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Pickens Wind-Power Plan Comes To a Whimpering End
Spy Handler writes "In 2008, billionaire T. Boone Pickens unveiled his 'Pickens Plan' on national TV, which calls for America to end its dependence on foreign oil by increasing use of wind power and natural gas. Over the next two years, he spent $80 million on TV commercials and $2 billion on General Electric wind turbines. Unfortunately market forces were not favorable to Mr. Pickens, and in December 2010 he announced that he is getting out of the wind power business.
What does he plan to do with his $2 billion worth of idle wind turbines? He is trying to sell them to Canada, because of Canadian law that mandates consumers to buy more renewable electricity regardless of cost."
I'm not particularly familiar with how he was planning to go about this, but it's a pretty good bet that a lot of the trouble came from subsidies. For reasons that don't make any sense to anybody outside the oil industry, oil gets heavily subsidized while renewable energy gets only a very small fraction of the government support.
It depends where you are, here in WA state, we have a high gas tax which helps to level things a bit, but given the amount of experience that we have with oil and related technologies, it's hard to get the scale necessary to compete with oil.
Alternative energy would probably be coming along a lot more quickly, if oil wasn't subsidized and oil companies were required to pay the full cost of the externalities that their product creates.
Pickens real plan wasn't wind energy - it was water. He wanted the government to grant him free land for the power lines that would be required to get the power back to where it would be used (cities). The land he was trying to get was going to also be used for water transport pipelines, which is going to be a huge moneymaker in this century - particularly in the south and west. Pickens doesn't give a crap about wind energy, I'm glad he was defeated.
I'm not sure quite what you are referring to.
Oil gets subsidized to a certain degree. But if you really want to see massive subsidies and protectionist, fucked-up tariffs and other governmental screwups at work, you need to look at the corn lobby. For the past five years, corn subsidies have been $37b; oil subsidies only $14b.
The end result is our diet is fucked up (way, way too much chemically incorrect HFCS), and regular sugar being way more expensive than it should be.
Plus, because corn is subsidized, all the farmers grow corn (which actually is a shit-poor source of energy once you calculate the net gain post-processing) instead of something better.
I'm in Canada. There are several provincial efforts to specify a certain percentage of renewable power by a particular date (e.g., 25% of power from renewable sources by 2015), and/or the ability for customers to voluntarily pay more if they want to buy renewable power -- as in, pay an extra few percent on your power bill and the power company guarantees that all that money will be invested in renewable power production (e.g., wind turbines). The laws don't say "regardless of cost", and don't specify doing it by wind turbines. They usually say "achieve this benchmark for renewable power by this date". The power companies are free to achieve that goal however they want, including importing power from elsewhere (e.g., Nova Scotia recently made a deal for a new hydroelectric power project in Labrador). It *may* cost more money, or maybe not. Depending upon how high the price of oil or other fossil fuels go in the next few years, it might not actually be more expensive in the long run. Realistically, it probably will be in the short term, but I think of it as "achieve this renewable energy target the cheapest way the market can figure out", not "regardless of cost".
Pickens is a scumbag. He doesn't care about Wind Power, he wants water. He used the guise of wind-power to try to grab land to transport water. Don't believe me? Read this: http://earthfirst.com/%E2%80%9Cblue-gold%E2%80%9D-t-boone-pickens-and-the-privatization-of-water/
Pickens placed a $1.5 billion wind turbine order from GE. But the problem: transporting the energy from West Texas to the rest of the state. Pickens planned to build his own transmission, but the approvals fell through, says economist Mike Giberson at Texas Tech.
This isn't an issue of relative energy cost. This is an issue of not being given permission to build the basic infrastructure he needed for his system to work.
Thank two private organizations: the RNC and the DNC - which conspire to begin primaries in Iowa. The solution to obesity in America is single-day primaries.
What I understand the biggest show stopper was the installation of the transmission lines to get the power from where it was generated to where it would be used. The Reason the transmission lines couldn't be built is because they couldn't get the right-of-way for it. The reason they couldn't get the right-of-ways is because they wanted the mineral and water rights as well; and the reason they wanted the water rights was to suck the ground dry and to ship the farmer's and rancher's water to the big-cities in aquaducts built under the transmission right-of way.
