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Pickens Plans On Wind Power
Hugh Pickens writes "T. Boone Pickens (no relation) has launched an energy plan and social-networking campaign that calls for replacing Middle Eastern oil with Midwestern wind. The Pickens Plan would exploit the country's 'wind corridor' from the Canadian border to West Texas to produce 20 percent of the country's electricity and provide an economic revival for rural America. Transmission lines would be built to transport the power where the demand is and natural gas, now used to fuel power plants, would instead be used as a transportation fuel, which burns cleaner than gasoline and is domestic. Pickens proposed that the private sector finance the investment, which would result in a one-third reduction, equal to $230 billion, in the U.S.' yearly payments to foreign countries. Pickens has already invested heavily in wind, notably a planned 4,000-megawatt wind farm in his native Texas. 'We've got to get renewable into the mix. The problem for this country is that we're paying $700 billion — you heard that — $700 billion a year,' Pickens says. 'We can't afford that. In 10 years we'll be broke if we continue that.'"
What about upright wind tunnels? They build a big structure a mile tall with plastic tarps 10ft above the surface for a few miles radius.
Air warms up under the tarp and goes up the tunnel. Estimates put power at around 500 MW. It was a project around Australia somewhere but it was cut to 1/2 mile for some reason (I dont know).
It could *EASILY* turn out that Pickens is just another participant in the public relations campaign that big oil is putting on to convince Americans that big oil isn't out to get them.
People are angry at the pump, and the more people who identify oil companies as enemies, the more people are exploring alternative fuels.
While his emphasis on America's trade deficit and, apparently, the economy seems to be a new tune for an oil man, he has plenty of others with whom to share the oil-going-green spotlight with.
Good to see someone up top speaking out for a change. I don't understand why more dont follow suit.... If you're a rich billionaire oil tycoon, you could invest in windpower and become a rich billionaire wind tycoon...There's no need to be so hell bent on oil
In 10 years we'll be broke if we continue that.
There are some that would argue that the US is already broke. The creditors just hadn't started calling yet. But they are now. Take a look at the S&P 500 over the past couple months, then zoom out and compare it to 2001. Yes, friend, right here is the abyss. Not later - right now. 1250 is where it stopped a few months ago. 1250ish is where we are now. After that it's 800 and we're back to the low point of the dot-com crash, and after that there's only the floor. It goes all the way down.
No, America doesn't have 10 years. Oil is going to break America long before that. Europeans are paying $9 US or more per gallon of gas and although they don't like it, they manage. What happens to the US economy when gas doubles again? You're having trouble at $4/gallon.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
It's really simple. Build windmill farms. Build solar collecting power plants. Build the variety of hydro electric generators.
Run everything from electricity including water heaters, building heaters, and cars.
Stop sending money to the other side of the world.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Sure, Pickens he has some business interests in his wind power generation, but who cares. It is clean, renewable, and nearly always available. (And it produces *Zero* CO2)
Get some added transmission lines to the main grid from the 'wind corridor' and we up and running.
-Pickens is putting his money where his mouth is and at the same time helping America, that is a true Capitalist and a Patriot.
http://www.greencarcongress.com/2006/12/doe_study_offpe.html
Someone, somewhere, will claim that this does not help solve the gasoline problem. Please read the above link, which states that current off-peak electricity could power nearly 200 million PHEVs, according to the DOE. Adding green energy sources will greatly reduce pollution in urban areas when combined with ultra low or zero emission transit.
We'd still have somewhat of an oil problem, but commuting can be covered by existing electric infrastructure.
His point is to use wind to replace natural gas power plants, then use natural gas to fuel our vehicles.
The Gish Bar Times - Blog covering Jupiter's moon Io
20% wind is about right. More than that, and there are problems during periods of no wind. There's a study on wide area wind averaging (need source) which has a table of percent of installed wind capacity vs. percentage of time available. Even averaging over the entire midwestern US only gets something like 80-90% uptime.
Base load should be nuclear, since that's all fixed cost. Peak air conditioning load should be solar. In between, whatever works.
California needs a major effort to install enough solar panels to power the Southern California air conditioning load. The numbers actually work for this. The nice thing about solar is that you get the power during peak hours. You're guaranteed that bright sun and peak air conditioning load come at the same time. Wind is somewhat random on an hourly scale, and hydro is somewhat random on a seasonal scale.
Mr Pickens, with a national debt of about 30K per head, an imploding housing market, a possible depression and soaring exchange rates to other currencies, weren't you like, broke, 5 years ago ?
This is NOT a signature.
There was a cover story on this in Business Week a few weeks ago. Pickens is facing alot of resistance from folks over his intention to put a price on drinking water. Though we pay taxes to the government for our tap water, we haven't yet directly paid a private owner for water. Pickens wants to change that; he wants to make water profitable even where it's currently (just about) free.
Harold
Much of the land in West Texas where the wind blows is owned by the Texas and Pacific Land Trust (TPL). How much of that does T. Boone Pickens own?
Fine, don't RTFA. And apparently, you didn't read the /. summary, either
The intention is to use wind power to free up supply of domestic natural gas for transport (that's automobiles).
22% of US electric demand is supplied by natural gas fired power plants.
[Gene]
Mission: To provide products that consume time and energy as entertainingly as permitted by the laws of thermodynamics.
We already pay for tap water: through our taxes. Pickens wants to change that, however: he wants us to pay a private owner for water, even water that's disputably owned. It think it's a bad idea. Do we really want to see private ownership of water? Then corporate ownership? It's bad enough that most consumers are being fooled by Pepsi and Coca Cola Bottling for their unregulated water products (which aren't any better than tap water, and are possibly worse); water should be free, everywhere, and perhaps the *only* resource government *must* provide.
Harold
Generating electricity isn't that difficult. Generating enough electricity to keep an average american home electric-bill free is. I started looking into solar and found it was too expensive for too little of a return. Maybe a few years down the road it will be better.
I'm sure a lot of people have done the same, and I'm sure a lot of people have also taken the next step as well and started looking into less expensive ways to generate energy. It seems odd, but very little attention has been paid to the home-electricity arena and there are huge opportunities for engineers and innovators. Building a radial flux generator is well within the capabilities of most do-it-your-selfers for less then a few hundred dollars and the only problem is how to turn it.
Should it really have taken until 2007 before flutter belts came along? Is it really that hard to engineer a device that would take advantage of rooftop wind energy? I bet some products hit the market soon and some DIY projects start showing up online as well.
But wind energy isn't the only thing out there. PV isn't the only way to extract energy from the sun. Gravity can be harnessed pretty easily. And there are plenty of other sources as well.
If there's one good thing to come out of the gas price situation we are dealing with, it's that a lot of smart people will be looking at energy generation all over again.
Yet another poster whose "claim" is to simply spout out RTFA.
Anyone have any idea of the feasibility of actually using natural gas to fuel transportation? Yes? No? I'm willing to bet that in the long run, it's simply not as efficient. Electric cars are great, but they haven't made a major dent in the industry, now have they?
This guy was one of the major contributors to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth propaganda campaign in 2004. I don't trust this guy one bit.
Besides that, there's something just not right about a billionaire oilman who comes up with an energy plan and first presents it on television commercials - this is not the proper channel for discussing energy policy.
"We're going to build a 4,000-megawatt farm in Pampa, and we've already bought the turbines for the first 1,000 megawatts".
This blogger explains it pretty well:
Memo to T. Boone Pickens: Your energy plan is half-brilliant, half-dumb
Finally, when we Americans have a gun held to our head and are in an energy crisis, we start doing something about it. The good news is that it's never too late to start doing something about it and I believe this country is finally headed in the right direction regarding the energy pandemic. It doesn't really matter what you think about Picken's. At least there are people coming out with solutions to the problem. A few years ago, there wasn't near the volume of discussion about energy and foreign oil dependance as there is today.
great idea!
too bad it'll take 5-10 years to get to market, and in that time the US is gonna fall into an even deeper hole than it currently is now! it's a bandaid on a limb that was chopped off -- better than nothing, but FAR too little, too late.
it's a shame those oil CEOs (that make more money in a minute than I will in my entire life) can't be bothered to invest in rapid deployment of something like this, eh?
Yeah, I'm with you on this. The moderation here seems broken, seriously flawed.
Harold
Has anyone considered what the impact on the environment these wind farms have? Surely large scale wind farms will reduce the wind currents across the continents and cause a series of climate changes that no one expects?
