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Pickens Calls Off Massive Wind Farm In Texas
schwit1 writes with this excerpt from an AP report:
"Plans for the world's largest wind farm in the Texas Panhandle have been scrapped, energy baron T. Boone Pickens said Tuesday, and he's looking for a home for 687 giant wind turbines. Pickens has already ordered the turbines, which can stand 400 feet tall — taller than most 30-story buildings. 'When I start receiving those turbines, I've got to ... like I said, my garage won't hold them,' the legendary Texas oilman said. 'They've got to go someplace.' Pickens' company Mesa Power ordered the turbines from General Electric Co. — a $2 billion investment — a little more than a year ago. Pickens said he has leases on about 200,000 acres in Texas that were planned for the project, and he might place some of the turbines there, but he's also looking for smaller wind projects to participate in."
Yaaaahhoooooooooooooooo!!!
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Makes me think of the "Wind farm" scene in "Blazing Saddles", when Slim Pickens says "Boys, I think you'd had enough".
Yeah, I'm surprised the summary didn't include the reasons for the decision.
From the article:
In Texas, the problem lies in getting power from the proposed site in the Panhandle to a distribution system, Pickens said in an interview with The Associated Press in New York. He'd hoped to build his own transmission lines but he said there were technical problems.
"Hideous"? Speak for your own narrow-minded aesthetics. Plenty people think they look beautiful, myself included.
Here, I'll handle that for you.
In Texas, the problem lies in getting power from the proposed site in the Panhandle to a distribution system, Pickens said in an interview with The Associated Press in New York. He'd hoped to build his own transmission lines but he said there were technical problems.
Now, one would think a major issue like this would have been thought of beforehand (it was) and thoroughly scoped out BEFORE the investment (it wasn't).
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
In Texas, the problem lies in getting power from the proposed site in the Panhandle to a distribution system
Yeah, I can see how someone might forget about that little detail before ordering two billion dollars worth of equipment. Wow.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Taking a bet that fails isn't necessarily a mistake.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Step 1: Reduce Refining Capacity through by-outs
Step 2: Send out pundits to claim how high oil prices will go
Step 3: Get price of oil/gas high enough that alternate energy starts to become profitable
Step 4: Get people to invest lots of money on said technologies.
Step 5: ????
Step 6: Let the oil bubble burst and take the alternative energy markets with it.
I'm not sure where profit goes in there, but this also happened in the late 1970's through early 1980's. Right when other means of fuel production came online and people had invested a lot of money in the new technologies, the price of oil suddenly dropped causing the alternatives to quickly go broke and effectively stifle competition for the next couple decades.
Funny about that history not repeating itself, but sure does rhyme thing.
This was told to me by a retired GM executive and friend of the family back in 2006/2007 when the price of oil kept going up. He even gave a prediction of that the price of oil would fall around 2008/2009 and when it did, any interest in alternate fuels would go with it. Seems like he may have known something.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
From the article:
In Texas, the problem lies in getting power from the proposed site in the Panhandle to a distribution system, Pickens said in an interview with The Associated Press in New York. He'd hoped to build his own transmission lines but he said there were technical problems.
There has to be something more to it than that. Maybe he thought he could get the state to pay for it or something the way sports team owners seem to expect the taxpayers should pay for their little athletic club. These public-private partnerships usually end up being a way to fuck the public out of tax dollars.
Electrical transmission technology is well-understood. There shouldn't be any technical surprises. The wind turbines are the new wrinkle but even they shouldn't be that big of a problem. It's not like he's trying to build a fusion reactor with technology that doesn't exist yet. There has to be a non-technical reason behind this.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
If it's radioactive, you can get energy from it.
We just have these stupid laws because you COULD take that waste and turn it into a bomb. So rather than let someone potentially make a bomb, we decide to just take the highly radioactive stuff and bury it.
If the laws were changed to take all that 'waste', reprocess it and shove it through the whole process again, and repeat until it's dead we could probably end up with 'waste' with half life in the decades instead of centuries.
