Free Republic

T. Boone Pickens is up in arms over NBC's decision not to run one of his new TV ads promoting the use of natural gas as a transportation fuel, and an alternative to importing expensive foreign oil. In an e-mail to supporters Mr. Pickens is quoted as saying, "NBC is refusing to run one of our strongest ads, and I need your help in showing NBC they can't control what we can or cannot say." The new 15-second TV spot, entitled "Iran is Changing Its Cars to Run on Natural Gas," calls attention to this development by this OPEC member...

Wind Turbines Give Bats the “Bends,” Study Finds "Wind turbines can kill bats without touching them by causing a bends-like condition due to rapidly dropping air pressure, new research suggests. Scientists aren’t sure why, but bats are attracted to the turbines, which often stand 300 feet (90 meters) high and sport 200-foot (60-meter) blades." "The mammals’ curiosity can result in lethal blows by the rotors, which spin at a rate of about 160 miles (260 kilometers) per hour." "But scientist Erin Baerwald and colleagues report that only about half of the bat corpses they found near Alberta, Canada, turbine bases...

Expansive dreams about renewable energy, like Al Gore’s hope of replacing all fossil fuels in a decade, are bumping up against the reality of a power grid that cannot handle the new demands. The dirty secret of clean energy is that while generating it is getting easier, moving it to market is not. The grid today, according to experts, is a system conceived 100 years ago to let utilities prop each other up, reducing blackouts and sharing power in small regions. It resembles a network of streets, avenues and country roads. “We need an interstate transmission superhighway system,” said Suedeen...

The Energy Challenge When the builders of the Maple Ridge Wind farm spent $320 million to put nearly 200 wind turbines in upstate New York, the idea was to get paid for producing electricity. But at times, regional electric lines have been so congested that Maple Ridge has been forced to shut down even with a brisk wind blowing. That is a symptom of a broad national problem. Expansive dreams about renewable energy, like Al Gore’s hope of replacing all fossil fuels in a decade, are bumping up against the reality of a power grid that cannot handle the new...

Wind turbines can kill bats without touching them by causing a bends-like condition due to rapidly dropping air pressure, new research suggests. ...scientist Erin Baerwald and colleagues report that only about half of the bat corpses they found near Alberta, Canada, turbine bases showed any physical evidence of being hit by a blade. A surprising 90 percent showed signs of internal hemorrhaging—evidence of a drop in air pressure near the blades that causes fatal damage to the bats' lungs.

Texas oil billionaire T. Boone Pickens is about to make a killing by selling water he doesn’t own. As he does it, it will be praised as a planet-friendly wind project. The basic story amounts to this: Pickens, thanks to favors from state lawmakers whose campaigns he funded, has created a new government whose only voters are two of his employers; this has empowered Pickens to more cheaply pump water from an aquifer and, by use of eminent domain, seize land across 11 counties in order to pipe the water to Dallas. To win environmentalist approval of this hardly “sustainable”...

All that talk last week about energy at Sen. Harry Reid's alternative fuels summit in Las Vegas sure got New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg fired up. Not "coal-fired" up, mind you. But fired up with that seemingly endless supply of clean energy long preferred by politicians: hot air. On Tuesday at the National Clean Energy Summit at UNLV's Cox Pavilion, Mr. Bloomberg vowed to make New York City the "No. 1 city in the nation" when it comes to producing green power. He laid out a vision that included wind turbines off the coast of Long Island and atop...

Federal authorities may unravel a tiny Panhandle government with far-reaching powers. The U.S. Department of Justice blocked changes to Texas law that last fall helped create the board of the Roberts County Fresh Water Supply District, a body dominated by employees of Texas billionaire T. Boone Pickens. Losing the district's authority could complicate Pickens' most visible means so far of running pipeline and power line infrastructure across the state. Jay Rosser, spokesman for Pickens' Mesa Water, said the decision as Mesa officials understood it did little to change the board or plans to move massive water and wind energy resources...

The more you learn about T. Boone Pickens’ plan to switch America to wind power, the more you realize that he seems willing to say and do just about anything to make another billion or two.

