Pickens Plan for Huge Wind Farm Blows Away

(AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

T. Boone Pickens, the conservative Texas oilman who became the unlikely face of energy reform efforts during the 2008 presidential campaign, has announced that he will not move forward with plans to build the world's largest wind farm in his home state.

Pickens' company's spokesman cited "the collapse of the capital markets" and "the steep downturn of natural gas prices" as the reason for the decision, as the Washington Post reports. (Pickens also cited a lack of transmission lines.) The spokesman insisted that "Boone still remains committed and focused on developing wind energy in the United States."

Indeed, Pickens plans to instead build three or four smaller wind farms at a cost of $2 million, the New York Times notes. He told the Times that he could potentially decide to build the larger wind farm – "anything's possible," he said – but his decision is seen as evidence that the wind energy movement is faltering.

(See Katie Couric's interview below with energy investor T. Boone Pickens Jr. from July 2008 - in which he talks about his plan to decrease U.S. dependence on foreign oil through the development of alternative energy sources.)

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Reuters writes that the decision "shows how a brutal recession could change the way the United States invests in renewable energy." Large scale projects are now more likely to be abandoned in favor of "smaller projects that are closer to major population centers," according to the wire service.

A drop in oil prices and a decreased demand for energy also likely played into in Pickens' decision to abandon the wind farm, which was to have powered up to 1.3 million homes at a cost of $10 billion. In addition, as the Times notes, there has been no movement on two provisions in the Obama administration's stimulus package to aid renewable energy.

Pickens has been seeking to reduce oil imports by 30 percent in ten years by replacing oil with natural gas in cars and trucks; wind power, in turn, would replace natural gas as a source of electricity. Check out the "60 Minutes" profile of Pickens here.

[energievair]

I think that really huge renewable energy projects are not good. They make the people mad and they usually hurt the environment.

That's why we think that these projects should be citizen's projects. Governments should encourage and help funding of small domestic renewable energy installations. This would help save the planet and would save money to everyone instead of helping only huge compagnies.

Green thinking from EnergieVair, Renewable Energy Promoters.

[JungleStruggle]

Pickens saw the light :-) <br />
Wind power is not a solution. The whole truth about wind turbines is never told by lobbyists and governments.
How could the very weak and extremely unreliable initial energy source of a wind turbine ever produce a steady power of any significance?
<b>Please think!<br />
And read: ?Wind energy- the whole truth? at: <a href="http://www.windenergy-the-truth.com">Wind energy- the whole truth</a></b>.
<br />
And for <b>green jobs</b> creation in relation to renewable energy read:
<br />
<a href="http://www.juandemariana.org/pdf/090327-employment-public-aid-renewable.pdf">Study of the effects on employment of public aid to renewable energy sources.</a>

[Jim1900]

The cost of W.'s $3T invasion of the wrong country amounts to about $10,000 for every American, or around $30,000 for every taxpayer. That would buy a lot of clean energy.

[hamiltongrad]

The answer to our energy problem is so simple : 1. NUCLEAR Energy, as they have in FRANCE and also CONN. - over 50 % of Connecticut energy is from Nuclear. One small box of material can power San Francisco for 5 years, after that 80 % of the "waste" can help save lives with nuclear medical uses.

2. Mandate that x % of new cars sold have to be HYBRID. Tax refunds etc.

3. Clean Coal.
4. Stimulus money to modernize the grid.
5. Mass transit from Major Western Cities vs. Airlines.

The idea that wind or solar ? is just stupid.

You can not store that energy. It is not useful / economic/ reliable /anywhere it is in operation. No place on earth uses it. It is a utopian dream . We already have NUCLEAR, it works, it is safe. Go to Conn. and see for yourself. IT ALSO is CHEAP.

[tmittelstaed]

nuclear is not cheap when you add in the costs of spent fuel storage - the spent fuel will be poison for hundreds if not thousands of years and someone has to be paid to guard it or your going to have idiots digging it up (or terrorists doing worse)

it's only cheap in Conn because they have figured out how to offload these costs on to the federal government.