Perhaps it will reduce heat transfer and cause a portion of the planet to fall into an ice age? Who knows?
That's what it is! I couldn't resist.
Or maybe T. Boone Pickens is a big fan of tornadoes, and doesn't like all the bad press they get. Now with wind power being a good thing, people will look forward to a tornado, since it might really give the city a nice little boost of energy. This way Mr. Pickens gets to refurbish theimage of tornadoes, like how John Travolta became cool again after Pulp Fiction.
..........FULL STOP.
I'm sure he did no planning at all, just came up with this idea, and then started spending advertising money on T.V. for it.
Or maybe it will work.
..........FULL STOP.
"a one-third reduction, equal to $230 billion, in the U.S.' yearly payments to foreign countries."
Note that he says it reduces foreign spending, but not cost. Weird, it might go either way but he doesnt say ...
Everything I have read on wind power shows it to be incredibly infeasible. You'd have to cover the entire corridor with mills to be able to get the % he wants. He also listed biofuel as generator option which is frankly frightening. And he is underestimating greatly the effort to change to natural gas.
Then he says all we need is proper leadership. HAH, if we had the perfect leader we could land a person on mars in 10years. But thats not happening. Hell if we had even semi-decent leadership, we could pass a law enforcing fuel efficiency and mpg for cars and usage would drop dramatically.
But maybe I just have it in for a guy that sounds like a hick while talking about science. And he has a name like T.Boone (reminds me of steak, country music stars, rappers and b/w westerns all at the same time). And was in SBVT a false smear campaign against kerry....
I was under the impression that the US was already TRILLIONS of dollars in debt? What difference is $700 billion going to make really? The US is a lost cause, time to jump ship.
Migratory birds.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
If it wasn't for their stupid asses we'd be tapped into ANWR and the Gulf and pumping millions of barrels a day and buying gas at less than two dollars a gallon. Fucking domestic terrorists.
Aren't we already "broke"?
http://www.solarnetwork.net/ in the "keep what you generate, share what you save model"
You really have a severe case of ADD, if you can't get past my first line.
It takes 5.6 pounds of natural gas to provide the equivalent energy of 1 gallon of gasoline (GGE).
(1 gallon of gasoline weighs between 5 and 6 pounds, depending on temperature).
According to the Green Car Congress, a gasoline Honda Civic SE consumes 6.9 liters of gasoline for every 100 kilometers driven (34 mpg); the CNG Civic GX requires 7.4 liters gasoline equivalent (31.7 mpg), making it 7% less efficient. The GX carries 8.0 GGE, for a range of about 200 miles.
In Massachusetts, CNG is selling for $2.96 GGE, vs. $4.09 for gasoline, making it 28% less expensive.
There are approximately 120,000 CNG vehicles on the road in the US. [Gene]
Mission: To provide products that consume time and energy as entertainingly as permitted by the laws of thermodynamics.
Unless we're going to have superconducting transmission lines, proposals like this just don't make sense due to the transmission losses. Otherwise solar power in the desert would work too. Perhaps you could colocate things like aluminum plants, but otherwise, this is yet another "feel good" idea.
Difficult to imagine how someone with this much wealth, presumably obtained via business acumen, could be this naive. The enviros will not simply stand by and permit private interests to carpet the front range with propellers. No way, no how.
They will claim bird extinction. The will claim the composites necessary to build the props are destroying the planet. They'll get a consensus of government funded scientists to assert that large wind farms cause devastating Atmospheric Thermal Depletion*. They'll discover whatever "endangered" prairie critters they have too to prevent anything on this scale.
Forget it.
*should copyright that
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
I'm a little surprised that Pickens didn't mention that the USA has been inflating and spending like crazy for decades. We're not going to go broke in a decade, we're already seeing the dollar crash.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
You know you can buy securities that will appreciate if the S&P 500 goes down. I'd love it if all the doomsayers would put their money where the mouths are.
Do you think that you know something the market doesn't? If the market should be priced lower based on all available information today (public and private-most likely) why isn't it?
Also, I think you'll find if you look at global market indices they've all been on the decline since last fall - it's a global economy you know.
Finally, what do you mean by "broke?" That the US isn't t going to be able to service its debt? Certainly we have more assets than debt, although much of them are illiquid. But I think you'll find that historically low tax rates can be raised if adjustments need made.
Finally if our central bank knows when it can't let a bank collapse (Bear Sterns,) then the rest of the world knows that it can't make a credit call on US debt without destroying their own capital markets.
JP
These schemes always go something like, "Renewable, blah blah blah, then a miracle occurs and everyone lives happily ever after." Let's all sing the monorail song now.
Natural gas is already a dead end. There's a reason why licenses for liquid natural gas ports have exploded and that is because domestic natural gas supplies are dwindling. Changing the transportation infrastructure to a fuel already in high demand at power plants is dumber than dumb.
Wind is awesome. It's cheap. It's safe and there's plenty of it. With DC transmission lines, you can even alleviate the peak demand to peak supply gap. The main problem is that the energy density isn't there. You have to put up a lot of capital up front to get the capacity you need. Wind doesn't need subsidies but until fossil fuel and nuclear subsidies dry up, there isn't enough market incentive to get it going on a scale that's more than a science project.
Hydro has already been overbuilt. There's no more energy to get out of that other than efficiency improvements at existing sites.
This leaves us with various solar technologies. The problem here is that there's a lot of manufacturing to be done before you start to see solar contribute significant energy to the grid. It's too late to make the transition painless. That should have gotten under way with Carter's energy plan. We would already be the beneficiaries of a new energy infrastructure today, but Reagan had to go and rip out working solar panels powering the Whitehouse as a sign to the oil hooligans that the party's on. So no, the transition won't be painless. It won't even be bearable. It will hurt. My only hope is that the pain produces some real political change, hopefully within the framework of the constitution since I'd rather not see Americans shed blood however gratuitous the initial outbreak may be. That always turns ugly. From Tsar to General Secretary or King to Emperor, revolutions have little chance of settling on the median most people want.
A good start would be to actually uphold the existing constitution by impeaching the evil doers. At least then, you're guaranteed not to have to endure some asshole on a "bring em on" trip ever again.
Politicus
As a Texan and solar/wind advocate (I get my electricity from West Texas wind and have a 3 KW solar array on the roof), I find Pickens' actions very ironic/egotistical. He is getting written up in Business Week and all over the web for his altruistic vision while also funding advertisements to show how the candidates should address alternative energy and a reduction on foreign oil dependence by switching to natural gas and wind. Clearly, these are self-serving ads from a man that only cares ultimately about the bottom-line.
What is lost is that this is the very same man who financed the Swift Boat ads that effectively killed Kerry's campaign. I am pretty sure Kerry would have gotten the US further down the road of renewable energy than Bush has. Was Pickens smart enough to realize that he needed more time to build his plan out and needed to kill off Kerry? Or was he just being a good oilman in supporting the Bush/Cheney campaign?
The real underlying reason for all this appears to be a smokescreen for his desire to open a water "pipeline" (which would just so happen to run right next to the wind energy transmission lines) from the Texas panhandle to DFW where he stands to make a significant amount of money from water arbitrage.
The United States does not need someone like Pickens to promote the wind energy market. There is more than adequate capital flowing into these projects already. But Pickens does need to find a way to build his water pipeline, and renewable energy is a very convenient way to do it.
Care to explain that statement?
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
Surely you could build a trailer park and then harness the power of the inevitable twisters that would hit it.
Excellent...
See my vest, see my vest,
Made from real gorilla chest...
What?
My brothers neighbor spent 60k on a solar/wind system for his house. We thought he was crazy, but then realized that tax credits and rebates and incentives from the electric company paid for almost half of it, so lets call it $35k owed. Now, he's working on getting an electric car for trips to the store, and converting his dryer and stove back to electric. Figures that the whole system will pay for itself in about 8-10 years, depending on how much electric bills increase over the next few years.. And he likes the fact that he will never have to pay the power company any money again.. (has batteries and a biodiesel generator to keep the house going for a few days in case of a bad winter)
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
Oh, there are certainly spread-out suburbs. But a lot of the older East Coast cities make a 100% public transit lifestyle possible, and in places like NYC, often dramatically preferrable.
