Oil Billionaire Building World's Largest Wind Farm

gadzook33 writes "CNN is reporting that oil billionaire T. Boone Pickens is planning to invest billions of dollars in what will probably be the world's largest wind farm. It will eventually generate 4 gigawatts, enough to power 1.3 million homes. The first 600 GE wind turbines are scheduled for delivery in 2010. Pickens says that each turbine will generate about $20,000 in income annually for the landowner who hosts it."

Comments

Re:Who is responsible for maintenance?

[quax]

Very good point especially since these things can literally burn and crash.

This PDF contains some scary pictures. And there is nothing you can do if the turbine catches fire. It is to high up to put it out. Don't get me wrong I like wind energy but if these things are conventionally designed each one of them will be a bush fire waiting to happen.

Re:just a few thoughts on clena energy

[aengblom]

Just playing devils advocate as from a environmental point of view how could this be a bad thing. First off the US needs to do something like Germany and give economic incentives, ie a fixed price on energy. This way your not competing dollar for dollar with oil and coal.

Wait, so you think that developers are building these without incentives and that's a bad thing? Sadly, wind still does need incentives -- and gets it in the U.S. -- but the whole idea is for incentives to jump start the technology to where it becomes competitive without the incentives.

And these turbines, at least, aren't really gobbling land -- a lot of them get placed on ranch land, so it's essentially multi-use.

Pickens is not a good guy

[rhadamanthus]

This is the same guy planning to drain the Olligalla (sp?) aquifer to supply southern texas with water. Private water rights being abused, right before your eyes.

FWIW, these two projects (the wind farm and the water system) are really the same

Some notes

[GreggBz]

I live close to the Waymart Wind Farm. Just a few notes:

I totally support wind energy and think the turbines have done good for the community.

They make noise. Even at 1/2 mile away, low whooshing sounds are clearly audible, especially at 4AM.

They are HUGE. Pictures don't do it justice. By the time your next to one, it's an awesome site.

The community here gets jobs and money from them. The government pays 1.8 cents per kilowatt hour for wind energy, netting the community here $150,000 a year. Also Florida Power and Electric pays about 12 employees here to service them. I've known a few that have worked on the turbines, they have some amazing pictures of being on top.

They significantly interfere with off-air television. I work for the cable company, and we had to build a giant antenna in another site because our first giant antenna was to close to the windmills. Local houses have trouble getting off-air signals, digital HD included.

They are a tourist attraction. The first few years they existed here, many people tried to sneak onto the private land to snap pictures etc..

Re:just a few thoughts on clena energy

[evilviper]

My only other concern is the amount of land that these wind farms gobble up. With the growth in population especially in energy craving areas like southern california land is at a premium, which makes dedicating hundreds of acres to a wind farm also cost prohibitive.

This is so utterly wrong it's funny. You OBVIOUSLY don't live anywhere near California. Try driving from Los Angeles to Las Vegas some time... Note the 3+ hours of driving (at 70MPH) through COMPLETELY VACANT FRICKIN' DESERT.

Land in Los Angeles county is ridiculously expensive. Land in immediately surrounding counties in the basin is fairly expensive also, but low enough that there are lots of farms, and the like, located there. As soon as you get out of the LA Basin, however (cross over the San Bernardino mountains) there are many, many thousands of square miles of utterly empty desert land...

That's why Sterling Systems/Southern California Edison is building a 7 square mile solar power facility north of Victorville. That's why there's a half dozen new state and federal prisons there, that's why there's one of the longest airport runways in the world located there. That's why Chinese airports are actually contracting to have maintenance on their jets done in Southern California. That's why BNSF railroad is building an absolutely gigantic intermodal facility there, adjacent to the airport. That's why the Army's National Training Center is located nearby, with 1000 square miles (2590 km) at Ft Irwin, not to mention NASA/JPL's North American Deep Space Network (DSN) facilities. There is an unimaginably huge amount of empty, dirt-cheap land in Southern California. Not only would dedicating hundreds of acres to wind farms be trivial... Dedicating THOUSANDS of square MILES of Southern California desert land to wind farms would go completely unnoticed by the public (the Bureau of Land Management might have a little something to say about it, though).

What's more, though, wind turbines are NOT like solar power plants. Wind turbines need as much space between them as can be practical done. In other words, you can have a few wind turbines across a farm, and continue to use the area as a farm, minus a small area that the base of the turbine takes up... It's not like the US is lacking in farm-land. In fact, most farmers LOVE wind turbines... Manufacturers just can't make them quickly enough.

Re:In other news

[mikael]

Not forgetting buildings. Cities are known to increase temperate by two degrees centigrade for every mile radius of urban development.

National Geographic had a program which described how the latest skyscrapers in New York were being designed to save on energy by using rainwater.

Although, they were saying that every skyscraper increased the surface area of the city due to the vertical walls, but failed to mention the shadow created by the building.