T. Boone Pickens scouting new home for $2 billion wind farm
By Darren Murph 
posted July 8th 2009 3:04PM
posted July 8th 2009 3:04PM
posted July 8th 2009 3:04PM
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You can bet he will be looking towards Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska for his next plan. He was never after the wind in the Texas panhandle, he was after the land which sits upon one of largest aquifers in the US, the Ogallala Aquifer. It extends from the panhandle straight up through central America.
Controlling the oil is loosing its luster, its will soon be about controlling fresh water.
Its too bad T. Boone is such a miscreant, because he could have actually done some good here. Don't get me wrong, I am not so naive as to think that he has an altruistic bone in his body, but this project is large enough to help propel other projects from people with more honorable intentions.
After what he did with the Swift Boat crap, he should have lost his citizenship. That damaged our democracy, and those responsible should have been put on trial for treason.
Popular Science pointed out the problems in the US electrical grid in the latest issue. It seems that a transfer to renewable energy is going to take more than just setting up windmills; we'll have to revamp the entire grid for energy transfer. Still, at least someone's trying.
Send em to Kansas... I live here and there are days where you have to walk diagonally into the wind to avoid being blown over.
idiot
I wish my name was T. Boone Pickens!
Last I had read, Pickens had a bill through the Texas Legislature that allowed Water districts, quasi-private entities which have some public powers, the ability to seize land through eminent domain for electrical utilities (so long as those lands were 'also' being taken to build water lines). That was the original plan, since Pickens owns so much of the water rights in West Texas, he was just going to create numerous water districts which he'd be able to control to then build the transmission lines. I'd be surprised if he decided to scuttle the West Texas plan completely...in all likelihood he's probably trying to threaten to balk to drive down asking prices for properties along the planned transmission line routes (like any good businessman does).
"the turbines (which have already been ordered, mind you)"
It seems to me that knowing that Pickens is sitting on 10s of millions of dollars worth of hardware basically will put whoever he approaches at a real advantage in negotiating land use rights.
Unfortunately, the lesser talked about 2nd part of the Pickens Plan involves all cars running on conpressed natural gas. This of course ignores the fact that there are currently few cars on the road that have the capability, they are expensive and there is currently no infrastructure and filling stations to support widespread adoption of natural gas cars. This is an additional hundreds of billions of dollars of required investment. He has recently changed his tune saying he only wants heavy trucks, not cars, running on compressed natural gas. That eats away at his whole premise of energy independence for the USA.
Someone should cut this guy some slack. He can bring his windmills to Southern Calif., there is a lot of wind coming through the pass and some windmills are up already. I keep wondering why we don't use the billions of barrels of oil we have here underground. The midwest is loaded.
I have read through most of the comments, and am truly amazed at the level of ignorance I see. How can anyone ascribe motives to someone else? How can anyone else say T. Boone Pickens is doing this because......? You guys are mind readers? Have you truly studied this issue in depth? If you disagree, give valid reasons and cite your references.
Personally, I object to this kind of progress being held up because a bunch of birds might become extinct. Lots of animals have become extinct over millions of years. (I learned that in Zoology class - my reference). The same holds true in other areas. Our welfare needs to come first.
Has anyone thought about what would happen if the Arabs stopped selling oil to us? We need to find other means.
Pickens wanted to use the wind farms as a Trojan horse to snatch people's land through imminent domain then build water pipelines alongside the power lines. Pickens' plan is a suspected scam and now that it's run into controversy and the water pipeline plan was squashed, the wind farm idea is all of a sudden less appealing.
The man is slime.
For all of you who believe that there will be a net energy output from these wind turbines, I ask you:
DEMAND from those organizations installing wind turbines to release energy output data for their installations.
When you look at the energy required to build, operate, transmit power, and provide load replacement when the wind is not
available, you find that these windmills are net energy consumers.
They only get installed because of the tax and rate incentives governments and "green power" plans pump them up with.
Go ahead, get net energy statistics for actual, operating plants, go ahead and try.
You won't get very far, because they only give you "nameplate" numbers and theoretical energy balance studies.
Actual data, not so much...
FAIL
I work for a company that owns several large-scale windfarms outside the US with no incentives whatsoever, fiscal or otherwise, and the farms generate considerable energy, have paid for themselves (several times over in some cases) and most importantly REPLACE other non-renawable, poluting sources (aka, reduces the countries oil bills)
The truth of the matter here is that as good and clean as wind, solar and natural gas are in comparison to 'foreign oil' or simply just petrol products in general (and Coal, let's not forget coal), NONE of those methods of producing electricity can sustain the base load requirements of our country. NONE OF THEM. Solar is a developing technology that, on a large scale, still can't generate enough electricity to be cost-effective per kWh or mWh compared to Wind or Nuclear. Wind, like solar, is dependant on whatever mother Earth decides to throw at us. If it's not windy, we have no power. Even putting up TONS of turbines throughout the 'Wind Belt', you'd be building them on terrain (mostly mountains) that is inhospitable for regular maintenance, your normal maintenance costs would be astronomical (given a 2 mW turbine attached to each unit), and the cost to run a new grid from a location that has so little existing links to the grid would be ineffective in terms of cost anyway. Wind and Solar are a great way to make up the 20-40% of our electricity that can be variable (for hybrid/electric cars, power to sell to other countries [re: California]), but in all practicality it's not a solution to the bigger issue that people want solved: Reduced CO2 emissions into the atmosphere while maintaining our comfortable American lifestyle. For that, the only sustainable source of power is Nuclear, and with the advances in technology over the past 30 years since anyone has built anything in the commercial Nuclear industry, costs for reactors are decreasing while the demand for cheap power is inceasing, Nuclear waste (spent fuel rods) can be RECYCLED into re-usable fuel that can be used over and over and over (see anything on France's nuclear program) which would eliminate the need for a 'Yucca Mountain-type' facility. The federal government already has an underground waste disposal site that can be expanded if needed, but again I say, we can RECYCLE Nuclear fuel, it's cheaper by the mWh for production in the long run, and the worst incident on American soil involving nuclear was TMI, which resulted in 0 deaths.
As much as I like Pickens' plan, he's gotta refine it for the modern age and get onboard with Nuclear, base load generation depends on it.
But, but, what about the nuclear waste and radiation. My children will be turned into radioactive zombies. We will have to start eating three eyed fish. Homer is going to blow up city. And, Mr.Burns is an evil meanie. With nuclear energy, we could power a system that includes high speed rail. Didn't you see what happened to Springfield when they build a monorail? Nuclear power bad. Yucky
You luddites may recall that France's electrical power grid is 85% nuclear. Not only that, they are also an energy exporter. They solved their energy problem, no radioactive zombies.
The energy policy in the US is laissez faire, that is why you have corporate raider clowns like Pickens making headlines. He's no oil man. That is hokum that he serves up to the ignorant masses.