And other cities have made good investements to enable people to not need a daily car. Here in Portland OR, the mix of bike routes, buses, light rail, and FlexCar-like services keep a lot of people out of single-occupancy cars for the daily commute. A similar lifestyle is possible in Seattle. And we see companies like Google and Microsoft offering free employee-only transit services to help easy congestion and parking problems. Plus employees do work on their commute thanks to on-bus WiFi, instead of arriving at work exhaused and enraged by traffic :).
So, we've got a long way to go, and places (Texas?) very hard to transition to a non-car lifestyle. But we have other places showing it really can be done.
Plus there's better car options. I saw a couple SMART cars on I-5 today...
My video compression blog
Gotta disagree with you there, cobber. Funny how folks have just gotten used to assuming that power generation has to be some multibillion dollar centralized facility. Dude, we've got intertie now. It's the law.
Seems to me that Firefox, for example, is a pretty ambitious project, as is SETI@home. Or, for that matter, the content aggregation that takes place at any big BitTorrent site.
To assume that "somebody big" needs to carry out the work of giving this country more power generation is like asking "who's in charge of this 'internet' thing?"
You want to see us have more power? Superinsulate a frackin' building with some friends. Earthberm one. Go on Craigslist for a few weeks, accumulate some surplus foam and other materials, and build a greenroof. Or put in your own solar panels. Or buy a surplus Whisper, put it on a tall post (height is good), and get more watts per dollar than PV. Plenty of biodiesel coops out there, both for refining fuel and converting vehicles. Join one.
We don't need no stickin' megacorps. We really don't. Most forms of renewable power just don't have that serious a set of economies of scale. Think about it. Me? I'm workin' on a few fronts, most notably getting local zoning codes changed to better accomodate this sort of thing and helping to optimize a 26,000 square foot building that's been converted into workspaces for things like bikemaking, vehicle conversions, and people like me who run small manufacturing businesses and such. Hopefully we'll have our first PV up this year. We've already got a guy making hydrogen and a project to build a pretty serious wind turbine.
Don't bitch. Build. Or, as a bumper sticker I sell says, Don't fight the system; replace it.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
Unfortunately, I do not believe in the slightest that wind energy is going to have a major effect on our dependency on oil. It sounds great for power plants and other things, but it's the automobile sector we really need to worry about.
Wind energy has some problems. The wind doesn't always blow. When the wind IS blowing there is no way to store the energy, it just gets pushed on the grid and may or may not be used. Transmission lines are expensive to build and its proved tough to get power companies to buy an unpredictable source of power.
But what if wind energy could produce fuel? The big problem with hydrogen is that it costs energy to produce. Why not produce hydrogen with "free" wind energy? This would eliminate the problems with energy storage, expensive infrastructure, etc. Further, cars are being produced now that can use hydrogen (CNG cars).
In my home state of South Dakota, we elected a public utilities commissioner on his promise of championing wind power similar to our neighbors in Minnesota and Iowa. However, we can't get hooked up to the grid and we can't get power companies to buy. There's plenty of open land and plenty of wind. Hydrogen generation might be the better solution. I realize that there is going to be the group that says hydrogen generation is a waste of energy and the perfect solution is wind and solar generating electricity which will power electric cars, but battery technology isn't there yet and we need a collection of bridge solutions.
Why have 1 person driving a backhoe when you could employ 20 with shovels?
LNG works fine for transportation, most of the around town buses in Cleveland run on it and it makes a HUGE difference to not have them spewing particulates every time they stop and go. I think the ultimate re: electric cars is something like the Prius but split the motor out into a trailer or detachable pod, if you're going on a long trip then attach the trailer/pod and you now have an x gallon tank and a motor strong enough to keep the batteries topped off. Your electric mode becomes more efficient most of the time because you aren't dragging the weight of fuel and a motor around, but you retain the ability to use the current distribution system. This is even a good long term solution since you can go with a diesel generator and use any of dozens of renewable sources to fuel it.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
That's how capitalism works, my friend. In fact, by encouraging the switch from gasoline to electric (which you can generate yourself with equipment from Home Depot) and natural gas (which is basically methane, which you can generate from a pile of garbage, among other things) he is creating a more "rational" marketplace, one in which monopoly power is reduced and anydamnbody with the time and a few thousand dollars can get into the game.
Will a dozen kinds of regulators, many of them paid for by guys like him, come in and make it more expensive and complex to become a vendor? Duh; of course. But worst case scenario, nothing keeps you from "rolling your own", a thing that you can't say about gasoline.
All looks good to me, I've gotta say.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
Again, RTFA, or in this case, watch the frackin' video. There are already over two million LNG vehicles out there, most of them in fleet use as things like city buses.
Get. A. Clue. Or just get the hell out of the way.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
LNG cars and buses have been around for a long time. It's not hard to convert a conventional engine into an LNG powered one.
Seriously,
My karma has gone from positive to terrible within the span of a few hours.
Why, you ask? Because someone comes along and tells me to RTFA when I did; and when I reply as such, I get modded down as a troll.
When your original post is salient, and you defend yourself against an asshat who attacks you, you are not a troll. Get it?
Why else? Because in thanking a poster who actually stood up for me, I was rated as being "off-topic".
To the fucktard moderators who aren't bothering to read the contexts, and who generally just like to moderate based upon whether a poster actually has the balls to call out both typical /. griefers and the moderators themselves, go fuck yourselves. You take your "position" far too seriously, and you mismanage it to boot.
America has been DESIGNED for the automobile...
Um, actually, not always. A lot of our older suburbs and cities (Pasadena comes to mind) were designed for streetcars. America is filled with moderately intact streetcar suburbs. They were designed for mass-transit and would work even better now that fifty years of technology could make streetcars that would be cheaper, lighter, and easier to maintain.
What is keeping cheap, small, streetcars like this from being brought back? Well, among other things, there are now thousands of expensive regulations about how a mass-transit rail vehicle can be made. The doors alone cost thousands of dollars because, for example, they need to be able to be opened manually if the power goes out while simultaneously not being easy to open while the vehicle is in transit while ALSO needing to be controllable electrically from at least two points, and on and on and on.
I've been looking into this for a few years now and the tech is ludicrously easy. I did a little thought experiment and I would say that it should cost about thirty thousand bucks for a bunch of techies to build a light-duty streetcar these days. But making it legal for use? Good luck with that.
No, the truth is, America, other than the winding suburban streets of the sort that are being phased out anyway, could actually implement mass transit and related technologies pretty fast and cheaper than you would think. IF, that is, the people in the various legislatures get off their asses and make it possible.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
The way to solve the automobile problem is to solve the suburb problem.
Having people live in endless house farms around cities so they have to commute back and forth every day has increased Americas fuel requirement massively.
The solution is either to move business out to the suburbs (yeah, right..), or provide alternative commuting methods, like free maglev trains and decent low emmision public transport in the cities themselves.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
I'm getting really damn tired of this crap about "all the greens" being opposed to all of the various renewable power sources. Let's see you back this up. Not with something from Fox "News", but with links to pages on the sites of major environmental organizations saying the sorts of things you claim. I deal with actual policy makers from people like the Sierra Club and Audubon on a regular basis, not to mention attending things like the AWMA convention, a senior official of which crashed at my place, and the line of blather you're pushing is pretty damn far off the mark.
Show us some facts. If you can.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
1. Transmission of electricity from the midwest to California would entail tremendous transmission losses. By way of comparison, at present the longest transmission line in the country is the pacific intertie from northern Oregon to Los Angeles, which is an HVDC line; at only ~800 mi it loses 15% of everything it transmits.
2. Most of the natural gas in this country is used for heating homes directly and would not be freed up for powering cars.
3. Oftentimes there are "low pressure" weather fronts which span large geographical areas and last for several days, resulting in practically no wind for hundreds of miles. As a result, we would need nearly 100% backup capacity for the windmills. This could be solved using pumped storage but that would add to capital expenditure.
4. Unfortunately, the areas which have tremendous wind resources in this country (and therefore wouldn't require long-distance HVDC lines) already generate almost none of their electricity from natural gas. Places like Illinois get their electricity from coal or nuclear. Thus, very little natural gas would be freed up for cars. It's in California that we get most of our electricity from natural gas but we have inadequate wind resources and HVDC lines to the midwest would entail the transmission losses I indicated above.
5. HVDC lines from the midwest to california or NY would require large capital expenditures.
...Don't get me wrong, I think wind power will be an important part of our future energy mix.
However I think an even better idea would be to replace all the natural gas-fired turbines in california with nuclear plants. Doing so would actually free up tremendous amounts of natural gas to use as automotive fuel, because california has a huge population, and it gets most of its electricity from natural gas which could be freed up.
