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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.
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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.
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.
"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 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.
Yeah, I'm with you on this. The moderation here seems broken, seriously flawed.
Harold
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.
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
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
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...
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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.
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.
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.
Everything I have read on wind power shows it to be incredibly infeasible.
Hmmm, seems to be feasible in Europe. Germany currently gets over 14% of its energy from renewable sources. That's not projected, that is *right now*.
He also listed biofuel as generator option which is frankly frightening.
I agree that any biofuel solution that competes with food resources is a bad idea, but there are other ways of generating biofuel (ie., algae) that seem sound.
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
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.
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.
Ya see, I *thought* that might have been it but since wind turbines have been working and turning profits for years now, utterly unlike cold fusion, I thought perhaps you had something a bit more reasonable in mind. By what standard has wind power "failed to deliver"?
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
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.
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"
Never trust a man wearing a coat and tie!
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.
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.
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
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.
Public transport being piss-poor is not a law of nature, it's a choice americans have made.
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.
my point was that the effect, if any, won't be thought about until we have hard evidence of what it is.
the most likely effect as i said, is slowing of large weather systems, that traditionally cross the Dakotas in hours, this could lead to increased precipitation and flooding, since the Dakotas don't have adequate drainage because traditionally there were no trees to slow weather patterns.
but really when when a company buys cane sugar from Brazil, do they think about the damage to the amazon river that was caused by slash/burn campaigns to clear the rainforest, and replace it with cane sugar growers?
trees have a larger impact than just slowing weather systems, the return rainwater to the groundwater tables, create secondary rain from evaporation of previous rain, and generally slow runoff, and they don't take water from underground aquifers like farms do.
in other words, long term commercial farming will eventually cause Brazil's non farm land to have California style wildfires, because the can sugar regions suck too much water out of the ground for normal vegetation just like farming in California has caused such water table crisis's that cause the massive wildfires..
but don't you dare say that farming isn't sustainable, oh no, farming can't possibly be ruining the environment.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html