Personally I think wind-power is over-hyped and uneconomical, yet it would be interesting to see one honest project happen to find out for sure if and why and by how much.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
It's simple. You use breeder reactors and fuel reprocessing. Your waste drops to next to nothing. The waste you do produce is very radioactive, meaning it only needs to be stored for a few decades before it is depleted. Your usable fuel supply grows by about 500 times, and you don't have to send it through an extremely costly refinement process. It's not like they're anything new, they've been around in experimental form since the 50s, and there have been a handful of production reactors over the years. But wait, they produce plutonium as one of their intermediate products, and that can be used to make more fission bombs. We can't have that.
The reason they couldn't get the right-of-ways is because they wanted the mineral and water rights as well; and the reason they wanted the water rights was to suck the ground dry and to ship the farmer's and rancher's water to the big-cities in aquaducts built under the transmission right-of way.
This is correct. He wanted the government to use its power of eminent domain to secure the route and he wanted the land to build a pipeline. T.Boone already holds hundreds of thousands of acres of water rights to the Ogallala Aquifer. [quote] He’s T. Boone Pickens. Yes, that T. Boone Pickens. And he’s gobbling up water rights in Texas. Pickens’ new company, Mesa Water, has been buying up ground water rights in Roberts County, Texas - 200,000 acres in all.[/quote] He wanted the power grid to go to Dallas and El Paso and San Antonio....wonder why
"Remember, politicians and diapers should be changed often and for the same reason."
The myth of "unfair subsidies to the oil companies" is a nice canard from the alt energy folks, but the facts don't bear it out.
Alternative energy companies want to lump in literally a century's worth of development and infrastructure and label this as an "unfair advantage" to the oil companies, when in fact it's just business. I'm sure that the buggy whip makers had all kinds of "unfair advantages" with roads suitable to buggies and watering holes everywhere when the automobile burst onto the scene--and yet it still happened. Why? Because it was *better*.
The facts are that billions have been pumped into alternative energy (solar, wind, geo) and they are ALL promising technologies. Some day they'll be able to pull their own weight. I just built a 100% solar powered house--completely off the grid and I can tell ya first hand....this is some of the most immature and "not ready for primetime" technology you've ever seen. The government pumping money into it just makes it worse since the manufacturers don't have to make anything *better* that way, they just have to force people to *buy* it. This is probably why the most significant development in battery technology has been to ADD A FRICKIN STRAP so you can move the battery more easily....it's pathetic.
No subsides for ANYBODY, ANYWHERE is the only way to go. Let the ideas fight it out in the marketplace. THIS will improve gasoline efficiency, advance solar technology, make windmills more durable and less prone to breakdown. Having the federal government back ANY of it is not in their list of duties, nor does it allow the industry to mature.
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
Many farmers would agree that corn subsidies need to end, but the situation is much more complicated than "evil corn lobby and farmers!" I honestly dont expect most people to dig deep enough to figure out whats actually going on, for the same reason I've stopped trying to explain to homophobes why gays aren't evil. Everyone seems to need a little "us versus them" in their diet. But I'll give a quick rundown.
-Ag subsidies in general are a way to slow the bleeding of population out of rural America. The price of commodities in general is so low (due to advancements in machinery and genetics) that the majority of farms would simply go under without some subsidies and tax breaks (either directly or through things like ethanol). In the short term this would lead to all kinds of problems, and frankly some government intervention this way is better than welfare. In the long term all of that freed land would be acquired by superfarms, and we all know how fond slashdot is of cartels...
-Agriculture in general is used as a bargaining chip on the world market, usually in diplomatic negotiations. The money that goes into ag subsidies could be reduced substantially if actual free market forces existed internationally. As it stands, there is a curious correlation between favorable agricultural tariffs/import bans for other nations and technology/manufacturing/??? deals favoring the United States. China blatantly manipulates demand to keep its rural areas from revolting. Europe in general tends to find "health risks" in American ag exports right as their own home industries decline, and ban imports until the local prices increase. Its a dirty business.
-And just fyi, corn isn't grown because there is some large conspiracy. It is very hearty, and with the current genetic modifications can take a lot of abuse from temperamental climates. If cellulistic ethanol pans out modified switch grass will likely take its place, but at the moment there just aren't that many crops positioned to displace corn. Since we went to all the trouble developing industries to create things like bio-degradable plastics from corn, why suddenly yank the rug out and force a move back to non-renewable?
This is just my two cents of course. I just find it discouraging to see so much negativity about rural Americans and farmers specifically. Most are just trying to make minimum wage on a consistent basis. I think if people actually interacted with farmers and were exposed to agriculture (ever) positions such as yours would soften a bit.
Here you go:
http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S26/91/22K07/
If you have a supposition about why the human studies will turn out differently, that would be interesting to hear.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
The issue its convoluted by special interest, however, I do believe HFCS is not a healthy product, and here is my argument.
