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Chinese To Supply 600 MW Wind Farm In Texas
Hugh Pickens sends in a Wall Street Journal report that Chinese banks will provide $1.5B to a consortium of Chinese and American companies to build a 600-megawatt wind farm in West Texas, using turbines made in China. The wind farm will be built on 36,000 acres, and will use 240 2.5-megawatt turbines, providing enough power to meet the electrical needs of around 150,000 American homes. The project will be the first instance of a Chinese manufacturer exporting wind turbines to the United States. China aims to be the front-runner in wind- and solar-power generation "The Obama administration is hoping a shift to renewable energy will inject new life into the US manufacturing base and provide high-paying jobs, making up for losses in other sectors. But while the US has poured money into renewable energy through tax credits and other subsidies, China has positioned itself to reap many of the benefits by ramping up its export machine."
They're making money and destroying a rival.
...where the hell are they going to put them? I'm sitting here in West Texas in an office of a major tower manufacturer; and we have 80 towers worth of sections sitting in our storage lot (which is being expanded) that the company purchasing them can't find a home for. A couple of sites have been proposed, but they fell through because it would cost too much to build the infrastructure to connect them to the grid. Now they're trying to find a site in a different state. And Mr. Pickens reportedly has 200 towers built that he can't site either, my favorite quote is "Well I damn sure can't put 'em up in my yard". So good luck to the Chinese I guess. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out.
"No sir, I don't like it!"
I hate how articles talking about renewable energy never take into account the capacity factor of the production. Wind is about 30% or so, so the real average output will be more like 200 MW, unlike a nuclear or other plant with a capacity factor of 90+%. Yet still, they will be compared on their MAX output, not the AVERAGE.
You're right, of course.
Losing manufacturing to China is probably the largest problem we face as a country. Especially in fields of advanced manufacturing, it is strategically important to maintain a strong lead in the U.S.
Some have said that we are moving away from a foundation of manufacturing and towards one of information management and service-oriented business. This is a truly horrifying prospect as both depend on a constant influx of *manufacturing* jobs to create demand for these new industries. Losing manufacturing to other countries means losing independence and self-sufficiency. We can't clean each other's pools forever.
The other problem, though, is that China can undercut our labor by a huge amount. It used to be that the Japanese were saying Americans were lazy and overpaid. It took the Chinese and Indians to prove it. So even if we were to begin another "Buy American" program, we would still be at a disadvantage to overseas customers who would simply choose the cheaper Chinese products over the expensive American products.
We are in a race to the bottom, and if we are to pull ourselves out of this death spiral it will be necessary to look to other failed states for examples of what not to do. No empire in its death throes has ever been able to save itself. England is doing a good job of coming back, but their once vast empire is now just a small collection of rainy islands in the North Atlantic.
I suggest they use an 8x8 grid pattern as the basic city layout. Then, you can put a 20MW turbine in each corner and power all the houses within each block. The turbines themselves only take up a single block, so you still get 60 blocks of high density residential zoning with no pollution at all.
The alternative (and better choice) is to terraform a small area away from the city. By raising the level of the land and encouraging waterfalls, you can build a very efficient hydroelectric power farm that generates no pollution and never breaks down.
Nuclear fission has its related pollution problems. Fusion plants don't last longer than 50 years. Wind power is pretty inefficient as far as power generation goes. But Hydroelectric is built to last and has a great price/output ratio over the life of the plant.
They're suppressing competition by undercutting prices. This is easy to do if you've got a low cost labor pool and government backing (both overt in the form of subsidies and covert in the form of silent ownership by senior Chinese government officials). All the better that you can seek (and probably get) tax breaks from the government of the very country who's industry you're looking to hobble with your low prices.
That said, there's nothing wrong with buying Chinese generators if they meet quality and price requirements. But I think this is a case where the US government has lost sight of the football here. Assisting a foreign power with the task of gutting an industry that was pioneered in the US and that may be important in future green energy markets around the world seems extremely foolish and short sighted.
> Hey, cheaper turbines making cheap electricity. We're preserving the
> American Way of Life.
No, we don't. At least when you look beyond tomorrow morning. If all we can
afford is cheap and ever more cheaper, our standard of living will eventually
be just that: cheap crap. While in the meantime the Chinese raise theirs, have
better and more quality products and can afford it easily.
The Chinese are incredibly clever...they produce everything 'for cheap' just
as we idiots want them to in our penny-wise, pound-foolish attitude. We give
them our precious fruits of 'research and development' to produce the actual
products. So even if they produce at a loss, it's a huge
win-win-win-win-win-etc situation for them. They practically leapfrog over
what took our economy years and decades to develop.
For every factory producing goods according to our blueprints is one shadow
factory a few miles further, producing the same exact item minus the
brand-name. That will then be sold across all of Asia, including the 'chinese
market' our western capitalists like to salivate over, for half the price than
the identical 'original' item. In the end they not only got the know-how for
free, but also manufacturing methods, perhaps even the machines to produce and
then make money at the end with their own copies while our business has to
fold as it can't compete by any margin at least on their asian market.
That they sell turbines of all things to us should be shaking us to the core!