ExxonMobil doesn't consider itself to be an oil company. As the parent suggests, ExxonMobil is in the energy business.
All the major oil companies started giving lip service to this about 20 years ago in response to a fairly famous critique of the industry. It's mostly talk however. If you look at ExxonMobil's last annual statement on page 19 it says "Fossil fuels are expected to continue to provide about 80% of energy in 2030". That does not sound much like a company that expects to be a big player in any other kind of energy any time soon.
...but the presenter claimed that ExxonMobil is the second largest holder of mineral rights to uranium ore in the world.
I'm deeply dubious of this claim. One would expect to find some mention of it in the footnotes of their financial statements as it would be a material asset. While it's possible I've overlooked something I can find no mention of such mineral rights in their 2007 financial statements or annual report.
Would this system not capture a large amount of radiant heat which would otherwise be reflected back into space (genuine question)?
Read Pynchon.
One of the moments that I truly became a radical happened in freshman year of college, in 1984. As it happens, I had been very aware of Carter pushing for more freight rail all through his term, a thing that the GOP fought tooth and nail. Well, he got some funding through anyway. Come '84, the results were starting to appear and, lo and behold, there was a big fat editorial in the Wall Street Journal trumpeting how much better off we were under Reagan because U.S. businesses were helped so much by this new freight rail capacity cutting costs and increasing flexibility. That was what taught me that you can't address environmental issues effectively without addressing the lies these sorts of people spread about them.
I couldn't agree more. Impeachment hearings and every other kind of fight to create accountability is key if we're to prevent even more of the same.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
I do not believe in the slightest that wind energy is going to have a major effect on our dependency on oil.
In the near future I'd certainly agree with this. Wind energy is more likely to displace coal or maybe natural gas in powering the grid - to what extent remains to be seen. For better or worse wind is unlikely to be more than a supplementary power source in the next 20 years.
It sounds great for power plants and other things, but it's the automobile sector we really need to worry about.
The main opportunity I see here is with plug-in-hybrids and electric cars. Those can be powered with a variety of fuels besides simply oil derivatives - including wind. This is where wind will make whatever dent it is going to make. But it's not clear just how much of a reduction is possible. Besides just the consumption of gasoline/diesel fuel, oil is used in nearly everything we manufacture (plastics, lubricants, etc) so the need for it will be slow to change.
I'm not so sure this will work out so well. After all, the places on earth where one can put a wind farm and get a reliable return without major transmission losses are, well,
no I can't say it. ...
Oh what the hell:
Slim Pickens!
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
The Manhattan project was one of the real success stories in U.S. history. Regardless of how anyone might feel about the politics of "the bomb", we put a huge amount of money, manpower, and other resources into being the first to harness the military power of the atom, because we HAD to. It was a case of "victory at any price/failure is not an option."
If we would have just taken the money that has been spent on military management of our energy problems, we'd all be driving solar powered Ford Exploiters that cost nothing to run as long as the sun continues to show up for about half the day, every day.
Wind energy has some problems. The wind doesn't always blow.
That's true just like the sun doesn't always shine but you are missing a very important fact. What we DO know for a given location anywhere on earth approximately how many days a year the wind will blow and with what average intensity. While you cannot be sure the wind will blow on a given day you can be reasonably sure it will blow. Having lots of turbines can help smooth out the fluctuations. Solar power works the same way - you simply plan based on the average number of sunny days a year in a given location.
This makes planning a fairly straightforward proposition. Almost all the costs are fixed so you simply have to design enough flexibility into the grid to allow for days when the wind deviates significantly from the average. Engineers have known for a long time how to accomplish this.
While it is nice to see someone trying to do something to reduce the worlds dependence on oil (even if it sounds like it's purely for profit reasons) renewables just aren't going to produce enough power any time soon.
I suggest people have a read of this before voting for this plan, it's quite an eye opener. In summary, the average person in the UK (which is the focus of the book) uses about half the power per person per day of the average. Even if we covered our entire windy island with turbines and ringed the entire coast with wave and tide generators we wouldn't even be close to providing enough power.
If we are to get off foregin (middle eastern) oil we need to go nuclear with fast breeder reactors and we need to start doing it soon.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
Migratory birds.
No, three words. Duck under glass.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
The problem with your advice is that most people do not possess the resources (skills/brains/money) to do the things that you suggest - hence the need for centralized industries to provide to the masses.
You mentioned installing your own solar panels. BAD ADVICE for all but the most competent of people. Solar panels can generate a ton of energy, and when incorrectly installed, can do really bad things like burn buildings down and electrocute people to death.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
You don't have to come up with some civic plan to GET supermarkets and clothing stores into the suburbs. Just change the dang laws, and business will follow the money.
How exacltly are you proposing we harness the power of gravity? I suppose hydroelectic / pumped water sort of uses gravity but I can't think of any other way. Lifing something up will always take more energy than you get from it falling and I can't see many large things falling out the sky.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
that's a good definition of informative.
I don't know if anyone has checked, but natural gas ain't exactly cheap either.
It might currently be expensive, but that's based on current demand & supply. Domestic oil companies recognize the possible vast availability of natural gas in the Gulf of Mexico. While other energy sources remained cheap, there was no incentive to develop infrastructure to harvest domestic natural gas on a large scale. Now that petroleum is expensive, natural gas is likely to draw a lot more attention both in demand which will spur development of supply.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Semantically speaking, most of the energy of the sun reflects off the atmosphere. Some light makes it through to the surface. Most of that is reflected back into space as well. The bit that gets through is absorbed by the ground, which in turn heats the air near the surface. (Note that the sun never heats the atmosphere in this process). In addition, there is a temperature differential created. I thought the differentiation was important.
TANSTAAFL GIGO Acronyms to live by!
Sounds like this guy is regurgitating the same green ideas that we've been kicking around for decades. He seems really proud of himself for his revolutionary "wind farm" idea and Wall Street is acting like the guy just discovered a gold mine.
My suspicion is that it takes a filthy rich corporatist to make free-marketers consider green tech as anything other than communist tree-hugging.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Of course. Earthberming a building could cause the end of all life on earth and requires at least six years of specialized training. Yeah, right.
.burn buildings down and electrocute people to death. /.-friendly a site as there could possibly be. /.ers, are capable of taking at least small steps to reduce the need for megaprojects in the first place.
I wrote as long a list as I did precisely because people's skills and resources vary. Are you telling me that "most people" have neither the skills not the money to buy a solar powered battery charger? I mean, hey, twenty-five bucks is serious money and it's hard work getting those little suction cups to stick to the window. Converting a car to biodiesel? If something that low on risk wasn't viable, half the projects posted on this site would be even less so.
solar panels . .
Unlike, say, using a backyard barbeque grill? C'mon, how frequently do homes get burnt down by solar panels? Especially since most put out 24 volts of power or even less. You're seriously pushing it here. I gave a bit of thought to the things that I suggested before I posted and not a one is limited to people with any more money or skill than is required to build a nice gaming-optimized PC. In fact, you could start with a little unit from thinkgeek, about as
I'm not claiming that the average American should put up a dozen terawatts of photovoltaics on their garage. I'm saying that most people, certainly most
Looking again, I should have put more emphasis on small starts, on things like battery chargers. As it happens, I just finished writing a blog post in which I did just that. But as for your concern about "the masses" not being able to handle something as simple as a wind turbine, dude, you're on the wrong site. What do you think "free as in speech" is all about? I posted on a site that's all about taking control of the technology around us, about not just curling up and waiting for some huge corporation, whether Microsoft or General Motors or General Electric, to tell us how they are going to run our lives.
We stop paying attention, stop keeping involved in "the means of production", and we're all screwed.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
Looking back at this after a couple of minutes, I stand by the conclusions but regret the tone. Sorry, I really didn't need to get so snarky. Time for me to head to bed. See y'all tomorrow.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
Thing is that many things get more efficient the bigger you build.
Sure I can put up my own wind turbine but compared to the monsters built by companies with decent money at hand my little thing is far too costly.
Nuclear is very cost effective but even companies don't like to put out that much money without government backing.
Try making your own microchips and compare them to what Intel makes then tell me you can do anything big business can. People always pull out the distributed generation thing as if it somehow solves the energy problem which is like saying the way to deal with the cost and CO2 from all those buses and trains is to put everyone in their own little vehicle and since those vehicles are smaller they, y'know, wouldn't pump out as much CO2!