SAGINAW - T-Boone Pickens says they're the wave of the future. But a wind turbine meant to save one Saginaw family on electricity has instead sparked a huge headache for their neighbors. "It makes a terrible air raid noise," says Debbie Behrens, about the high-pitched whine made by the turbine. "It's driving me crazy." What's worse, is that Debbie and her son Lance both say that high-pitched hum is now causing them problems, physically. "You occasionally have the dizziness," explains Lance, "The ringing in the ears, I've never experienced the ringing in the ears." It turns out, there is a...

Mayor Michael Bloomberg is backing off his suggestion to put windmills on city bridges and rooftops after newspapers mocked the idea with photo illustrations of turbines on the Brooklyn Bridge and the Empire State Building...

The visuals are terrific. Imagine the Empire State Building with a windmill on top rather than King Kong. That's how the New York Post depicted Mayor Michael Bloomberg's latest idea. Another illustrator adorned the Brooklyn Bridge with windmills atop its towers. It's all because Bloomberg proposed that the Big Apple should blossom with windmills to provide at least one-tenth of its power. What if his idea caught on? Why not mandate that every building taller than a few stories sport a rooftop windmill? We could include the Washington Monument. And every TV and radio antenna. And every hilltop and mountain,...

Energy Policy: The mayor of New York City would put wind turbines atop the Brooklyn Bridge under a plan announced Tuesday at a "clean energy summit." Will there be an ocean wind farm next to the Statue of Liberty?Speaking at the event in Las Vegas, Michael Bloomberg, one of many politicians to whom hot air is no stranger, embraced wind power as the alternative energy du jour. He even offered his city's skyline as a site for perhaps the world's largest wind farm. "Perhaps companies will want to put wind turbines atop bridges and skyscrapers, or use the enormous potential...

We haven't talked about a good environmentalist wild-west style shootout in a while. Authorites in California have endorsed the construction of a 150 mile electricity transmisson line to carry power from wind and solar projects in the desert to San Diego. State law requires utilities to supply 20% of their energy from renewable sources by 2010 – a benchmark SDG&E has said it cannot meet. The San Diego utility supplies 6% today. Unfortunately the transmission lines are proposed to go through some pretty areas and some environmentalists aren't too happy. “The idea that we’re going to sacrifice critical pieces of...

Mayor Michael Bloomberg Lays Out Plan To Put Windmills Atop Skyscrapers And Bridges (CBS/ AP) New York's mayor said solutions to the city's energy problems are blowing in the wind. At the National Clean Energy Summit in Las Vegas Tuesday night, Mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed placing windmills atop skyscrapers and bridges and turbines in the East and Hudson rivers to help power the city. Bloomberg's "windmill power plan" is the boldest environmental proposal yet from the billionaire independent, who has been trying to make energy efficiency a legacy of his administration, reports CBS station WCBS-TV reporter Magee Hickey. The plan...

Pierpont's findings suggest that low-frequency noise and vibration generated by wind machines can have an effect on the inner ear, triggering headaches; difficulty sleeping; tinnitus, or ringing in the ears; learning and mood disorders; panic attacks; irritability; disruption of equilibrium, concentration and memory; and childhood behavior problems.

LAS VEGAS - Forget Chicago. New York would claim title as the genuine "Windy City" under a dramatic proposal by Mayor Bloomberg yesterday to develop wind turbines atop the Big Apple's bridges and skyscrapers. But that's not all. The mayor also tossed out the possibility of building wind farms way out in the Atlantic Ocean, miles from shore, that he said could generate roughly twice the energy of similar land-based facilities and supply 10 percent of the city's electricity needs within a decade. "I think it would be a thing of beauty if, when Lady Liberty looks out on the...

NYC's Mayor Bloomberg yesterday proposed to develop wind turbines atop the Big Apple's bridges and skyscrapers. The mayor also tossed out the possibility of building wind farms way out in the Atlantic Ocean, miles from shore, that he said could generate roughly twice the energy of similar land-based facilities and supply 10 percent of the city's electricity needs within a decade...

