe limitations; its performance, obviously, is as fickle as the wind. Because of that, wind farms must still be backed up by conventional power in case the wind fails. "You can predict some changes in the wind broadly but not second-by-second," said Robert Michaels, a professor of economics at California State University, Fullerton, who has studied the issue. ...Wind energy will have a growing place in America's energy portfolio, but its niche probably won't approach the Energy Department's 20 percent prediction.

Whether the reports of health hazards are true or not is almost irrelevant. Just the fact that many people are truly concerned about the potential health effects of living near a wind farm, or the electromagnetic radiation from high voltage electrical wires, is reason enough to try to avoid buying a property that is close to power lines. It's a simple law of economics: As demand for a product goes down, so does its price. When you have a certain number of people avoiding a certain property, for whatever reason, the price of that property will be negatively affected.

Creating a welfare-dependent industry in the province may benefit the backers of these projects, but the potential cost to taxpayers is huge, and the outlook for an unsubsidized industry is grim. ...The wind power industry in Canada gets a federal government subsidy of $10 per megawatt hour. But B.C. consumers can expect to dig deeper. The cost of electricity from wind power is about $71 per megawatt hour. That compares to about $48 for natural gas and $25 for electricity produced from B.C.'s heritage hydro assets.

When Young County commissioners began discussing details of the abatement with special counsel Alan Carmichael last week, the majority seemed very interested in finding a way to maximize the amount of money Young County stands to bring in if the farm is built. While that makes perfect sense up front, it could prove perilous to the entire project. With several other counties vying for wind farms from BP, it may not take much to sway the company one way or another. In Archer County, rumor has it that commissioners are planning to agree exactly to the proposal made by BP.

But had Bloomberg done the math, he'd know that even if Manhattan were topped by a solid block of windmills, they wouldn't come close to meeting the city's power consumption. Wind power has its place as a power source, but it's not a place at the top. It provides less than one-tenth of 1 percent of U.S. electricity because it costs more to produce. The wind may be free, but the equipment is expensive. The costs are even dearer if you follow Bloomberg's other suggestion, namely floating windmills in the middle of the ocean. How many windmills does it take to meet the power needs of a typical city, much less New York City?

Let's replace all the coal-fired plants with wind turbines. Just don't site them all in West Virginia and have the electricity travel over hundreds of miles of transmission lines. This time, build the turbines in the cities and the suburbs. Those places are already noisy, and they have no beautiful hills to ruin. Let's put the turbines where the electric customers are. Urban wind farms will let the metropolitan elites see where their electricity comes from.

The most workable and affordable energy plan is one that throws in pieces of everything, from increased oil and gas exploration and production to increased conservation and efficiency in heating and transportation to multiple fuels and power sources for vehicles and electricity generation, old and new (wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, biofuels, even new coal technologies and a nuke or two). Such an approach doesn't make for flashy advertising campaigns or snappy slogans.

The first issue is the high cost of wind power, which is about 2.5 to three times the cost of coal-generated power. Large wind-power projects exist only because of large government subsidies. Otherwise, wind power would be restricted to a few applications where the physical isolation of the electricity demand precludes extending the transmission network to the site. The other major issue is the intermittency of wind power. Even on the best of sites, wind turbines generate usable power less than 30 percent of the time ...T. Boone Pickens' claim that wind power will reduce the need for natural gas in electricity generation is spectacularly wrong.

Pickens' plan is basically a couple of pie charts showing how he'd like to see the U.S. energy economy work. ...He gives no specifics publicly, but he's made it clear that it's up to Congress, not consumers or investors, to make this vision become reality. Because Pickens has announced his gambit in the name of the environment, the media have dropped the skepticism they usually apply to the claims of businessmen trying to make a buck. Because his plan involves government - meaning you and I pay the costs - that skepticism ought to be even greater.

Here's a scenario OPEC would kill for: Your product gets pricier and pricier, and yet demand grows relentlessly. That's the rosy picture facing the world's wind-turbine makers. Denmark's Vestas, the world's biggest turbine maker, reported a big jump in profits today-and a $10 billion order book for more. With a global thirst for clean energy, some companies stand to clean up. Turbine prices have risen 74% in the last three years-and yet countries from the U.S. to China can't get enough of them.

Mr. Pickens and Mrs. Pelosi share the same talking points downplaying the need to drill and open up more access to American oil. Instead, the Pickens pie-in-the-sky plan proposes to replace natural gas with wind power in electricity generation and theoretically free up natural gas for America's transportation needs. All well and good in la-la land, but let's be real about the limitations and costs of wind power.