Remember that 240 wind turbines spread across 36,000 acres does not *use* 36,000 acres - not anywhere near it. Every wind energy corporation I've worked with allows farmers to farm right up to within 10 meters of the turbine tower base. The wires are almost universally all run underground with these new wind farms. The actual footprint of the turbine tower base with the 10 meters of safety space, is less than 1/2 of 1 acres. 240 towers will use an area around 120 acres. The remaining 35,880 acres will still be prime viable agricultural space. In the meantime, the typical turbine lease involves payments to the landowner of approx. $10,000 per year per turbine on their property. That means if you have a farm that is 1000 acres and have suitable space for 10 turbines, you'll lose about 5 acres of your growing space, but be paid around $100,000 a year. The loss of 5 acres of crop space may see something in the order of $5000 in lost revenue from the growing space.
The farmer comes out $95,000 a year ahead - that just might keep their farm operating when otherwise economics might say they couldn't. Also, note that for every MWh of power generated by a wind turbine, that's typically 1220 pounds of CO2 emissions avoided from traditional power generating plants (coal, gas, oil, etc.) - a 600Mw farm running at 25% capacity for a 20 year life span generates 26,280 GWh of power - potentially keeping 16 million tons of CO2 out of the environment.
This is another great example of why giving money or tax breaks to the biggest corporations is no longer a winning strategy to promote job growth. The multi-national corps have a world-wide market to pull labor from and are only forced to buy local labor for a few on-site jobs. This is why I believe they should stop ALL money going to huge multi-national corps (who have their own R&D money anyway) and focus on getting micro-loans to smaller businesses who can't offshore their work as easily. Start preferring the little guy trying to start something on a local corner by his house instead of a corporation that really has no home or loyalty whatsoever.
I thought Obama wasn't going to fall into this trap of giving money to huge corps who are simply going buy cheap foreign labor. I guess I was wrong.
I live in west Texas, and I would have been one of the first posters here on my phone if I hadn't been about to get a root canal. Yes it sucked, but that's beside the point.
WHY DON'T WE GET SOME DAMN POWER LINES FIRST!!!! I am so sick of driving around seeing all these turbines just sitting there idle on windy days because we don't have the transmission lines to get the energy out of here. Amarillo is like the third windiest city in the united states (and no Chicago isn't above us). Funny thing is informed people here know that wind power isn't our cure all, it's just a political football, and we it at the moment.
1. We don't have transmission lines
2. Even here we have calm days
3. T Boone is like the most despised person in West Texas. There are what I think to be a lot of conspiracy theories about him here about him trying to steal all of our water, and using wind power as a conduit to do that. There is some anecdotal evidence to support the conspiracy theories, so it's hard to say that they are 100 percent false. What I do believe to be true is that he wants wind power to be huge because he could sell a crap ton of natural gas to generate electricity when the wind isn't blowing.
That's not entirely true. You're partially right that, for Wal-Mart fodder, the vendor just says "Make something that looks like this as cheaply as possible." So, naturally, they supply crap that Wal-Mart can sell very inexpensively and their customers can use for 3 months and send to a landfill.
However, even when specs say "We need this to last for 1000 years" or "We need baby formula - Poison-free, please", the Chinese are some of the worst offenders about using counterfeit goods. Using under-rated bolts and chains has been a major hassle for us. We've bought stuff with strict specs and have had failures under use that should have been well within the capabilities of the equipment. Fortunately (so far) the field failures haven't been catastrophic, but determining the cause of the failures is enormously expensive. They save a few bucks by using sub-standard steel and we spend thousands tracking down the cause of failure to "This isn't a 2000 lb load chain - It's failing at 1200 lbs." That also means that (now) when we buy stuff from Chinese vendors we have to do acceptance QA testing that would be redundant if we were buying from a more reputable source.
So, in short, the Chinese do not always "build judiciously to spec".
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
I thought a lot of this push by the Obama administration et al was to put US citizen to work and boost OUR economy, not China...why is our government not pushing for all aspects of the alternative energy initiatives they are promoting to be done in the US? Where are the tax credits and incentives to US companies (established and especially startups) for developing and manufacturing in the US and employing US citizens? During the election campaigns, I recall hearing that the move to clean/green energy sources wasn't JUST for the health of the environment, but also for generating new jobs and industries for the US.
I know China technically owns a lot of the US at this time, but, c'mon no one has been annexed yet, and this is not helping US citizens as much as home grown/developed/manufactured solutions would be...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
This article really explains it: http://www.denverpost.com/business/ci_13655311
The largest wind turbine manufacturer in the world, Vestas, has just built a plant in Colorado and is building a second. However, due to the credit crisis they are having a harder time selling turbines worldwide since its difficult for customers to get financing.
The reason the project in Texas is going forward is because one of the few countries in the world that is still in a good position to finance, China, is willing to do so with the obvious catch that he must use Chinese turbines.
I think once the credit market improves US-built turbines will be more attractive for other projects. The reason Vestas is building the two plants in Colorado is because there are many skilled laborers there that cost less to employ than similar ones in Europe (a Vestas plant over there was closed due to the creation of the new plants in Colorado).
To Pickens' credit, he tried hard for years to get financing for this project, but if he was to get this thing going while he was still alive this was probably the only way for him to proceed. I think it's still a smart move and hopefully will lead to similar projects in other states. If his project succeeds it should make it easier for other companies to get domestic financing so won't be forced to purchase Chinese turbines in the future.