Mayor Bloomberg is proposing a "green" plan that has the potential to drastically change the New York City skyline and shores. It's part of his effort to make New York the most energy efficient city in the nation. The mayor's "windmill power plan" is the boldest environmental proposal yet from the billionaire independent, who has been trying to make energy efficiency a legacy of his administration. Speaking at a major conference on alternative energy Tuesday night in Las Vegas, Bloomberg proposed putting windmills on top of city bridges, and skyscrapers, and turbines in the Hudson and East Rivers. In terms...

Wind farms may have an impact on local weather patterns. As environmental engineers have discovered, wind farm propellers create a lot of turbulence in their wake, mixing air up and down with effects that can be detected for miles... ...a large windmill array could influence the local climate, raising temperatures by about 2 degrees Celsius (about 4 Fahrenheit) for several hours. The rotating blades could also redirect high-speed winds down to the Earth's surface, boosting evaporation of soil moisture... ...At best, wind farms produce electricity at an efficiency rate of 30 percent, compared to a 70 percent efficiency rate from...

It is difficult to imagine a more unlikely pair of investors than House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens. Pelosi, the San Francisco Democrat, is among the most liberal and pro-environmentalist politicians in Congress, while Pickens has long been associated with Republicans, hedge funds and the energy industry. Yet in May 2007, Pelosi invested between $100,001 and $250,000 to purchase public common stock in Pickens’ Clean Energy Fuels Corporation (CLNE). Pelosi's CLNE investment was first highlighted by Eric Odom on the #don'tgo blog. CLNE is a cog in Pickens’$6 billion plan to build a massive wind farm...

In this year's great energy debate, Democrats describe a future when the U.S. finally embraces the anything-but-carbon avant-garde. It turns out, however, that when wind and solar power do start to come on line, they face a familiar obstacle: environmentalists and many Democrats. To wit, the greens are blocking the very transmission network needed for renewable electricity to move throughout the economy. The best sites for wind and solar energy happen to be in the sticks -- in the desert Southwest where sunlight is most intense for longest, or the plains where the wind blows most often. To exploit this...

Visiting America last week to talk to audiences across the country about "global warming", I was struck by television commercials for the two presidential candidates. Senators McCain and Obama were each shown in front of film of the same giant wind farm, to lay claim to virtually identical "green" credentials. Since America has already built five times as many wind turbines as Britain, covering thousands of square miles, I checked out how much electricity all those 10,000 turbines actually produce. The answer is around 4.5 gigawatts - not much more than a single large coal-fired power station.

[ROBERT M. SYKES is Professor emeritus Civil and environmental engineering Ohio State University Mount Vernon] I was disappointed to see that the very large negative effects on both Ohio's economy and environment were not discussed in the July 27 article "Wind power likely to blow in," on the wind-power projects in Champaign County. The first issue is the high cost of wind power, which is about 2.5 to three times the cost of coal-generated power. Large wind-power projects exist only because of large government subsidies. Otherwise, wind power would be restricted to a few applications where the physical isolation of...

Usually when you argue with liberals, you can start winning right off the bat by denying the premise of their argument. On energy, their premise is that wind power is pure, clean energy, harnessing mother nature with no downside at all. After all it is just a breeze, which we like on hot summer days, and other than lifting loosely glued toupees and bad comb-overs, it is harmless. Right? Well we don't get wind power from pin-wheels. We get it from thousands of huge, industrial grade wind turbines, which, for the dim bulbs on the left, are machines.

Hundreds of giant turbines in the Oregon desert will bring power, but residents nearby raise concerns about health effects and an end to their quiet way of life BOARDMAN -- Sherry Eaton pulled into the driveway of her rural, high-desert home to see one of several giant wind turbines being assembled a half-mile away. "I started to cry," Eaton, 57, recalled of her first sight of the Willow Creek Wind Project in late July. "They're going to be hanging over the back of our house, and now there's the medical thing." "The medical thing" is new research suggesting that living...