The problem I see is that Mr Pikens earns 1 billion weekly form Oil. How exactly do you convince private sector to put up money with that much excess earnings based on Oil futures 'gaming'?
Fred Grott(aka shareme) http://mobilebytes.wordpress.com
Wind, solar, geothermal. Done carefully, with an eye towards minimizing ecological impact, these energy sources are clean and they just won't run out.
TANSTAAFL GIGO Acronyms to live by!
Correct except for one thing. He's talking about CNG, not LNG. I'm in the natural gas business and we have plenty of vehicles running on *Compressed Natural Gas*, but the range is limited, and the storage tanks are heavy and take up a lot of space. *Liquefied Natural Gas* would be better, but there are major problems when it comes to using it in a vehicle. And have you checked the prices of natural gas futures lately?
It's all about knowing the whole story.
In reality, Mr. Pickens is certainly promoting wind power, but not in the way you think.
In Texas, where his proposed farms are located, there is a proceding under way at the PUC to determine how large an investment in transmission lines, built to get all that wind power back to consumers, can be charged to electric consumers. In other words, how much Texan's electric bills are going to go up.
Texas currently has something like 9 billion in transmission line assets. The proposed expansion? About 9 billion dollars.
It takes a lot of salesmanship to push something like this through. Pickens is hooting about how wonderful wind power is, and how much we need it, because he wants ratepayers in Dallas and Houston to pay the enormous costs of getting his electricity to market.
Is wind power good? Sure!
Is paying another $50 a month on your bill - before you ever even start paying for the electricity itself, to add 2 or 3 percent more (unreliable) watts to the grid, and mainly make Pickens richer good?
Not so much.
a car powered by a motor in a trailer? That sounds like the worst design for a vehicle ever.
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?
The idea of this huge windfarm running down the center of the US is laudable. Have it over a wide area and cover the variability of wind speeds and locations. But now come the obstacles.
The NIMBY's. Windfarms are an eyesore. They make noise, despite what manufacturers say. Figure out the shadow footprint from the blades. The windfarm would be right in Tornado Alley (I'm happier than a tornado in a windfarm"). Who is going to pay for the towers that are trashed by a twister? No wind = no power = no money for the energy company (never happen - we will pay regardless).
His eggs in one basket approach will not be a endall but a part in a bigger plan. We have to get off of oil - period. So that leaves us with wind, solar, nuclear, biomass,energy conversion technologies (solar running hydrogen separation).
Until we decide to suck it up and put the US into OA (Oil Anonymous), we will be voluntary slaves to oil.
No, I'm New Here
I agree. Move from coal to nuclear for base load, make synthetic gasoline from the coal. We have lots of coal, and since the coal is not burned directly many of the impurities (S, Hg, Th, U) are not released into the atmosphere during liquification. While this is not a solution that will be good for hundreds of years, it is an economically viable solution that is good for several decades.
Wind can be a part of the solution, but I am dubious about its costs ($5000/kW?), its environmental impact (turning large areas of the country into no-fly zones for birds), and its usefulness (what to do when it does not blow?)
I am also convinced that if the US is going to compete economically in the 21st century, we need to be able to produce cheap, abundant energy. Conservation mandates will not get us there, nor will most 'green' technologies (yet).
Perhaps we should build a solar tower and put a parking lot in the space under it. The cars would contribute their waste heat and increase the energy output of the tower.
Heck, they could even build a shopping mall under it for the triple-whammy. A solar tower that captures solar energy, recycles waste heat from cars and collects rent from retail space.
Bigtime Consulting - "We're the best because we cost the most"
The wind power generation pales into comparison to the land rights above the Ogalala aquifer w.r.t. long term value.
http://seekingalpha.com/article/24410-t-boone-pickens-invests-in-water-should-you
If you're correct...
1. build massive wind farms
2. global COOLING! (Offset global warming)
3. ???
4. President Al Gore
I live in a rural part of Texas. I haven't seen any wind turbines going up around here, but I have seen an awful lot of trucks hauling gigantic wind turbine components past my house.
I look forward to the day when we have wind turbines all over the state cranking out fuel for our cars. Umm. . . They do produce fuel for cars. . . somehow. . . right? Right??
Pickens is suggesting that we spend one trillion dollars to produce 20% of the US electricity needs, because we are spending 700 billion a year on oil. What he doesn't say is that only 1.6% of our electricity is generated by oil, so we will not be saving any of the $700 million/yr in the process. He just wants us to go bankrupt even faster.
Keep in mind that electricity is just 14% of our total energy needs. So he is proposing to spend one trillion on just 3% of our total energy needs. (20% * 14%) If this is such a great deal, why is he appealing to citizens/government to push this plan? Because he wants us to pay for it. If he thinks it is a great idea, let him raise the funds and build it.
The best short-term solution is government regulation of automobiles, through taxation and incentives.
I'm surprised no one has proposed changing the US speed limit back to 55 mph. The original 55 mph speed limit was instituted to save oil during the oil crisis to reduced demand. It's really the only thing government could do in the short term to lower gas prices, but I have yet to hear any politician propose it this time around.
There ain't no such thing as A free lunch:
TANSTAAFL
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
This is just shy of the Canadian border, in my home town. Quite a site to see, there are turbines as far as the eye can see. This site says they built 100; the other company they mention must have doubled that. I counted 100 in a 5 square mile section, and they go on for over 20 square miles.
Never trust a man wearing a coat and tie!
Basically I think that T. Boone is on the right track but there may be more to the story and it isn't just PR for the oil industry (Pickens is an independent oil man; probably doesn't care a whit for the image of big oil as long as they buy the crude he produces). Matthew McDermott at treehugger.com has linked the Pickens' wind strategy to another company that Pickens has in north Texas. It involves using right of way for green power transmission and a new law passed by the TX legislature. http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/06/water-not-wind-behind-tboone-transmission.php
Pickens may not be quite the renewable resource hero he'd like everyone to think he is. Anyone following this needs to understand the linkage between Pickens' interest in wind power and the water pipeline he'd like to build in Texas.
Pickens has long pumped water from the Ogallala Aquifer through his company Mesa Water, but has recently formed an itsy-bitsy eight acre water district (populated not coincidentally by people firmly in Pickensâ(TM) pocket) which will finance the construction of a $2.2 billion water pipeline running into the the Dallas-Ft Worth metro area from the Panhandle. Electric transmission will run above this.
Up until last year this wouldnâ(TM)t have been possible under Texas law, but during the last session of the state legislature a new law was passed which allows renewable and clean-coal energy projects to obtain public rights of way by piggybacking on a fresh water districtâ(TM)s ability to claim land for water pipelinesâ"by eminent domain if necessary. A water transmission pipeline can be built underground and the transmission lines can run above it.
15 percent sounds way too high. Wikipedia indicates that around 3-4 percent for 800 miles is what HVDC power transmission should achieve (3 percent per 1000 km). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HVDC
Maybe they built a crappy transmission line there :)
Does the "Slashdot Community" ever thinks ANY idea is a good idea? No matter the topic, most posters to this site will put it down and bloviate about how they know all.
It would be interesting if anybody, ever, had an idea that this self-righteous group would find worthy.
"Unlike, say, using a backyard barbeque grill? C'mon, how frequently do homes get burnt down by solar panels? Especially since most put out 24 volts of power or even less."
That statment proves that you shouldn't be allowed to install solar cells!
The voltage doesn't matter. A good example of a really dumb idea take a charged car battery. It is only 12 volts so have your voltage and hook it up as a dead short through a common nail. She how long it takes to get hot enough to start a fire.
enough solar cells to run your home or even a good part of it backs more than enough power to kill you. As to the BBQ example. Most people don't BBQ every day and the smart ones don't do it in there home but well away form it.
Also if you have a relatively modern diesel you don't have have to do any modifications to run bio-diesel. You do have to if you are going to run veggie oil.
Instead of buying a little solar panel to charge a few batteries you would be much better off replacing your lights with CFs. Putting your TV, DVD, WAP, Consoles, and other gadgets on to a power strip and turn them off at the power strip.
I wonder how much power we waist with things that go on to standby and don't turn off.
I kind of miss power switches that where big and went clunk.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Am I the only one who thinks that taking large amounts of energy out of the winds and tides may have some equally problematic consequences for the climate?
Obviously, at the moment, it's a tiny fraction of the total energy in the climate system, but surely harnessing the energy means the wind or tide is no longer going to do what it was going to do?
