Is natural gas 'boom' a threat to real renewables?

My skepticism alarm goes off whenever I see a news story or press release cross my newsfeed with some headline to the effect of, “Wind energy (or solar energy or energy efficiency) not worth the investment.” And the bells started ringing loudly today when I came across a wire story claiming that wind power carbon dioxide savings are “either so minimal as to be irrelevant or too expensive to be practical.”

A couple of clicks quickly confirmed the suspicion that this “news flash” came from an organization with a vested interest in the natural gas and oil sector. Should it come as any surprise that the fossil fuel industry would welcome doubts about the wisdom of investing in renewables?

Wind energy, like any power source, is certainly less than perfect, and its intermittent nature (if we don’t couple it with energy storage, which we typically don’t at this point) makes it initially less appealing at the moment than, say, natural gas. But, whatever the merits of this particular dig on wind power, the claim doesn’t cover the whole picture.

Peer-reviewed studies, not vested-interest analyses, have found that natural gas from shale formations — the big “play” these days — has a greenhouse gas footprint up to twice that of coal. And The New York Times recently reported that “hundred of industry e-mails and internal documents” from natural gas companies themselves show that a number of insiders question how much of a game-changer shale gas really is, from either the industry profits or the energy security perspective.

The bottom line, however, is that whatever energy source we’re looking at, we need to take a long and big-picture view. Fossil fuels are still the leading go-to power resource today, but we want sustainability and security too. With that in mind, we need to make sure we’re always taking a much more nuanced view than “x energy source is irrelevant/impractical.”