Webb is a senior scientist with the University of Virginia's Department of Environmental Sciences. His Web site, www.VaWind.org, addresses environmental issues associated with commercial wind energy development. Oil billionaire T. Boone Pickens is being disingenuous, telling one thing to the American people and another to Congress. He has repeatedly said that no government help is needed to pursue his plan to build the world's largest wind farm in the Texas Panhandle. Yet he is lobbying hard for extension of the Production Tax Credit and National Renewable Energy Zones -- essentially a huge tax shelter for wind industry investors and expedited...

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called congressional Republicans who want up-or-down drilling votes “hand maidens of the oil companies.” Let’s call Pelosi what she is: House girl of the Big Wind boondogglers. Though she seemingly backtracked on labeling drilling a “hoax” this week, Pelosi refuses to consider GOP energy proposals that don’t include massive government subsidies for eco-fantastical alternatives that have never panned out. Which brings us to Madame Speaker’s 2007 financial disclosure form. Schedule III lists “assets and ‘unearned income’” of between $100,001-$250,000 from Clean Energy Fuels Corp. - Public Common Stock.” Clean Energy Fuels Corp. is a natural gas...

T. Boone has re-invented himself as a green wildcatter. Can he finish what Al Gore started? T. Boone Pickens can't read his lines. Squinting at his teleprompter, he is posing in front of a mile-long ribbon of wind turbines, churning against an endless Texas sky. Pickens is in Sweetwater, a town of 12,000 that bills itself as the nation's wind-energy capital, to shoot a commercial urging Americans to put themselves on a new energy diet: cutting out imported oil—which costs $700 billion a year—in favor of domestically produced sources such as wind and natural gas. "Our dependence on foreign oil...

Ah so! It seems T. Boone Pickens is not the disinterested environmental pioneer that his ads make him out to be. Michelle Malkin exposes the grand scale corruption that is behind Nancy Pelosi’s desire not to drill for more oil. It seems that she has stock in companies that create and run wind farms – T. Boone Pickens companies. Though she seemingly backtracked on labeling drilling a "hoax" this week, Pelosi refuses to consider GOP energy proposals that don't include massive government subsidies for so-called eco-alternatives that have never panned out. Which brings us to Madame Speaker's 2007 financial disclosure...

Wind Turbines Whip Up Health Fears By RICHARD COCKLE  BOARDMAN, Ore. — Sherry Eaton pulled into the driveway of her rural, high-desert home to see one of several giant wind turbines being assembled a half-mile away. "I started to cry," Eaton, 57, recalled of her first sight of the Willow Creek Wind Project in late July. "They're going to be hanging over the back of our house, and now there's the medical thing." "The medical thing" is new research suggesting that living close to wind turbines, as Eaton and her 60-year-old husband, Mike, soon will be doing, can cause sleep...

eek, Pelosi refuses to consider GOP energy proposals that don't include massive government subsidies for so-called eco-alternatives that have never panned out. Which brings us to Madame Speaker's 2007 financial disclosure form. Schedule III lists "Assets and 'Unearned Income'" of between $100,001-$250,000 from Clean Energy Fuels Corp. -- Public Common Stock. Clean Energy Fuels Corp. (CLNE) is a natural gas provider founded by T. Boone Pickens. Yep, that T. Boone Pickens -- former oilman turned wind-power evangelist whose ads touting a national wind campaign are now as ubiquitous as Viagra promos. Pickens and Pelosi share the same talking points downplaying...

It’s what conservative bloggers are buzzing about: the financial relationship between Do-Nothing Nancy Pelosi and Big Wind pusher T. Boone Pickens. #dontgo reports that according to disclosure statements, “in May 2007 she invested in T. Boone Picken’s clean energy fuels corp., CLNE, which is the sole sponsor of a proposal in California to funnel $5 billion in state funds and $5 billion in Federal funs to this corporation which will indirectly help them create a giant wind farm in the Texas panhandle.�Follow the money.Get the whole scoop here and here. Know your eco-cronies.***Flashback: See-Dubya asks, “Why is T. Boone Pickens...

At first glance, the energy proposals of Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens for wind power and increased gas usage sound good. "We can't drill our way out of this crises"; I happen to disagree with this statement. We still need to drill to make ourselves "independent from foreign oil." But the real issue is what is behind the clamor to expand wind power in lieu of increasing oil drilling. To understand this you have to read between the lines. Not only does Pickens' firm, BP capital, have significant investments in natural gas, but last June he announced plans to build...