You point out that surcrose breaks down to about the same thing that is in HFCS, but what you fail to take into consideration that there is an energy cost associated with the body doing the work vs having both products readily available to your body.
The net result is that while on paper they seem to be equivalent and the gross calories in similar quantities are close enough to not seem different, the reality is that HFCS is ready for rapid absorption and and use by your body, while straight up sucrose takes some work to prepare which to some degree lowers the net caloric intake for sugar over HFCS.
Check out the wikipedia article on fructose and check out the metabolism section.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fructose
The whole argument that HFCS is the same as sugar and no different to your body is complete horseshit.
The fact that HFCS is usually a 1:1 ratio of glucose and fructose may even exacerbate the issue since there have been some recent studies which indicate increased uptake and absorption when fructose and glucose are administered this way.
There are other factors as well, since HFCS is cheaper (due to subsidies) and has a longer shelf life than sucrose, and sweeter than sucrose, food manufacturers looking to make a palatable shelf stable product turn to HFCS because its cheaper, sweeter(thus less is needed), and easier to deal with. Sweet is a flavor humans are biologically predisposed to and makes things taste better, but somethings shouldn't be sweet, so they have to add sodium to offset this sweetness and maintain palatability while "tasting" better than other products. This has led to an arms race in the food industry that has been increasing sugar and sodium content in prepared foods over the last 25 years.
Don't believe me? Compare similar products in the store, I will bet you that the products using HFCS have more salt and sugar than a similar product that uses sucrose.
So yes, I think HFCS is not healthy because it adds easy to process calories and it is in so much of the food that people can afford to eat and while it may not be single handedly causing the obesity issues in the USA and to a lesser degree the world, but its inclusion into high caloric, shelf stable, cheap, unfilling food leads to consumption of unhealthy amounts. Its difficult to moderate intake when its in everything that you can afford to eat.
The water wars are going to get nasty very soon. The US Federal government is trying to get greater control over all water. They diverted a great deal out of the San Joaquin Valley, which devastated the farms, put 40,000 farmers out of work, and forced many farmers to sell off their land cheap or hand it over to the Federal conservation programs for relief.
The Bush's bought a lot of land in Parguay, which prompted a lot of speculation, but the big deal is that the land sits on top of one of the largest fresh water aquifers in the world, giving them control of all that water.
T. Boone Pickens himself gets it, too. I'm skeptical whether the whole wind idea was real, anyway, as it created an excellent diversion from speculation what his land purchases were all about. As it turns out, the land he now owns and/or controls gives him access to a huge portion of America's fresh water supply, as it's sitting in a mid-west aquifer that he now has right to drain.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
It is true that it is more radioactive and hence more dangerous and harder to handle in the short term, just as the GP pointed out. For that reason it has a shorter half-life and so only has to be stored for a few decades, which means that the little waste that is produced is actually far easier to get rid of. That is because you don't have to find a perfect place that you know (suspect) will remain geologically stable for 10,000 years - you can maybe even just leave it at the reactor site and come back 50 years later when there is no more waste left.
I'm for no subsidies if, and only if, we include 'free pollution' as a subsidy.
In my universe, the fact people can buy and freely burn oil for energy counts as a 'subsidy'. People should have to pay for that. They're using up a public resource.
Same with rate earth magnets for wind and semiconductor manufacturing for solar and nuclear waste disposal. (1) Everyone should have to pay.
Once all that is leveled out, we can look around and ask ourselves if we need subsidies. Possibly we do, possibly we don't, but it's impossible to see from here, where some power production industries can trash the environment and others can't.
1) Although we've already done enough with nuclear protection...it's like, for some reason, with nuclear waste, we need a goddamn submarine door that can withstand 20,000 feet, whereas with, for example, coal ash, we have a screen door with holes in it and a broken latch. It's fucking absurdly imbalanced the lengths nuclear must go through thanks to a generation of idiots trained to jump when people say 'nuclear.
If we treated coal like we treated nuclear we'd be running coal engines in a dome of air surrounded by a dome of vacuum, with massive scrubbers operating to recycle the air in the first dome, and it'd cost about a thousand times more. That shit is the only reason nuclear isn't 'competitive', but the solution isn't to subside is, it's to recognize that we can't stop the world because a nuclear plants raises background radioactivity by 5% for a square mile or whatever. OMG, two hundred extra people might get cancer...unlike coal plants, which regularly kill tens of thousands of people each year.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?