Basically, I say nuke the planet from orbit and get a new one. It's the only way to be sure.
The man is more of a patriot than is the current white house. Hopefully, other billionares will re-invest their money back into Amerca in the same fashion. We need to stop the bleeding of money to the middle east as well as to CHina. That means the first business MUST be getting back cheap energy. Wind is one approach. But so is geo-thermal and other AE as well as nukes. Hopefully, EESTOR is for real. If so, within 5 years, we will have quit importing oil into the west. In addition, EESTOR and ppl like pickens could solve the Global warming issue in one clean swoop.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I'm wondering how the Bakkan Formation, which straddles Montana and North Carolina, will affect the price of oil in the near future.
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3868
http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2008/3021/pdf/FS08-3021_508.pdf
Wind, sure, whatever. I do not care if it is vertical turbines or cloth covered windmills out of Don Quixote.
Alcohol made from corn/hemp/recycled waste sounds good too. As long as the money goes to some farmer in Iowa rather than Big Oil, Haliburton, or some Sheik.
I am willing to pay more for everything if it helps my neighbor and not someone who HATES ME.
- I live the greatest adventure anyone could possibly desire. - Tosk the Hunted
Their last CEO sat right in front of congress and was giggling about this (if you can find the video you can see it in his expression, I remember it) and told them they were an oil company. That is when he was explaining how he got 400 million during his last year as his salary, and exxon dropped a whopping 10 million on all alternative energy projects combined. Go by a corporations true actions, not what they might jabber about. Their own internal reports diss all forms of alternative energy. Uranium is not credible alternative energy, on the contrary, it is one of the most dangerous forms of energy and right now we could be staring at a huge expanded war in the middle east over who gets to use uranium and when. You can't just dismiss this either, it is real, right now, in your face and has the potential to spiral out of control. My guess is you hit it, they were trying to fake out some young people to work for them because of their deserved bad reputation. The same young people who will be the first drafted to fight in the expanded resource wars because we stay stuck on oil and uranium. That was just propaganda to try and get you to work for them, their real actions show their real intent, they got the planet by the balls and will squeeze until well past hurting, they have no desire to make it a better deal for YOU, they want a better deal for THEM because that is how they make more profit, and keeping you tied to petroleum and centralized electricty production is the easiest way to do that.
And quite frankly, I hope they don't go into alternatives. We need to just route around exxons and similar entrenched companies profits bottlenecks and the major filth and pollution and political weirdness associated with conventional petroleum and the contentious use of nuclear power.. They don't need to be the energy vendor lockin corporation forever. Let some other companies and people do it, and we need a massive push for DEcentralization and home and business production of energy, solar pv and thermal, personal wind power, electric vehicles and home brewed biofuels for cars, etc. Energy needs to be "open sourced" even more than software code. Vendor lockin is never a good idea. How many wars and threats of wars and how much wallet hijacking do we have to go through to keep some companies rolling in the dough forever? And why would it be a good idea to keep that company in such a position of political influence and political power? I see zero reason to do business with those people and hope they gradually just go broke, because people switch away from their products by the millions. And oil shale and oilsands will just perpetuate all this excessive climate weirdness and still result in massive pollution. We need to as quickly as possible work on eliminating the need to go there in any large fashion, same as with coal. That was OK in the 20th century, but we know better now, time to move on and do it better.
T. Boone is using the wind power scheme so he can pump the fossil water out of the Ogallala Aquifer. The easements will allow him to run pipelines as well as power lines. He gets 10 points for wanting to develop renewable wind energy. He gets minus 100 points for wanting to pump out essentially a non-renewable water resource.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Aren't we already broke?
Just saying.
If you've go an available head of water, you can use a hydraulic ram pump to keep a reservior full, and use a turbine to generate your electricity.
It's a handy way of using gravity, and is essentially free (you're using the power of the water that would flow downhill anyway).
One swallow does not a fellatrix make
Windy areas are generally not close to cities. Plus its difficult to store surplus power generated off hours. As the hydrogen economy evolves, maybe we could hyrolize water during off-hours.
Why are we trying to make unreliable sources like wind and solar a big part of our power grid?
I'm not sure if anyone else knows this, but the sun only shines for half of the day. We have no efficient means of storing and releasing electricity, so solar doesn't make sense. Wind is also unreliable. Towers must be shut down during storms due to high winds, etc... Can you imagine the power routing nightmare if we became too dependent on wind?
Pickens isn't doing anything new here, either. He is simply trying to get wind power in so that more of his company's natural gas can be used for cars. That doesn't really solve anything. If he truly cared about the energy crisis and a clean environment then he would be investing his money in hydrogen research.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
Think more along the lines of drop-in power source - battery pack for in-city, gas turbine generator for those long trips.
Something bad is coming when people are suddenly anxious to tell the truth.
You're straining at gnats. As of 2001, lighting is 8.8% of total residential energy use. And those CFs have a high energy cost to make and to dispose. Television, 2.9%. VCR/DVD, 1%. Desktop computers, 1.5%. And that's TOTAL power. The standby power is a miniscule percentage of that.
Is that in direct dollars or did he account for inflation and the time value of money? Do those figures include the cost of maintenance (both preventive and corrective)? Calculating the payback rate/period isn't all that simple and most people screw it up by accounting only in current direct dollars.
I am amazed that you missed out public transport. One day, the people of the USA are going to have to get used to sitting next to strangers again. :)
So will grocery stores be closed on nights, Saturday evenings, and Sundays again? That's when buses in my home town don't run.
And don't count T. Boone Pickens as a philanthropist.
West Texas is blanketed by wind turbines now.
They're there to generate electricity to run the cricket pumps that have been there for several decades.
It takes electricity to bring oil to the surface.
And they haven't stopped drilling. At the current price of crude (4-5X what it was just 5 years ago) just about every drop in Texas is now profitable to extract. But it'll take a lot of electricity.
Our current leaders thinking of building more nuclear power plants while telling Iran that they can't also control their own energy destiny with their own nuclear power plants is a little two-faced. We should gain expertise in large-scale wind and solar and then sell that technology to them. Everybody wins - US is off foreign oil, US sells more technology broad, Iran gets clean energy production, the environment is better off, US-Iran relations are better, and there are no nukes hiding out there.
Tidal power, let the moon do the lifting, get the energy out of the falling water!
I'd rather be sailing...
Maybe you should have read my post and the post I was responding to.
The post that I was responding to was suggested that people should buy small solar panels and use them to charge a few batteries or run a few LED lights.
You want to talk about gnats.
There is a lot of ways to cut your power bill.
The thing that gets me about standby and phantom loads is that they are 100% waste. Not only are they waste but the contribute to the cost of cooling your home since they are dumping that electricity as heat.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Has anyone thought what's going to happen when there's so many wind-powered generators around removing energy from the atmosphere that winds no longer blow into neighboring areas like they used to? What's a layer of still air on the surface going to do? Remember people energy is not free. Every use of it has effects.
Why is it wrong for "the oil companies to position themselves to . . . provide the alternative energy sources?" This is just good business sense, to recognize changing realities and adapt to them.
My great-grandfather was a blacksmith; and when the first automobiles appeared in his county, he added a gas pump to his shop and learned to work on cars. That was a wise decision on his part; just as it is a wise decision for Exxon, et al. to diversify into other energy sources.
You seem to share the reflexive disdain for business which is all too common (especially on /.) . . .
Petrol (gas) station down the road from me is charging 1.20 sterling a litre (in the UK).
1.20 x 1.98 (sterling to dollars) x 3.79 (litres to US gallons) = 9.00 dollar / gallon.
Yup, we're paying 9 dollars a gallon today in the UK. It will only go up from here...
C'mon, how frequently do homes get burnt down by solar panels? Especially since most put out 24 volts of power or even less. You're seriously pushing it here.
They don't burn down houses often because they are installed by professionals and there are laws that regulate how they are installed. A friend and coworker of mine runs a side business that does solar installs. Even supposedly qualified crews he's hired to do the installs have occasionally made mistakes that could have led to fire.
not a one is limited to people with any more money or skill than is required to build a nice gaming-optimized PC.
I think that makes my point. The majority of people could not build their own PC.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
There is a public Forum for discussions about Pickens plan :
www.pickensenergyplan.com
Cheers.
Don't forget that natural gas currently doesn't have the gasoline taxes ($0.40 per gallon in this area).
