As promised in my blog on Amory Lovins’ vision of our energy future, here is the contra view of another noted national energy expert. As with Mr. Lovins, I have been in meetings with Robert Bryce. Mr. Bryce believes that Mr. Lovins and the Green Left are living in a dream world that would, if implemented, cripple economic growth in the United States as well as prevent the growth of an emerging middle class in countries such as China and India.

Mr, Bryce says the Green Left has a dream, a dream increasingly shared, according to opinion surveys, by a majority of Americans. It is that the use of 20th century fuels like oil and coal, will finally end and that the time will soon come for, as Al Gore says,”21st-century technologies that use fuel that is free forever: the sun, the wind and the natural heat of the earth.”

It might be better, and much more realistic, says Robert Bryce in his bestselling book Power Hungry, to imagine our journey toward a “green” energy nirvana in units of Saudi Arabia. “Over the past few years,” he writes, “we have repeatedly been told that we should quit” using fossil fuels. Okay, Fine, he says. Bryce says, “Global daily hydrocarbon use is about 200 million barrels of oil equivalent, or about 23.5 Saudi Arabias per day. Thus, if the world’s policy makers really want to quit using carbon-based fuels, then we will need to find the energy equivalent of 23.5 Saudi Arabias every day, and all of that energy must be carbon free.”

Power Hungry is a bluntly worded exploration of what Bryce calls a profoundly delusional quest, from near hysteria at the mention of nuclear power to the illusion that we are rapidly running out of oil or that we can turn to renewables for salvation: Since it takes 10,000 tons of wood to produce one megawatt of electricity, for instance, the U.S. would be chopping down forests faster than it can grow them to use bio fuels.

Mr. Bryce also points to the critical link between affordable power and economic productivity and asks why we should expect much of the world to forgo the benefits of light bulbs and regular energy when we Americans have enjoyed these privileges for decades. But if Power Hungry sounds like a supercharged polemic, its shocks are delivered with interesting and powerful backup documentation.

So let’s build a wind farm. OK, Bryce says, to start you’ll need 45 times the land mass of a nuclear power station to produce a comparable amount of power; and because you are in the middle of nowhere you’ll also need hundreds of miles of high-voltage lines to get the energy to your customers. This “energy sprawl” of giant turbines and pylons will require far greater amounts of concrete and steel than conventional power plants— anywhere from 870 to 956 cubic feet of concrete per MW of electricity and 460 tons of steel  – 32 times more concrete and 139 times as much steel as a gas-fired plant.

The same criticisms apply to large solar PV farms spreading across the desert landscapes of the American Southwest.

Once we’ve covered our tract of rural landscape with turbines and gotten over any guilt about the significant numbers of birds that will likely be killed, prepare to be underpowered. Look at Texas, he says, home to Mr. Bryce. He says: It ranks sixth in the world in total wind-power production capacity, and it has been hailed as a model for renewable energy and green jobs by both Republicans and Democrats. And yet, according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which operates the state’s transmission grid, just “8.7 percent of the installed wind capability can be counted on as dependable capacity during the peak demand period.” The wind may blow in Texas, but, sadly for consumers and grid operators, it doesn’t blow much when it is most needed—in summer. The net result is that just 1% of the state’s reliable energy needs comes from wind.

If using a huge amount of land to generate a tiny amount of energy from an intermittent energy source sounds crazy, consider, too, that we haven’t yet found any feasible, affordable technology for storing wind and solar-generated energy. Wind and solar power are either instant energy snacks or energy starvation. They must be used when available or immediately replaced when they aren’t.

But for those managing the electric grid, they must meet constant demand or face blackouts, which means that conventional power plants will be required to back up the wind (and solar) farms. This strategy, he says, is precisely the one that China is pursuing, adding in one province alone the coal-fired equivalent of Hungary. These plants, Mr. Bryce notes, are designed to run continuously and will in all likelihood “be run continuously in order to assure that the regional power grid doesn’t go dark.” The irony of wind – (and solar power) - is that it “doesn’t displace power plants, it only adds to them.”

What is arguably worse, says Bruce, is that the current drive to impose mandatory use of renewables and eliminate use of fossil fuels are bad ideas that are nearly immune to dispassionate examination and criticism. Although there is increasing local opposition to proposals for sprawling wind and solar farms, both political parties seem stuck on the green mythology that fossil fuels that provide affordable and reliable energy can easily be replaced by renewables with similar results

Power Hungry is a bluntly worded and well documented effort to call this kind of revolution to account, literally, by asking us to look at the math and to face the numbers. It is unsentimental, unsparing and impassioned. It is the very antithesis of the energy views of Amory Lovins and the Green Left.

An energy future somewhere between Lovins and Bryce is likely to emerge. Fossil fuels are not going away anytime soon, nor should they if economic growth is to continue here and elsewhere. The effort to produce affordable and reliable energy from renewable resources is not going away anytime soon, nor should it, as energy consumers should have these choices to make in a market driven economy.