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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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
*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.
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
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.