Also, like hydrogen, it takes some energy to compress into a tank. Moreover it won't take too much additional demand to push gas prices higher.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Unfortunately, the state government is in the pocket of the coal industry, which is also very big in ND. Wind farms put coal workers out of jobs. So they don't let many wind farms get built and they don't give the infrastructure necessary to do so (such as a way to tap in to the power grid).
The problem with wind in North Dakota is that it is in North Dakota. It has nothing to do with coal companies trying to kill it. The problem is getting the wind power from North Dakota to someone who needs it. That is a very difficult and extremely capital-intensive problem.
The current system that we use to fund our transmission system is simply not equipped to deal with this sort of chicken and egg problem. Here's a short list of the real reasons that North Dakota is not the short-term panacea to our energy problems:
1) North Dakota citizens do not want to pay billions to build new transmission line that will simply ship their power into other areas. (Rightfully so.)
2) No single wind company is big enough to fund the transmission upgrades by themselves, which leads to amazingly complicated squabbles over who gets to use whatever available transmission capacity is available, and attempts to screw over the competition in a scramble to get there first.
3) Wind is an "intermittent" resource (part 1). Try running a company where 20 percent (or more) of your employees may or may not show up on any given day. Moreover, on same days every single employee will come rushing in all at once; on other days, not a one will show up. (Never mind the engineering challenges of building an electrical system that can physically accommodate huge influxes one minute and then dead zones the next!)
4) Wind is an "intermittent" resource (part 2). Try running a company where 20 percent of your employees only show up in the evening / early morning hours. Sure, the majority of your customers (e.g. load) show up between 10 am and 4 pm -- but the wind tends to blow most in the early morning and later in the evening.
5) Integrating wind into the power system can lead to serious operational problems: http://www.wind-watch.org/news/2008/02/28/power-grid-narrowly-averted-rolling-blackouts/. On February 28, 2008, the wind in Texas dropped from 1,700 MW to 300 MW over an extremely short period and came close to causing blackouts.
6) Transmitting power over long distances is problematic in terms of transmission line losses. (Yes, someone will inevitably raise the prospect of a DC-tie line -- but from a practical view, that's many, many years off in the future and hugely expensive.)
Please don't misunderstand -- I'm very pro-wind. But people need to understand that it's limited and will not be the automatic solution to our energy problems.
There is a public Forum for discussions about Pickens plan : www.pickensenergyplan.com Cheers.
I don't know, this doesn't seem so bad to me.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
There's also the fact that a solar system increases your home value by something like 1K for every $100 in monthly electrical reduced.
You could go on and on.
The problem is that investing 60K in an electrical system is such a huge investment. If people are really going to start using "alternative" energy sources, it's going to have to be a smaller number with a quicker ROI.
I live deep in the midwest, and employment is sparse out here. Also, power tends to be expensive, since it needs to travel long distances and be parceled out in small amounts. It would be nice if we could do this, but somehow I get the feeling that the political will and financial investment won't be coming, especially as people refuse to take risks in an unsure market.
This idea is great! There is lots of land and lots of wind: Perfect! Why does it seem like we're forgetting something... Oh yeah! Wind Corridor=Tornado Alley. Back to ye olde drawing board.
-- Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new. -- Albert Einstein
That's the first thing I thought when I saw this headline.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
The region the Pickens plan calls for just happens to also be known as Tornado Alley. In which case, those turbines can be very expensive to replace at the least, and become flying chopping blades at the worst.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for wind power, but I don't think anyone's taking this particular problem into account.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
Wow.
I had no idea the "greens" were so ambivalent towards Wind Power. Nice bit of googling.
I don't find it surprising actually, their "DNA" is anti-big business, and Wind Power is definitely becoming big business.
Of course the days where "green" is a useful political label are definitely numbered now, if not already zero.
1. We only get half of our oil form OPEC. 2. OPEC is more than Middle Eastern countries 3. Most of the oil we get from OPEC/Middle Eastern countries is from countries that are friendly to the US. Wind is a great idea, but I guarantee either environmentalists or farmers will make this idea difficult to implement.
I'm not sure how building a wind turbine farm across the US would replace power plants. I think the proper way to state it is that it would lessen future growth of natural gas power plants. I don't think an energy company is going to let their gas powered turbines sit idle. So natural gas usage would not decrease. Where does the excess gas supply come from for the cars?
super insulation methods aren't exactly out of the price range of people building homes. I mean, the cheapest super insulation method is the Straw bale wall method. Straw bales have very good R-values, and it's entirely possible that the residents can build a house that has no furnace, even in Canadian winter environments.
oh hey, did i mention, it saves your cooling bills in summertime too.
I've been trying to convince my dad to add 2" of external foam insulation when he resides his house (built in the 70s), it's not even close to super insulation, but if he does it it will pay for itself in a very short time (since he'd do the install himself)
6" walls are becoming commonplace, if energy prices soar higher i think 8" walls will come into vogue. especially since you can use existing 2X4s to make 8" walls.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
because it's so obvious the US Oil Industry controls the oil supply chain...
Are you kidding? Have you heard of this little place called the Middle East? Check it out sometime.
Our oil companies ARE peanuts in relative comparison to the world's oil interests. Like a pimple on the butt of an elephant.
well, all i know is that in Total Annihilation there were a couple maps where you could build windmills. and as for the rest, you built solar and tidal generators until you could teched to the fusion plant. a few kbots or some subs, with a few towers for defense, and it was a race to get that fusion plant online, once you got it you could mass units like crazy, or get those super weapon buildings... TA was the precursor to System Commander, which would have been called TA2 had cavedog not tanked with most of the rest of the PC gaming industry...
of course, TA had no coal or fission plants, just solar, wind, tidal, and fusion, it was kinda assumed those energy sources were long gone by the time frame the game took place in.
wind was the worst in TA's game engine, you would hit spikes of wasted energy and then dips of not enough... yup, it was a real pain to use wind.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Yes, yes, it's completely bizarre and sinister that an energy company would be investing in the field of, um, energy.
Oil companies aren't about oil, they are about money. Show them another way to get it and they'll go there. They'll still be around selling petroleum products long after the last oil- or gas- burning power plant has gone by the wayside, and in the meantime they will be happy to trade their knowledge of energy production for your dollars, green or otherwise. Oil is just where most energy comes from right now.
When the inevitable shift away from fossil fuels is well underway, you can bet it won't be some irrelevant industry doing the work; it will be the same one that is doing it now (i.e. the Big Oil and Big Power guys).
Has anyone considered that the large scale implementation of wind farming facilities might disrupt the natural flow of wind causing environmental problems? I'm all for wind farms, and even nuclear energy, but I'm not sure that wind power is really free.
Wind power is used to replace Natural Gas for generating power on the grid.
That Natural Gas gets reallocated for used as a transportation fuel. So we use less oil.
Hey, does anyone remember a red tape-like strip from 3M that was supposed to be vastly superior to solar panels? They were talking about lining parts of skyscrapers with them to power the whole building. Whatever happened to this? I can't find anything on it anywhere, and it seems incredibly foolish to be wasting time with outdated solar technology when there's something like this.
The efficiency decrease from using CNG in a modified gas engine is a result of the engine being tuned to run gasoline. A car designed to run on CNG would be far more efficient because the compression could increase from the 8-10 used in most automobiles to around 12 because the equivalent octane of the CNG is 120 versus 87 for unleaded gasoline. The boost in compression will result in better burning of the fuel.
CNG is bad in automobiles, because it's burned in an engine tuned for gasoline upto 20% of the CNG is unburned and discharged out the tailpipe. In the past this was considered OK because unlike gasoline the CNG doesn't contribute to urban air pollution (gasoline mixes with the atmosphere and produces ozone, a critical urban smog component).
The problem is that atmospheric methane traps 4x more heat than CO2 so all the unburned methane coming out of the tailpipe that would be discharged by automobiles into the atmosphere would quickly outweigh the global warming of the CO2 discharges currently made negating any environmental benefit from switching.
Should it really have taken until 2007 before flutter belts came along? Is it really that hard to engineer a device that would take advantage of rooftop wind energy?
I Googled "flutter belt" and didn't come up with any energy-related products.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Thank you, I sit corrected!
- solar and wind electric are worthy goals, but can be expensive - and power transmission isn't easy or cheap.
