I’m all in favor of nuclear. I always have been, and have posted such. A combined wind-nuclear-biomass solution would be great.
Apropos of not much … Michael Vick is 1000 times the household name T. Boone Pickens is. In fact, I’ll go so far as to say as T. Boone Pickens is straight up not a famous person. At all.
What stikes me about the whole T. Boone deal, is that despite being a big time Bush supporter as well as a Swift Boater, the commercial I saw of his really seems to squelch the Republican party’s whole “Drill here, Drill now” campaign.
I can’t help but be as suspicious as I am encouraged. Is he also quietly pushing for drilling as well? Offshore, ANWR, or shale? Is it a ploy ala ‘you get me in ANWR, I’ll get you some windmills’, or ‘watch my clean, green, left hand, but ignore my oily, red, right hand’?
I’m cynical enough not to believe his new found “green” interests go any further than his wallet, but what ever gets us there; as long as it’s clean.
I don’t know squat about solar since my company doesn’t own a solar farm. We do however run a wind farm that has been in operation for about 5 years. In your opinion, how long does it take for a technology to be proven? There’s really nothing new about it.
Of course, it’s not free. (I’m not saying that you said it was) Our coal plant generates at rates about 25% cheaper than wind. It’s also not very useful for baseload generation. I’m not sure what the Pickster is going to do about that.
As for being an eyesore, it’s in the eye of the beholder I guess.
KRM
University of Oklahoma grad. T-Bone hasn’t given a damn thing to my alma mater.
The most suspicion I have is that he wants to sell CNG to consumers - but then, he’s already selling it to power plants as it is (of course, CNG to consumers is more expensive than bulk contracts to power plants, but it’s also very possible that bulk contracts to CNG stations might also end up being significantly cheaper.) I also think he wants to poise Texas as a key State for creating enormous amounts of green power. Maybe he’s foreseeing a $20/ton carbon allowance system in the near future and he wants to cash in on that. One thing that should not be overlooked is the crunch and consternation being caused in States like Arizona, Utah, and Nevada over California’s “green generation” mandates. If California actually starts cracking down on this, and Pickens gets a huge amount of wind power in Arizona that he can send or wheel to California (can you wheel from Texas???), then maybe he could sell at $100/MWh and up during much of the summer.
I had a half-hour talk with my renewables manager today on this subject, and he claims Pickens plan can work except for the availability of CNG stations and the lag-time in getting a fleet of cars. He figured one solution might be to start with city buses as CNG mass transport, and then switch to other municipal vehicles, etc., and spread into consumer vehicles as the fleet grows. Personally, I think (like Magiver upthread) biodiesel is a much better option as a primary fuel.
In terms of GHG emissions, I see little chance for a downside here. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt until I see much more over the medium-term.
Ah, but recall my friend that much of the gas that he hopes to free up is used for peaking power plants anyhow. Now naturally, if the wind isn’t blowing then peaking power isn’t there, but I think the point of Pickens plan is that all the baseload coal and nuclear capacity will be there as reserve, but when the wind is good, those units will be derated or even put into warm shutdown mode. It is entirely possible that this may actually require the construction of some new coal plants (or nuclear, if possible) for situations where it’s a hot summer day and there’s no wind blowing. But the overall net effect, on an annual generation basis, should be positive.
Would the wind farm that your company owns be economic without government subsidies? Specifically, I am wondering if it has a positive present value of the cash inflows and outflows using some minimum discount rate of something like 8%.
Also, what is generally the useful life of the windmills and what kind of ongoing maintenance capex do they require?
I think we both want the same thing, practical energy that is dependable and is environmentally friendly. Solar is a complete joke (today) but may be perfected down the road. I get excited when I see research on thin film designs or paint-on designs. But spending $50,000 on a house system with a 25 year life cycle is just expensive land-fill (yes some of it is recyclable). I would expect solar-thermal plants to be the wave of the near-future but even those are not competitive with coal. I would like to see more research on these plants as we have a significant amount of desert that screams solar-thermal for West Coast energy requirements. I have to believe that we could invent some kind of pecs pipe that would hold up for these plants and greatly reduce the cost.