It sounds a lot like a gamble on his part in order to get the local utility to cough up part of the dough for transmission lines running to his proposed site. Saying there were "Technical Problems" is completely misleading since there is nothing particularly difficult about installing/operating an electrical grid, short of the significant upfront cost in materials, easements, and land purchases. Not to mention constant upkeep.
I suspect he approached the eminent utilities on this when the windmills were ordered, and got a soft "sure, if there's a windmill in Texas we will buy energy from it" sort of commitment that turned into a "You want us to spend how much capital? Just for the right to buy your energy?" now that the nation's financial situation is looking less optimistic.
I'm sure he was banking on a bit of taxpayer funds and cutting deals with the electric company to get that done. My guess is they voted him down.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I live in North Dakota, the generally really flat place that is boring as hell to drive through as there's no scenery. Trust me when I say that a wind farm really adds a lot to the landscape around here. That and at certain parts of the day they can look downright amazing. Here's an image I found on Google image search to show you what I'm talking about. There are a few other really nice ones at well.
Classic example of that, the massive aluminum plants in Iceland -- an island nation with no sizable quantities of bauxite of its own to refine. It's cheaper and cleaner to ship freighters of bauxite to Iceland and ship the aluminum out to use its ample cheap, clean electricity than it is to just refine it where it's mined.
All them years of priest training, taken out by one bounty hunter.
Parent is right. PBS has a decent interview which talks about this in language most people should be able to understand. The person being interviewed was the head of a project called the Integral Fast Reactor which was a new approach to recycling the 'waste'. Apparently the project was extremely successful in just about all of its goals (one of which was a focus on creating a new generation of significantly safer nuclear reactors), then canceled at the 11th hour by the Clinton administration in order to win brownie points with anti-nuclear factions of the Democratic party.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pickens_Plan#Pickens.27_motives
I think the "technical problems" may be that he couldn't get the okay to build his pipeline along the same corridor. I never trusted his motives, and I remember reading a pretty detailed article on this shortly after he announced his grandiose plan.
There IS more to it...WATER and his newly-granted powers of Eminent Domain!
http://www.lubbockonline.com/stories/071008/loc_302185743.shtml
http://www.junkscience.com/ByTheJunkman/20080731.html
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/TimothyCarney/T_Boone_Pickens_wants_your_water.html
http://seekingalpha.com/article/24410-t-boone-pickens-invests-in-water-should-you
I live is Southern AZ where Interstate 10 runs and a road which I am driving on often. Over the last few months I've noticed a steady flow of "oversize load"s on the freeway that contain rather large wind turbine components heading eastbound, presumably heading to TX from somewhere in CA. Perhaps these are Mr. Pickens, but who knows. Bottom line is there sure have been a lot of these steadily flowing through AZ...
Becuase[sic] wind doesn't meet the needs of today's energy grid (baseline power needs, peak power needs)
Nuclear doesn't meet peak power needs either. It turns out that multiple sources can be used together -- every wind turbine spinning replaces MWh generated by gas or coal. Build enough un/negatively correlated turbines and you can count a fraction of wind generation as base. The rest replaces gas turbine output. No engineer is claiming that wind can, by itself, replace all other power demands. It can certainly play a role replacing some fossil fuel power generation, and it's nuclear waste-free!
It takes alot[sic] to maintain such a distrubuted[sic] generation system
But not so much that we can't do it. It also takes a lot to underwrite the insurance for nuclear power. So much, in fact, that nuclear power companies don't pay for it -- the US gov't does. Somehow that tidbit, a tidbit that makes nuclear power one of the most expensive options around, is rarely mentioned around here.
some people don't like the aesthetics
Some people don't like the aesthetics of coal power plant smokestacks, giant fences around nuclear plants, or what's left of the mountain after the coal or nuclear fuel is mined. No energy solution is perfect.
they grind up birds like no tomorrow.