Accompanying the myth that wind turbine energy will replace fossil fuel energy is denial of the ecological impacts and health effects of wind turbines by governments and promoters. The ugly reality is that wind turbines are a serious addition to the industrialization of quiet rural landscapes, places that people have long valued for quality of life, retirement and recreation. The environmental costs imposed on wildlife and people have been systematically ignored by a political and regulatory system that has corrupted individual and societal freedom and environmental integrity by relegating these values to some distant offshoot of economic growth.

Iberdrola of Spain, owner of Elk River, realized over $9.9 million in PTC allowances in 2007. Foreign companies are not regulated by the Kansas Corporation Commission. There are no state or federal regulations of any kind on WECS. Few Kansas counties have wind regulations. WECS will force consumers to pay for their electricity three times; to build the WECS, build conventional power as backup, and additional transmission lines to carry power from the WECS to the grid. WECS will not produce large economic benefits to a community as evidenced by records from Gray County (Montezuma), or Butler County (Elk River). Elk River has produced seven jobs. Most employees live outside the community.

If wind energy were a sensible economic investment, it would not need federal and state subsidies already in place or the additional subsidies inherently needed in the wind power expansion directly and inferentially sought after by Pickens. Similarly, if compressed natural gas (CNG) vehicles are really an economically viable alternative to conventional gasoline-powered vehicles, they would have succeeded in the market place and no government subsidy would be necessary. We can wish T. Boone Pickens well in his wind energy business, but there is no reason for taxpayers, ratepayers or consumers to pay him for his investments.

There is one fly in Pickens's ointment, however. Along most of the "wind corridor," the wind blows the strongest and steadiest before the sun rises; its strength diminishes until the hottest point of the day, just as the demand for electricity, particularly in the summer months, peaks. As a result, replacing natural-gas base load capacity with "wind watts" does not work. Peak loads still will have to be met with natural-gas generated electricity. That will diminish by billions of cubic feet the amount of natural gas available to be converted to transportation fuel, defeating the essence of the plan. The wind corridor is essentially in a single time zone, so morning-wind-generated electricity cannot be "wheeled" to afternoon consumers. Unfortunately, there is no economical way to store wind watts for use later in the diurnal cycle.

But 22 percent by 2020 is far-fetched. Wind power is intermittent, unreliable and expensive (even with subsidies). Many modern turbines are 400 feet tall and carry 130-foot, 7-ton, bird-slicing blades. They operate at only 20-30 percent of rated capacity - compared to 85 percent for coal, gas and nuclear plants - and provide little power during summer daytime hours, when air-conditioning demand is highest, but winds are at low ebb. ...Launching the enterprise with the backing of federal mandates and subsidies minimizes his [Pickens] financial risk and attracts semi-free-market investors, by putting the risks for his scheme on the backs of taxpayers. A $58-million ad campaign could pay 100:1.

Democrats can't get to Denver without dumping carbon into the air. They're washing away the sins of transportation and electrification by purchasing carbon offsets from a Vermont-based broker called NativeEnergy. ...This modern-day indulgence is officially called the "Green Delegate Challenge." For a mere $7.50, delegates and attendees can buy a carbon offset, making them at least theoretically responsible for new alternative energy. They can then forget about the emissions from jets, limos, buses, trains and taxis they take to Denver. They also can flash the lights, crank up the soundstages and rock 'n' roll like the dominant force they've become with that rhetoric about saving the planet.

Even with heavy subsidies from ratepayers and taxpayers over the last two decades, wind supplies only about 1 percent of America's electricity and 2.3 percent in Kansas. A study by the National Center for Policy Analysis determined that wind energy and other renewables and conservation received between $30 billion and $50 billion over the last 20 years. This represents the largest governmental peacetime energy expenditure in U.S. history, outranking the Strategic Petroleum Reserve program as well as spending on the synthetic fuels program during the mid-1970s. A short-term threat to the growth of wind energy is the looming expiration of federal tax credits at the end of this year. But the wind industry should not ask for more government support. It should be made to stand on its own.

The potential for wind energy is vast, but forgive West Texans if they have an overblown (pun intended) view of what it could mean in the future. Among those, of course, would be Panhandle oilman T. Boone Pickens ...All that said, we have to understand the realities of the entire nation and not be dazzled by the positive effects that have been and will be felt from a regional standpoint.