Ask PGE how cheap it is. PGE is still storing spent fuel from the Trojan nuclear plant and that plant was shut down in 1993. Ratepayers, of course, pay for this in their power rates TODAY and will continue to pay for this even when the fuel eventually goes to Yucca (if it ever does). PGE ratepayers will also pay Hanford, forever, permanent storage fees for storing the reactor vessel.

SURE, sure it's cheap!!! Keep dreaming.

[casionova]

Nuclear is a dead end and is hugely expensive! No nuclear industry in the world has ever turned a profit. None. They survive on massive handouts from governments.

If you think its safe I've a bridge to sell you. One accident can render a region uninhabitable for millenia. I live thousands of miles from Chernobyl, and yet the fallout can be detected in my area.

Nuclear waste is piling up all over the planet too, that will cause a bit of a hangover.

When the next big nuclear accident happens (and it will) nuclear will be finished forever.

[edgy44]

Where everyone misses the boat on energy, is their thinking that it has to be a huge power plant with high tension lines for hundreds of miles.
<p>
If every neighborhood had their own power generation, then there would be no need for residential connection to a grid.
<p>
If congress and states would provide for tax deductions, then every home in America could be built with solar electric and solar water fixtures, and the neighborhood could have a backup natural gas generator for low solar days. Each neighborhood could have their own (smaller) water pump. The energy we waste by using high tension lines could power a factory. It's insane.

[tmittelstaed]

It is not insane. When I'm out of my home for 3 weeks on vacation and the solar cells on my roof are generating more power than I can use I want to be able to sell that power to people who need it. You need a connection to a power distribution network for that.

And the fact of the matter is that studies on million-volt transmission lines show their losses are LESS than the lower-power 230kv lines. And DC transmission line losses are even less than that. That is a proven fact and you can look it up and see for yourself. It's why DC is used between the Bonneville Dam and Los Angeles power intertie.

[tautomer]

So much for Obama's Green Energy!

[wtcmedic911]

isnt that a shocker....

[billpl-2009]

...read between the lines

Pickens Plan really isn't about making money on wind...but rather Natural Gas over Coal

[ubrew12]

Boone's wind farms will not make money without a carbon tax.

As long as oil gets off scott free for potentially destroying our planet, energy alternatives will be found to be economically unselected.

And when oil is finally found to have destroyed the planet, it may be too late to deploy alternatives. This nation needs to find the will to take the LONG view. A view Pickens tried to take, but he's too much of an oil-man to forget for long that without a true policy forward on energy, he'd be throwing money away.

[airjafo]

We will live in the dark someday if we rely on wind energy and solar power. Nuclear energy is being safely used in the US, Russia, China, France, India, and many other countries. Many people are dying from accidents at coal mines and from the byproducts of burning coal and oil, and yet there is only brief outrage. France gets 80% of its electricity from nuclear energy. The US powers its submarines and other large ships with nuclear energy. What's the problem with nuclear energy and why is the US falling behind other countries who are rushing to buy uranium?

[ubrew12]

One eighth of Arizona, put into solar thermal collectors (parabolic aluminized-mylar wind balloon mirrors focusing sunlight onto pipes containing molten salt, which is then stored underground until needed by conventional steam-cycle turbine engines), could absorb enough of the suns energy to power the United States, no other power source required. Let me repeat: 1/8th of Arizona gets enough sunlight to power your life, and the lives of every American in this country.

Solar thermal energy is base power, its available any time of day (thanks to energy storage in the molten salt).

You are a moron to suggest we would live in the dark on solar power. Once upon a time, it was the only light we had. Our failure to recall that time is due to the blindness of people like you.

(But nuclear is fine with me. We should double it to 40% of America's total. But the rest should come from alternatives like solar, wind, etc. We need to get off of fossils).

[tmittelstaed]

uranium is also a dwindling resource, so switching over to nuclear just exchanges one devil for another.