No, no they don't. The 1980s called, and they want their built with small fast moving blades, non-monopole design, and located in bird migration routes wind turbines back.
Sure they will be nice here and there but they don't have the potential to solve the problems we have now while nuclear does.
Nuclear has the potential to be part of the solution, but it too can't solve the problem whole-hog. Nuclear isn't financially efficient now, if you try to use it for anything more than base load your efficiency drops like a rock. Solar can be used to shave some peak (in much of the world peak demand is very positively correlated with hot sunny days), wind can be used to reduce the need for fossil-based intermediate demand when it's blowing, and biomass, natural gas, and water pumped uphill (battery) can be used to make up the difference.
Enviromentalism needs to wake up and face the fact that the problem is now so bad that idealism must take a back seat to pragmatics.
The pragmatic solution is not to pooh-pooh wind. The pragmatic solution is to use a mix of non-fossil fuel approaches to (1) meet our electricity desires, while (2) reducing the amount of carbon emissions we generate as much as we can. Wind can't do all of that to maximum effect. Neither can nuclear. Neither can solar. Neither can biomass. Nor hydro. Nor natural gas. Nor whatever comes next (tidal?). But, using all of them, whenever feasible, will maximize our reduction of carbon emissions in electricity generation.
Why not support both?
Support a few technologists in Washington.
I'll never get this notion of people talking about how wind turbines spoil the beautiful natural landscape. Natural landscape? What natural landscape? We destroyed the natural landscape of the south and midwest in the 1800s. The worst you can say is that it *changes* the *artificial* rural landscape we've become accustomed to. Personally, I like them.
All them years of priest training, taken out by one bounty hunter.
I think the "technical problems" may be that he couldn't get the okay to build his pipeline along the same corridor.
Moderate parent up. Pickens wanted to use the corridor to build a water pipeline from the Ogalla aquifer to the D/FW area, using eminent domain to acquire the land. He ran into heavy opposition.
*One* freaking poorly placed, poorly designed wind farm (Altamont Pass) and wind turbines get forever scarred as bird killers. Ugh.
Wind turbines almost everywhere *except* Altamont Pass (one of the first large-scale farms, placed in the middle of a flyway, using small turbines with fast-turning blades, with no study -- something nobody would dream of doing today) have very low bird death rates. The freaking Audubon Society supports wind power because it's impact on birds is much smaller than that of the other generation methods it displaces.
If you actually want to make an impact on bird deaths, spay and neuter your cats, keep them indoors, and stop supporting the construction of glass-curtained buildings. Both kill far more birds than wind farms ever will.
All them years of priest training, taken out by one bounty hunter.
Agreed, I think they look futuristic. Also the pile of dead birds around them make me smile.
You thought you could break the laws of physics without paying the PRICE?
I remember reading those stories and I don't really doubt it because water is drying up in the west. You don't hear much about it, but water rights and who controls the water is going to be a deal and make someone very rich over the next 25 - 30+ years. Actually that goes for the entire world. Anyone take notice of how many dams have been built around Iraq in the past few years by Turkey and Iran?
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Technical? More likely political.
Although Texas operates its own isolated grid, the panhandle area lies partially outside of this, in a region covered by the Eastern Interconnection, the power grid that interconnects the eastern half of the USA. Where the Texas grid may not have been able to absorb such a large amount of varying power, that shouldn't be a problem for this larger area. Up until this project was envisioned, Texas politicians haven't expressed a problem with the panhandle region being a part of a separate grid, so long as it is a net power importer. But shipping power out of state changes the issue.
Have gnu, will travel.
Really, your argument against all the benefits harnessing wind power will bring is, "It looks ugly?"
To me part of their beauty comes from what they symbolize--the beginning of the next era in human advancement where we learn to work with the planet to progress rather than exploit it. When I drive by wind turbines, all I can do is smile.
As for the "not being able to connect them to the grid" part, makes me wonder if throwing all of that money at wall/auto street couldn't have been better spend elsewhere.
