Great Ideas: Where The Buffalo Roam… And The Wind Turbines Spin
There are some solutions that will probably never become a reality, but you just have to push them, get them out there, make sure other people at least hear them. That’s how I feel about the Buffalo Commons. Imagine the world’s largest nature reserve, where massive herds of wild buffalo could migrate across the plains the way they used to, uninterrupted. And imagine that same land had a environmentally safe, completely non-polluting energy source collecting power 24 hours a day 7 days week. That’d be pretty rad, and it seems like most people would be for it. Well it can happen, check it out:
The Federal Government owns huge amounts of land in the west – they own more than half of Oregon, Utah, Nevada, Idaho and Alaska; and almost half of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Wyoming. These aren’t park lands either, they’re just public domain lands offering no value to anyone. Selling off some of those lands could generate hundreds of billions of dollars, maybe trillions, for the government. What if the government sold some of those lands and used that money to buy up a huge parcel of land in the great plains?
The great plains are slowly reverting back to wilderness. People are moving out in droves, it’s the area with the biggest population drain in the country. Land there is cheap – so buy it up. Then comes the interesting part. Offer it for sale or lease to energy companies, on the condition that the new owners or tenants build wind turbines on that land, and leave it otherwise undisturbed, fence-less, etc. In the end, after all the transactions are complete, the government has recouped it’s costs from the energy companies, all it did was facilitate the whole enterprise since no one single energy company could have done it on it’s own.
It’s the perfect solution, wind is one of the major resources of the great plains. That land isn’t being used efficiently right now anyway, and the buffalo need a home. The world’s largest nature reserve, literally millions of acres of wind generating land, plus tourist revenue. It’s win-win-win-win.
Any comments, Common Sense Investors?
This is a great idea, it would also have the positive side effect of preserving the Ogallala Aquifer. Will fresh water be a precious a commodity in the future? All signs point to yes.
Anyone interested in the Buffalo Commons should look at my website, policy.rutgers.edu/faculty/popper. I and my wife Deborah Popper, a geographer at the City University of New York/College of Staten Island and Princeton University, originated the idea. It has no particular connection with the Sagebrush Rebellion idea of selling off the federal lands. I am the board chair of the Fort Worth-based Great Plains Restoration Council, gprc.org, the only group explicitly devoted to creating the Buffalo Commons. Best wishes for the holidays,
Frank Popper
Rutgers and Princeton Universities
fpopper@rci.rutgers.edu, fpopper@princeton.edu
Any plan to conserve nature and promote alternative energy sources has my full support. I think the article is correct to assume that it would be a win-win-win-win. The revenues from these projects could also help towards making the great plains more desirable for living.
This article reminded of a New York Times article I read recently. The article states that one in ever four mammals is threatened with extinction. That statistic is frightening, and we need to do whatever we can to prevent the further rape of our planet’s resources.
“they’re just public domain lands offering no value to anyone.”
I’m sure that there are a whole lot of folks who live in the WEST that would take umbrage with your value judgment. It’s not like those lands are used by the residents of all those western states in which they now reside. I’m mean really Federal lands in the west are unused and bring in no tourist or other revenue. Sarcasm mode off. If you think the world needs a buffalo park on the great plains organize and get your neighbors to buy/build one. Just don’t sell off the existing deer, antelope, elk, and horse ones in the west to do it.
So build your buffalo park in the great plains and leave the western public lands alone. Then “It’s win-win-win-win.”-WIN!
Thing is though, there is cheaper land that is even more promising for an alternative energy that is much easier to integrate into the grid than wind. Desert land is made into desert land by the fact that it is being irradiated by massive amounts of heat. That heat can be concentrated in order to operate heat engines such as sterling engines or steam turbines.
Solar thermal is much more practical than wind because it can be operated in dense grids that are cost effective to wire to the grid unlike the widely distributed wind power being described here. Moreover, solar thermal generates power in a manner that is more reliable than wind and that’s quite important. In a solar thermal solution with steam turbines, it is common practice to integrate thermal storage that uses molten nitrate salts to circulate heat through an enormous vat mostly filled with nothing but gravel which provides the thermal mass to allow the system to continue producing hundreds of megawatts of power well into the night.
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