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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."
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 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".
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 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
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 effect was that he was offered electric rights only, and he refused. He wouldn't build the electric lines to give people cheap renewable energy unless they gave him unrelated rights-of-way. From here, he attempted extortion and paid millions in ads to convince people that it was the government blocking his altruistic goal of cheap renewable energy for everyone.
Refusing extortion seems like a good idea. Even if the power would have been nice, giving away billions in subsidies to a billionaire extortionist doesn't sound like a good thing for the people.
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