Faith is a willingness to accept something w/o complete proof and to act on it. Reason allows you to correct that faith.
Becuase wind doesn't meet the needs of today's energy grid (baseline power needs, peak power needs).
Virtually every study done on the subject disagrees with you. Our current grid supports up to about 20% penetration. With peaking and transmission upgrades, but without large-scale storage, studies in Denmark suggest that 50% is economically realistic.
they grind up birds like no tomorrow
Ugh! Why won't this myth die? There was *one freaking wind farm* that had significant bird kill problems. One -- Altamont Pass. Built in the middle of a flyway. Built without a bird-risk placement study. With turbines that have far faster rotation than anything we use nowadays (the bigger the turbine, the lower the RPM). I mean, come on! The average wind turbine nowadays causes more bird deaths from the transmission wires that take the power to market than die from the turbine itself.
All them years of priest training, taken out by one bounty hunter.
It was never about wind, it was about WATER, and Mr Pickens' newly-granted powers of Eminent Domain!
http://www.lubbockonline.com/stories/071008/loc_302185743.shtml
http://www.junkscience.com/ByTheJunkman/20080731.html
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/TimothyCarney/T_Boone_Pickens_wants_your_water.html
http://seekingalpha.com/article/24410-t-boone-pickens-invests-in-water-should-you
You're totally right about reprocessing fuel: if it's still (radioactively) hot then there is useful energy in there. But it's not right to say that we'd have waste with a half-life of decades instead of centuries. Radioactivity and half-life are inversely proportional. Something that is very radioactive has a short half-life (it's so active because it's decaying quickly). The more we reprocess the longer the half-life of the leftovers gets because we are taking out all the short half-life materials to be used as fuel. So after lots of reprocessing we'd more likely end up with waste that has a half-life in the millions of years than decades.
But that's really okay, because long half-life things aren't all that radioactive. Given a long enough half-life, you could carry radioactive waste around in your pocket and never receive any radiation from it in your lifetime, just because it takes so long for it to decay at all.
The "little athletic clubs" who bring in buckets and buckets of tax money, tourism, and municipal revenue?
Yours is the standard argument for why cities should build stadiums for major-league teams. Except it never quite seems to work out that way, at least in cities where I've lived (Denver and Minneapolis) which have recently done so. The team owners extract all kinds of special concessions from the cities to the point where the cities end up with all the costs -- traffic control around the stadiums, existing neighborhoods and businesses wiped out, infrastructure costs for the stadium, and of course the construction costs themselves, which always always always go overbudget -- while the owners end up with the benefits, including not only the ticket sales but also such goodies as sales tax exemptions on goods sold inside the stadium, which means they can charge more and keep all the profits. It looks a hell of a lot like a racket; if you've got solid evidence to the contrary, go for it.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Yes. The high points of the Integral Fast Reactor are that is will run on just about anything, including "spent" fuel from other reactors. It keeps processing fuel until there is nothing left to get from it. The result is a far smaller amount of radioactive waste than other plants. The radioactive waste produced will decay to the level of natural uranium radiation in only 200 years, which is worlds better than the thousands of years it takes for the "spent" fuel of current systems to decay.
Fuel does not need to be precisely fabricated like in many other reactor designs. It can simply be cast into the correct shape.
The reactor is not a serious proliferation concern, because once the fuel is started in the reactor it remains extremely radioactive until it is completely spent. The completely spent material is worthless is nuclear weapons, and militarily could only be useful for dirty bombs. However that risk exists with conventional reactor designs, and is even worse, because of the larger amount of waste produced by those designs.
That is not to say that everything about this design is ideal. The cost per unit energy produced for this plant is somewhat higher than with conventional plants. That is because other plants are only retrieving the least expensive energy from the fuel, while this plant design wrings pretty much all the energy out of the fuel. This produces a problem for companies interesting in using such a design, since they need to be able to compete on cost per unit energy. If nuclear power plants had to pay for waste disposal in proportion to how long the fuel takes to decay, that would almost certainly offset this. Another small issue is that a few important components of the reactor have never been shown to be commercially viable at a large scale. There are also some safety concerns about the use of molten sodium in the reactor design.
