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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.'"
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
That's really solar power, not wind. With wind power, the air is already moving before you heat it up.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
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.
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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.
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.
This blogger explains it pretty well:
Memo to T. Boone Pickens: Your energy plan is half-brilliant, half-dumb
this is not the proper channel for discussing energy policy.
He's got you talking about it, hasn't he? How hard will it be to push congress critters for the appropriate political backing when he's already convinced half the country that he's the man to follow?
Oh he might be wrong, and he might be full of crap, but he's playing politics. And in energy, you NEED politics. Otherwise your multi billion dollar wind farm gets killed by someone who is concerned about all the sparrows getting caught up in the turbine blades... poor little birdies...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
As a percentage of GDP, the U.S. debt situation is about the same as Germany, France, and Canada, and is considerably better than Japan and Italy's. It's a common misconception that the U.S. is badly in debt. For some reason people keep looking at the raw dollar values. In raw dollars, the U.S. has huge economic figures because its population is significantly larger than all the other G8 nations, and its per worker productivity is the highest in the world. Once you account for this (by dividing by GDP), its debt load is pretty much in the middle of the other G8 nations.
While you're doing that, you might want to look at the FTSE 100 (UK), the DAX (Germany), and the CAC 40 (France). They all do pretty much the same thing as the S&P 500.
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.
About the silver bullet, I didn't say we don't need it. I just said it was unlikely.
Re: Re: motorcycle parking, yea anything over 1000cc would be off-limits if I designed this project. I guess we'll have to agree to disagree about the effects of subsidies ;-)
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
Nuclear is also not solar. But ultimately, all energy (including geothermal and nuclear) is of stellar origin.
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
I think you are referring to a solar tower. They are neat, in that if built right, they could last damned near forever, potentially generating energy at very low operational cost.
Additionally, since they operate on top of a heat sink with several days of thermal mass, they could easily be used as a 24x7 "base load" alternative energy power plant.
However, they aren't particularly efficient, they haven't been well tested at larger scales, and present a number of fairly serious engineering challenges. The taller the central tower, the more efficient, but building a mile-high tower isn't cheap. And while the "several days" of base load could be turned into a week or more with the correct engineering, that raises construction costs significantly...
Before solar towers can reach the critical mass of economic viability, other technology that's more (downward) scalable will probably win out first. Quite easily, IMHO.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
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.
My reverse cycle air condition heats very efficiently thank you.
Wind power is in use in many places. Up and running, providing electric power every day. Your metaphor fails.
TANSTAAFL GIGO Acronyms to live by!
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.
Actually, being from West Texas myself, I am highly dubious of any claim T. Boone Pickens makes that seems in the slightest way to be environmentally sound.
Most of us here in West Texas draw water from a portion of the Ogallala Aquifer that has been cut off from the main aquifer, due to glacial movement in the last ice age, IIRC. As well water is the predominant supply, this has led to a potential water shortage in the area, without proper conservation. Pickens insists on ignoring this fact and continually tries to purchase water rights from people so he can pump and send the water down state where it will sell for a higher price. What does he care if the area runs out of water, he has enough money to move easily when that happens.
I have not looked deeply into his current plan, but, with his track record, I would imagine he is paying lip service to environmentalism, with his only priority bein increasing his vast fortune.
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 :)
This is T Boone Pickens we are talking about right? Do you consider the "swift boot captains for truth" campaign philanthropy?
Do you consider shirking on a million dollar challenge respectable? Especially when the Million would have gone to paralyzed vets.
I have to say on the surface the plan actually seems pretty good but because it Pickens I question where the scam is. The guy is scam artist plain and simple. Why you think he would stop at 3 billion when he didn't at 1 and 2 I am not sure.
Right. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nevada_Solar_One
The Nevada Solar One solar tower plant generates 134 million kwh per year, cost $266 million to build, and covers 400 acres (roughly 0.6 square miles or 1.6 square km).
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epat1p1.html The 2006 US energy use was about 4,060,000 thousand mwh. So to generate all of that with plants like the Nevada Solar One, we need 4,060,000,000,000 kwh / 134,000,000 kwh = roughly 30,300 copies of Nevada Solar One.
That's $8 trillion in expenses and 0.5% the surface area of the United States. Petty cash. (Obviously, shifting our entire energy generation to solar tomorrow is impossible. But gradually ramping up this kind of energy production looks good to me. Eventually economies of scale will bring the energy generation costs down below coal.)
Here, here! And let me add, I signed a mineral rights lease this year for just such an enterprise, given that my little acre of Texas sits square in the middle of the Barnett Shale, one of the largest natural gas reserves in the USA. The first drilling took place in our neighborhood recently (not related to my lease, though - that's a year off), and the gas is flowing. We had to search for the well, too - very nicely concealed a few blocks down from our house.
What we need less of is government regulation (to the point of the grandparent post). The government is not the solution, they are the problem. You can bank on it.
And that, in a nutshell, is why we might as well stick to fossil fuels. No matter what the solution, environmentalists will object to it.
The answer, of course, is yes. If a plant generates 1 megawatt, and is 33% efficient, it results in 3 megawatts of heat (the megawatt generated as electricity is converted to heat eventually as well, though it may be at a distant point). Subtract from that the amount which would have otherwise been absorbed, which is roughly the 3 megawatts times the inverse of the albedo (40% for desert sand), and you get a net 1.2 megawatts of heat for each megawatt of thermal solar plant in the desert.
This isn't too bad considering that if you burn coal at the same efficiency, you get _all three_ megawatts.
There's lots of things I haven't considered here (like shadowed area not directly involved in generation) but I think it works as a first order estimate.
Here's one article, I'm sure you can find more. The basic problem is the same as with Cape Wind, they dont want to spoil wilderness areas with solar cells, windmills, or power lines.
http://www.pe.com/localnews/inland/stories/PE_News_Local_S_renewable03.3cc481c.html
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.
Our sun won't produce Uranium either, it's not massive enough. Uranium is produced in supernovae via the r-process.
what's that now?
By putting the word 'pedantic' in quotes, it is clear you are mentioning the word, not using the word. Look up the use-mention distinction. So, 'pedantic' most certainly is an adjective. Saying that the word 'pedantic' is an adjective is just redundant.