- there are aggressive state subsidies for both solar electric and wind electric
- yet, solar domestic hot water is cheap to install (i.e. $4K for many houses) and has near 100% conversion efficiency at the panel (most of the indicent sunlight heats the water, as opposed to solar's conversion efficiency of 20-30%)
- AND 20-50% of a typical home's energy usage is hot water.
So, if the goal is to save money and reduce your greenhouse gas emissions, don't start with solar electricity or wind electricity - put in a simple solar hot water system, tied into your current tanked gas-or-electric heater. WAY better bang for the buck, and an order of magnitude cheaper than grid-tied PV systems.
CA and other states 'over-value' solar electric (for example by offering $10K+ credits on PV system) and under-promote solar hot water (with tiny $300 credits). That makes me a sad panda - if you're going to subsidize environmentally friendly choices, they should at least include the most efficient ones...
Guess it's time to go write a policy paper on this.
- KvK
The rock, I has it: http://www.instarmusic.com/
Why not made energy from waste ex: Dimethyl Ether (DME), Methanol and Biodiesel.
http://www.neworientalenergy.com/
Yeah. I actually first wrote "decades", just for electric uses and was tempted to put in "centuries" but I decided to define things as narrowly as possible, just to remove any possible wiggle room. But, yes, deep in my heart I agree with you completely.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
Free health care? Free higher education? No, not really. High taxes on things like gasoline, income taxes, and the value-added tax pays for it. The big difference between their $9/gal gas and $4/gal gas in the USA is tax, not the price of extraction, transport and refining. They pay at the pump, we pay at the HMO and university registration desk.
Yes, your point? Please note that I never said that accessing those renewable resources was free (or cheap) or that they would have no environmental impact. What I said was that if we build carefully, with an eye towards minimizing ecological impact, we can have renewable, green sources for energy.
TANSTAAFL GIGO Acronyms to live by!
T. Boone Pickens seems to have his heart in the right place (Main Article Click Here) but since no one has ever obstructed the flow of so much wind near the Earth's surface... he could find out that slowing that much wind DOWN HERE will cause a speeding up of the jetstream windspeeds UP THERE. What he is really doing is wanting to change the Weather Equation from what it is now, an equation we are rather happy with to an unknown quantity. Wind down here + wind up there may just turn out to be a Package Deal so that interrupting half the package will set up some kind of abnormally fierce turbulence.
His answer is the typical Capitalist answer so he can set himself up as a New OPEC => we have to pay him instead of foreign oil sheiks we get to have our own Wind Sheik. I fail to see where this leads to an advancement for the American citizenry still paying monthly electric bills out the window of their car, but he is right that keeping the money here beats paying yer enemies to napalm your allies and kid-soldiers forced to join as volunteers rather than starve at home on Minimum Wage jobs (psychology behind the Bush).
Each home should be energy sufficient on its own, thereby spreading wind interference around and reducing any "wind turbulence effect" that could result from Picken's concentrated energy farming... but by the time it becomes apparent that has resulted the deed will be done. We'll be as hooked on his Wind Farms as we are now on OPEC OIL. Sometimes the Capitalist answers tend to make us bend over and lose our balance a lot. Not to mention it but I will anyway, that the consumer psychology that kicks in from getting their electricity from a remote location is to leave the lights on all night. If people had their own home-based system with full monitoring, set up to turn stuff off automatically whenever the wind & sun dies down and run off its own battery storage, then you'd have something called er uhm energy responsibility... and a stronger-minded Public as a side effect... which the government has to keep from happening since a Public that learns to control its own energy gluttony would then turn on the gluttonous in DC spending all their tax monies, a really bad result. In the end, keeping people barefoot ignorant and energy pregnant has to be the answer, the T. Boone Pickens answer.
Industrial Age 2 + How-to Stop Malignant Cancers.
Chicago gots its nick name from a lot of hot air from politicians
It went to the guy who ran the cash register where you bought it, and to the guy who stocked it on the shelf, and to the guy who drove it there. Not to mention the guy who supplies electricity to that store, and takes its taxes, and spends its taxes, and earns its profit, much less the guys who come up with the marketing campaigns, and print them in magazines, and...
And all of those guys are in the US (assuming your store is, of course).
Your numbers are completely made up. The situation for an iPod is probably roughly similar to the situation for a CD, which has the overwhelming majority of the purchase price accounted for by local expenses (retail overhead, label=Apple overhead, retail profit, label=Apple profit, marketing, distribution).
The large majority of money from an iPod bought in the US stays in the US.
You may want to review the definition of the word "profit"; it comes after expenses have been deducted.
Don't kid yourself - the US is the world's largest food producer, and exports $30B more in agriculture than it imports, making it the world's largest food exporter.
Far more than "margins" stays in the country of sale; have you not heard of "overhead"? All those well-paid design, marketing, and managerial types are likely to be in the US.
Not to mention that for some of those products, like cars, the US is one of the world's manufacturing heavyweights.
Because the Chinese company is also more likely to get a minus 25% return. Or, in reality, -50% so far this year. Volatility in developing markets is hardly new.
You have some strange ideas about the state of the world that don't agree with the available data. You might want to reconsider some of them.
Not unless you think the lifestyles of Europeans are completely different from those of Americans. Having lived in both regions, I can tell you they're not that different, despite rich-country Europeans using half the energy per capita that Americans do.
Plus walking - or waddling - around town would do many of us a lot of good.
Which part of "insulate your house and buy an efficient heat source" is not economically viable? In most cases, it'd pay for itself due to energy savings in 4-8 years.
How would you know? You don't even have the faintest idea what his argument is.
He's not saying "Europeans are so great because they pay so much for gas", and it's news to nobody that that high price is due to tax. What he's saying is that because Europeans tax their gas so much, they've had years to get used to the high prices, and adapt their lifestyles and city layouts accordingly. Going from $4/gal to $8/gal in 10 years is a lot less painful than doing so in 2 years.
His point isn't about Europeans at all; it's about how vulnerable Americans are.
Not if you're sensible enough to use pumped storage to smooth out that wind power.
Based on the modelling I've done (hourly real-world wind production data for all of 2007), a capacity factor of 31% (US avg), 75% round-trip storage efficiency (average), and just 2 days of storage (the Hoover Dam has that for all of the US), 6MW of wind can provide 1MW of electricity more reliably than coal can (> 95% uptime, hours of warning before shutoff).
Using more than 20% wind really is not a technical problem. It's just more expensive (factor of ~3), so it's not yet appealing.
And the US is 30x as large.
Space is not a problem for wind.
Let's check that, but not with numbers you've just made up.
The USA uses 7x the electricity of Germany, meaning it would need 20%/6%*7 = 23x as many wind turbines. Germany had 22,000MW installed at the end of last year, so the USA would need 516,000MW.
Pickens is planning on spending about $10B for 4,000MW, or about $2.5M/MW. $2.5M/MW * 516,000MW = $1,300,000M = $1.3T = 2% of what you claimed.
So it's pretty clear you don't know what the hell you're talking about, but I bet you Pickens does.
At 20km^2 per 200MW, we'd need 516,000MW/200MW*20km^2 = 51,600km^2 of the USA's 9,800,000km^2 of land, or 0.5%.
Space is not a problem for wind.
Then the EU must be running a hell of a big science project, as last year they added more wind than any other generating source, and it provided 4% of their total electricity (source).
The USA must be keen on pumping money into science projects, too, as wind trailed only gas in terms of capacity added last year (and wind's 31% capacity factor is higher than natural gas's 25% - compare EIA capacity and generation figures).
It's too late to say wind power can't scale; it's already done so.
That you don't know about it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Pumped storage is 75-80% efficient (round-trip) for storing electricity, and is a mature technology that's already in wide use all over the world.
That windbelt generates 40 milliwatts, which means that in order to "generate enough electricity to keep an average american home electric-bill free," you'd have to put about fifty thousand windbelts on the roof of every home. (More, if you want to generate surplus power to compensate for periods of no wind.)
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Streetcars don't need rails. Wires, yes (otherwise, it's a battery-powered electric bus). Rails, not necessarily.
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
It takes 175,000 acres of wind turbines to replace one 1000MWe thermal plant and you need to build the thermal plant anyway to pick up the load when the wind stops blowing. Nuclear is cheaper on a lifecycle basis and if fuel rods are reprocessed into mixed oxide fuel the resource will last essentially forever. In addition reprocessing reduces waste volume by 97% and most of it is relatively short lived isotopes. If a podunk country like France can get 80% of its power from nuclear plants and reprocess fuel safetly and economically why not us?