But all things considered it is a real shame the project was canceled just because it might appear at first to be a threat to anti-proliferation efforts, even though an explanation of the design would make it clear that constructing such a plant would reduce proliferation risk.
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
I think a rather significant portion of his plan was that some government entity, be it Texas or the USA, would get behind it and pony up the money necessary to get the power to a distribution system.
I'm not sure that would have been such a bad idea. Here's someone putting his own money where his mouth is on national energy policy and dependence on foreign oil.
Seems like the collective "we" could have ponied up a little support as part of the Smart Grid upgrade. It fits many of the qualification for a stimulus project. Green jobs, alternative energy, Smart Grid, local jobs and it's shovel ready.
I'm not saying it was smart, only that it does seem to line up with our national priorities and why would helping out with the grid upgrade been such a bad idea? There have been public/private partnerships in other areas, why not this one?
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
sports team owners seem to expect the taxpayers should pay for their little athletic club
The "little athletic clubs" who bring in buckets and buckets of tax money, tourism, and municipal revenue?
Those ones?
Every credible third-party study on professional sports teams has completely debunked that myth.
Having a sports team in your town brings in NO additional net revenue, and in most cases, costs you.
If you're going to subsidize private businesses to the tune of $400 Million, you are better off giving $1 Million each to 400 random small business in the local Yellow Pages than building a ballpark.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
you're right.
instead we should use coal and burn it.
or we should use oil/natural gas and do the same.
or we should dam up all the rivers and use those.
or we should plug the geothermal vents and use those.
in case you missed the sarcasm, i'm telling you it's there by the bucket load.
Nuclear power is the BEST currently available alternative to coal.
It's cleaner.
it's just as safe, if not safer (even the french can run a nuclear reactor... :P)
it's smaller in footprint than a comparable coal/oil/gas plant.
it doesn't rely on the whims of mother nature like solar and hydroelectric do.
The biggest problems with nuclear power are that we try to redesign the wheel every time we build one rather than standardizing on a single design for easier training maintenance and cost savings. (Think naval nuclear power)
and the second biggest problem is that we simply stop with still useable fuel because we make idiotic laws that say just becuase you could take the fuel and turn it into a weapon, we will just stop before there and deal with the waste.
simply stopping carbon steel production at the ingot stage since it can be used to make knives means we haven't gotten much use out of the carbon steel as other than a good weight, and we don't do that because it's moronic, yet we allow morons without a clue to tell us that we shouldn't use nuclear because it's "bad" and can "be used as weapons".
I've worked in nuclear reactors in the navy, and they, when staffed by properly trained individuals, are a reliable, easy to operate, serious contender for replacement of coal power.
but it doesn't matter.
obama-san will just raise taxes to pay for more of this "eco-energy" by fleecing the american public.
Nearly any energy production process you can think of is going to benefit from being scaled up way beyond what you can do in your backyard. Wind turbines, in particular, get a lot more efficient when they're as tall and as large as you can practically make them. The individual turbine blades on wind farms are as long as they can be while still being legal to fit on trucks for hiways.
Backyard wind turbines are simply going to fall to economies of scale, unless you have a very big backyard.
Not a typewriter
As I do from time to time, I shall explain what's going on for people attempting to grok the situmication.
Remember all his damned ads on TV? They were designed to get people behind him, and thus coerce politicians seeking election to help accomplish this transmission system. Money, eminent domain, whatever he needs.
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and predict, from this theory (remember science?) that he didn't get what he needed. Politicians don't like people doing a populist end-run around their usual kickback MO.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
He spent the only money that mattered. Pickens funded the Swift Boating of Kerry and got a 4 more years of an oil-industry friendly administration. That's money well spent, from his perspective at least.
I don't care how many fucking windmills that cunt build or doesn't build. I, and many others, will never forgive or forget.
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.