What we like most about T. Boone Pickens' grand scheme for meeting America's insatiable energy appetite and reducing the reliance on unfriendly foreign sources of oil is his willingness that all alternatives should compete. Whether it's drilling for oil offshore, or processing natural gas shale from the heartland or capturing wind that blows from who-knows-where, Mr. Pickens is all for it. "I'm for everything that's American," as the billionaire Texas oilman put it Tuesday when he met with the Register editorial board and news reporters. What we like least about his grand scheme is that to pursue the parts of...

I was just looking at the task of providing wind power to according to T Boone Pickens Plan. It is not a pretty picture. But here is a try at it. TX power Requirement (MW) 104,754 MW Amount of Wind Power Desired 20.00% MW of Wind 20950.8 MW Area per Megawatt 0.02 MW/Acre Efficiency 35.00% percent Sq Miles Wind Power 2992971.4 Acres Acres / Sq MIle 640 SqMi/A Actual Sq Miles Req 4676.52 sq miles Distance from Minot ND to Big Bend TX 1300 miles Width of Corridor 3.60 miles Watts per Tower 1.5 MW Quantity towers 13,967 units Cost...

Boone Pickens may be a fine man, and has played a colorful and useful role on the American stage for decades. But his "energy plan," which he's spending a fortune to promote on cable TV, is not a plan. Asserting that something would be good to do is not "a plan." Saying how to do it is "a plan." By this standard, what the legendary oil man is devoting $58 million to pitch hardly amounts to a decent slogan. He would replace natural gas in electricity production with wind, and use the natural gas to power cars. He fails to...

As North Texans sweltered through another 100-degree-plus day, the windmills around Sweetwater turned lazily in the West Texas breeze, generating enough electricity to power about 250,000 homes. It’s not much — barely 1 percent of the peak electricity demand Monday for the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, operator of the transmission grid for about 75 percent of the state. But it’s about what is expected from the state’s wind-power industry, by far the nation’s largest, during the dog days of summer, when temperatures climb but wind speeds dip on the West Texas plains. "In general, wind’s peak energy does not...

...developers are looking to build more than 100 wind turbines taller than the Statue of Liberty, side by side, on 18 miles of the George Washington National Forest. FreedomWorks, a company with projects in four states, wants to generate electricity for the power-hungry Washington area and beyond, despite concerns about disturbing wildlife, spoiling untouched lands and creating noise and light pollution. As the United States searches for ways to lessen its dependency on foreign oil, wind energy is getting a second look in states such as Virginia that had not embraced it. The national push, along with new state financial...

Wind-Power Growth Could Put Prairie Chickens on Endangered List Posted on: Sunday, 3 August 2008, 03:00 CDT By John David Sutter, The Oklahoman Aug. 3--A plucky little bird in northwest Oklahoma -- known for its comical mating dances in which it patters around like a jittery wind-up toy -- has found itself pitted against an unlikely environmental foe. Huge power-generating wind turbines are expected to pop up all over the lesser prairie chicken's habitat in coming years, and biologists say the development could push the birds onto the endangered species list or even into extinction. "We're very concerned they could...

What's in store for America when most of its electricity is generated by the sun and wind? Trouble, turmoil and tyranny. With more than 125 wind farms, England is many years ahead of us when it comes to alternative power. But it has just as many NIMBYs per capita as America, and theirs detest wind farms. A 2007 government-commissioned study found upward of three-quarters of people living within 1.2 miles of "condor Cuisanarts" say the loud whooshing sound the blades make is ruining their health and quality of life. But their biggest complaint was about falling property values. More than...

COMMENTARY: T. Boone Pickens is being lionized for his efforts to legislate a transformation to "eco-friendly" wind energy. We need to "overcome our addiction to foreign oil," he insists, by harnessing wind to replace natural gas in electricity generation, and using that gas to power more cars and buses. If Congress would simply "mandate the formation of wind and solar corridors," provide eminent domain authority for transmission lines, and renew the subsidies for this energy, America can make the switch in a decade. Mr. Pickens' $58-million media pitch makes good ad copy, but his policy prescriptions would bring new energy,...

