Posted on 07/08/2008 12:12:33 PM PDT by Red Badger
Finding direction in wind.
T. BOONE PICKENS KNOWS SOMETHING ABOUT THE ENERGY business, and right now he's really, really into wind. His private firm, Mesa Power, is buying leases in the American heartland for a massive wind-power project whose first phase includes about 700 windmills on 400,000 acres near Pampa, Tex. By its completion in 2014, Pampa should be the world's largest wind farm, generating enough electricity to light 1.3 million homes. The legendary Texas oil man isn't alone. Some $9 billion of new wind projects boosted U.S. wind-power-generation capacity 46% last year. That, says a U.S. Department of Energy (www.doe.gov) study, is about a third of the total invested in wind power over 25 years: "The U.S. wind-power market surged in 2007, shattering previous records," says the Annual Report on U.S. Wind Power (http://eetd.lbl.gov/ea/ems/reports/lbnl-275e.pdf). "The yearly boom-and-bust cycle that characterized the U.S. wind market from 1999 through 2004...has now been replaced by three consecutive years of sizable growth."
(Excerpt) Read more at online.barrons.com ...
No problem as long as the American taxpayer is not on the hook when it goes bust.
He’s already plopped down $2Billion big ones for generators from GE.............
Then the worry was that the excess spillage of water would nitrongenate the water and cause a fish kill.
The environmentalists can't have it both ways.
I am not a math genius but a 46% increase on capacity of .01% of generation = NADA, Nothing, ZILCH, Zero!
OK, but how do I stuff the wind energy into my auto?
Secret to success in business:
Find a need and fill it.
He’s found the need.
Now he’s trying to fill it..................
Okay, but building the wind farm may actually be the easy part. Texas (as in “the State of”) is presently grappling with the projected construction and maintenance costs of the electric power distribution grid needed to support moving electric power from its current wind-generation projects to the consumer.
However, you’ve got to start somewhere.
In you new plug-in hybrid or full electric vehicle you’re gonna be forced to buy....
When you listen to Boone talk about replacing the electricity produced from nat gas with electricity produced from wind and then move that nat gas into the transportation sector, the potential is to reduce (in todays usage numbers) our imports by 38%.
Take 38% of the $700 billion PER YEAR we are sending overseas and you get $266 Billion. PER YEAR. That will fund a lot of domestic projects such as a nat gas supply infrastructure.
We could give tax credits to Exxon, Chevron, etc., the oil companies that presently have thousands of locations to any of them that install nat gas filling station units at their present locations.
With this money, we can offer incentives to fleet operators to use nat gas vehicles as they replace older units...
Remember that when those dollars go overseas, they come back to us in the form of foreign companies buying, for ex. Budweiser...
America is the Saudi Arabia of nat gas.
It is absolutely essential that we take some bold steps and Boone has put forth a serious plan. I havent heard anything from the greenies except to use less, expand solar, grow corn for ethanol...all minimal impact plans...
Americans think big.
If you take a chessboard and put a grain of wheat on the first square and then 2 on the next square and so on until the board is filled to all 64 squares, how much wheat will you have?.............
http://seekingalpha.com/article/78278-t-boone-pickens-hedge-fund-holdings
One nuclear plant rated for about 750 Megawatts can be sighted on probably less than 100 acres, even including cooling ponds for the required water. Probably even less for a pebble-bed reactor, but we haven't progressed enough as a country to actually permit and build one of those, yet. And no need to string transmission cable and towers all over 400,000 acres either, so as to the get power from the windmills into the energy distribution kid.
And as Teddy could affirm, HEAVEN FORBID a powerful nimby liberal should ever have to look out of his window and actually SEE a windmill!!
Pretty much the same math for covering millions of acres with solar cells in the desert, too.
The inescapable conclusion is that liberal greenies REALLY suck at any form of math or science, and, want one or more of the following conditions to occur.
1. Most people to ride horses, walk, and burn whale oil lanterns.
2. Most humans to live in the dark.
3. Most humans to die off from the lack of any modern energized form of lifestyle, and the few that are left to live in teepees or caves, on whatever type of subsistance living they can scrape off the planet.
127 grains?
Each successive square is double the previous square’s number. The final square will have 2^64 grains. The one previous one will have 2^63 grains, etc................plus the 1 grain you started with on square 1............
I think it's a good thing that a good ol boy like T Boone is talkin' Wind Power. That will free up Natural Gas supplies to help power autos and such.
We are pumping to much money out of our country....we can not sustain it.
Mucho grains but no wheat!