As a Texas oilman and major contributor to the Republican Party, you’ve just launched yourself, at 80, into green stardom by devising an energy plan that relies mainly on wind power. How does it feel to be in the company of Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi and other leading Democrats? If they’re on my side, that’s good. We’re working on a nonpolitical venture here. Why do you think your energy plan is superior to others’ plans? My dad once said to me, “Son, a fool with a plan can beat a genius with no plan.� I’ve used that here in this...

Cutting photocopier costs was once Randall Swisher's top concern, now it's redrawing the United States' power grid into a $60 billion superhighway. When Swisher became executive director of the industry group the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) in 1989, he had four employees and fuel was cheap. So the energy business largely ignored him. Ten years ago, cutting office costs topped the agenda. Swisher commissioned American Electric Power (AEP.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), the country's largest electricity transmitter and one of its largest power generators, to map how a new national network of power lines could potentially distribute wind...

They Call the Wind Energy by: Jeff Waldmann, July 29, 2008 The solutions to the energy crisis and relief for unemployment woes can all be found across the pond in Europe, according to a July 22 panel at the Center for American Progress. The panel, including two U.S. experts on both alternative energy and green building and two European officials, discussed energy policy in great detail, and were particularly interested in the application of alternative energy policy in Europe here in the United States. While the event promised to be a discussion of solutions to global warming, and the policies...

Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain travelled to Oregon in mid-May to deliver the definitive climate change speech of his campaign. He spoke in Portland, at the U.S. headquarters of Vestas Wind Systems AS, a Danish company that markets wind turbines around the world. He started on a self-deprecating note. “Today is a kind of test run for this company,” he said. “They've got wind technicians here, wind studies and all these wind turbines. But there's no wind. So now I know why they asked me to come and give a speech.” It was perhaps his most perceptive statement of...

algore has come up with an improbable reality, his 10-year, all fossil fuels replaced by wind, sun and other things. A couple of thoughts crossed my mind. 1. Installation. Build enough wind and solar capacity to replace our current use which was 2005 was approximately 4,000 TWh (trillian watt hours) in 2005 http://www.iaea.org/inisnkm/nkm/aws/eedrb/data/US-elp.html . Remember, it goes watts, kilowatts, megawatts, gigawatts and then terawatts. Of this number you can see that the conventional (coal/natural gas aka thermal) usage was about 70% or 2,800 TWh. This is a s__t pot of power! In 10 years we build enough windmills and solar...

You’re going to love this video from Americans for Prosperity, whose staff caught eco-hypocrisy on full display at Al Gore’s big energy sermon in Washington, D.C. earlier today. Ed Frank writes: “We’re back from Al Gore’s big global warming speech, and boy did we have a great time! We had a dedicated band of taxpayer advocates out in force, pointing out the high economic cost of global warming alarmism - starting with $8 a gallon gasoline. Of course, we saw plenty of hypocrisy — especially the fact that Gore didn’t ride his bike or take public transporation to the event....

Many angry landowners have contacted us about a plan that, contrary to good public policy, will negatively impact property rights of rural Texans from Roberts to Jack County. The brand-new Roberts County Fresh Water Supply District No. 1, acting as an alter ego of businessman T. Boone Pickens and Mesa Power Pampa, LLC, has launched a private venture that may force landowners in 11 counties to submit to the power of eminent domain so they can pump water from the shrinking Ogallala Aquifer and sell wind-generated electricity. This new governmental entity is composed of only five people, all employees or...

Boone Pickens is a very smart man. He understands oil and energy better than most analysts. But, he has just made an $85 million ad buy to run the above commercial. The ad says he has a plan to solve the energy "problem". The ad states that wind power is part of his plan. What he doesn't tell you is that he is looking for huge subsides for his wind farms. When someone has a plan, they can go ahead and execute it. When someone has a plan and they run commercials to tell you about the plan, they want...