400,000 acres to provide power to 1.3 million homes minus the energy that you need to run businesses. Maybe you have the space for this in Texas and other western states. But the middle and eastern states don’t.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/oil_gas/natural_gas/analysis_publications/ngpipeline/
Boone's plan to swap wind with nat gas for electric power supply is the best quick fix to our current gasoline problem. CNG/LNG filling stations can be quickly installed.
if it is 1,2,3,4,5... then (64/2)32 = 1024
if you meant 1,2,4,8,16..... then it is (2^64)-1 = 18,446,744,073,709,551,615
Pampa should be the world’s largest wind farm, generating enough electricity to light 1.3 million homes.
Homes where?
How?
Using what means to transfer the electricty from the farm to the consumers?
At what cost to the consumer?
2^64 + 2^63 + 2^62 + 2^61......some really serious bread, er, wheat ...
I saw his commercial today for the first time. He says, “We can’t drill our way out of this “crisis”. That sounded like something a Democrat would say so; NO SALE, T. BOONE.
He is heavily invested in wind, thus the wind that follows. We don’t have an energy crisis, we have an intelligence crisis.
I may have this wrong but isn’t this a lot of land to be taking up for power generation. I would think you could put several nuke plants in the same acreage and generate a lot more power with less clutter to the landscape. Wind is ok, but nukes are better. We need to dump the EPA and all useless regulatory bureaus. We also need to tell the greenies to get the he** out of our country and go to some other country to ruin it. Get themselves a small island and get back to nature if they wish. I really like living with modern contraptions that make my life easier, I like being able to jump in my car a take off when I want to and there is no reason not to keep on with our present lifestyle of our leaders would stop trying to take down America and get back to the job of letting private enterprise build it up.
“Maybe you have the space for this in Texas and other western states.”
Sure you do, you can live in the windmill.
Prior results are no guarantee of future success.
“Texas (as in “the State of”) is presently grappling with the projected construction and maintenance costs of the electric power distribution grid needed to support moving electric power from its current wind-generation projects to the consumer.”
Yep, Mom just got $25k for a right of way across part of her Texas ranch for a windmill power line. They offered $15k a year for a windmill site, but she is holding out for now on that.
He’s putting HIS money where his mouth is. I can support that. More “power” to him!.................
Right! That is how much is on the last square (2^64), not all of them. I remember that from a fable and it was gold coins or pennies or something..
Nuclear is the best option but we have to drive out all liberals from Congress.
• Every energy technology is supported by the federal
government. Wind energy is no exception, nor should it be.
• During the year 2003 alone, federal energy subsidies
ranged from $37 billion to $64 billion, according to a study prepared for the National Commission on Energy Policy.
Probably more now. The ante is 2 billion for Boone the total cost of the project is a lot more, who do you think is paying for that? Not that I’m against T-Boone betting $2 billion of his money that he’ll come out ahead. But like ethanol, wind power would not exist without tax subsidies. And you couldn’t get these subsidies without scaring the sheeple that coal and oil will kill the planet.
Being born and raised in southern Arizona, it made me kind of sad to see the desert landscape visually spoiled in that way. Well, at least the land is being put to some good use instead of just baking.
Spare, interesting country.
As you know, the problem with all this is money, politics, power. You can be sure energy suppliers with a vested interest will do all they can to stop anything that’ll hurt the CEO’s $20M yearly bonus. They’ll call out their army of lobbyists to line the pockets of gatekeepers setting up shop where ever they can get the best price for their goods and services. (I think they’re called whores.) If they don’t get everything they want they’ll game the system in every way possible.
If these so-called free enterprise capitalists looking for government protection and handouts while eschewing government regulations and paying their fair share of the taxes, and they don’t want role up their sleeves, do the hard work, and sacrifice like this rest of us, then nationalize them. Put them out of business. Let them retire to their Xanadus, their stately pleasure-domes, where others they’ve screwed on the way to the top can find them and give them their just deserts. This is war.
Great post. The greenies just want to be in control. They don’t want to have to think.
I agree, he is doing something, I applaude Pickens.
So- he wants to push Wind farms for US electricity needs, and shift our use of Natural Gas to transportation...
And his TV ad says we cannot “drill our way” out of our energy problem.
And he also claims that peak oil is passed, basically saying that the world is running out of oil. Of course, it is in Pickens’ financial interest for that to be believed...as the higher oil prices go, the more money in his pocket.
What is the actual cost to produce a barrel of oil? I seriously doubt the actual cost of production has increased in proportion to the trading price.
The way I look at it, if he is so confident that his "PickensPlan" is the answer, he should just shut up and fund it himself and prove it. If he is right, he stands to make his money back exponentially. If wrong, it is his own bad idea.
The US could be the Saudi Arabia of OIL if our politicians had any guts...
does this mean we can make Pelosi wear a burqua?
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