Wind power seems like a lot of production parts for a small, unreliable return. Again, I’m in favor of research that will bring the cost of production down. As a kid I wondered why cities didn’t align buildings so that wind would be funneled into a vertical turbine. I’m not an engineer but it seems logical to focus wind using existing structures. I love dual-purpose technology.
I see coal plants as dual-purpose technology. We extract the Co2 and use it to grow diesel. The diesel fits nicely in our current technology. We could easily double our fuel economy. We also have an existing infrastructure for oil. We went to great lengths to put an oil pipeline right up to the North Slope fields. We then let 1 politician declare half of that field off limits because caribou would be unhappy. Turns out that they like the damn pipes. Who knew? We know now so why are we underutilizing a pipe that could bring money, jobs, and taxes to our own country instead of gifting that to other countries. All that tax money could be earmarked for research. ALL of it. We need a short-term strategy and a long-term strategy.
As we speak I’m tinkering with my car to see if I can boost the fuel economy. It’s a subject that I’m greatly interested in.
Since you’re a science advisor and deal with power plants feel free to fling numbers. If you can justify wind turbines as price competitive add-ons to the grid I would be interested in your input. It doesn’t have to be in debate form.
You may misunderstand - I mean it should be strongly positive from an environmental and reducing dependence on foreign energy standpoint. The point at which it becomes equivalent to current power prices is going to depend upon natural gas prices and if (repeat, if) there is an actual carbon cap & trade system in place. I freely admit that the result of wind generation will be a higher utility bill, unless and until something significant happens. Maybe not that much higher, as in, we can bear it (or should be able to, the average person living hand-to-mouth with $10k of credit card debt maybe can’t…that’s a bigger discussion), but deciding if the cost is worth it…is again another subject.
So in short, I agree that it doesn’t make economic sense - right at this moment, when carbon costs in the US are effectively “$0”.
I’ve got to disagree with you. Wind is mainstream now. There are huge wind farms going up all over the world, and it’s not Greenpeace doing it - it’s people investing in it because it seems like a good deal. Wind power can be produced for about 6-8 cents/kWh, including capital recovery. And it’s getting better as the technology improves.
Wind makes a lot of sense, where it’s useful. You need locations with high, constant winds. There just aren’t that many of those, so the rest of the farms have to be put in areas where their utilization factors are lower. Here in Alberta, we have a wind farm situated in the mouth of the Crow’s Nest pass, a very naturally windy area. Those are the locations that can produce cost-effective wind energy. And people are building them in such locations at a rapid rate - probably limited only by land availability and proximity to consumers of the electricity.
But there just aren’t enough great locations for wind, and the first I thought when I saw Picken’s map was, “You mean that entire region of the country is always windy? I think not.”
I think it’s a real stretch to get wind to 20%. But it could quite easily become 5%.
You’re going to have to cite that wind generators are competive with coal or nuclear. I’m seeing figures of .04 per kwh not adjusted for slack time. Coal is closer to .01 per kwh. Increasing the number of wind generators equals increasing the cost of energy. The technology does appear to be improving but it there is a ROI that needs to be justified between wind and coal plants. Money spent now is money not available in the future.
IMO, calling a subsidized technology mainstream is misleading. It’s not cost effective.
Externalized pollution is also a form of subsidy.
Not if you can scrub the polution at the source. making a zillion small power plants has an externalized pollution factor that also needs to be taken into account. Everything is a trade off. If you use the Co2 to make diesel and that cuts Co2 levels in half then that should be added to the mix. Nothing we do is a single point solution to either cost per kwh or the cost of removing pollutants. There is also the concept of applying technology to cool the planet versus removing Co2. That’s never even discussed. The object is to achieve a goal or set of goals via the most economic means.
Yes, if you can scrub everything, there’s no subsidy. You posted figures comparing the two technologies. Does the figure you posted include the cost of scrubbing? If it does, can you post a cite, since this information I hadn’t heard before.
I was looking for the same thing. It’s tough to get 2 sites that agree on anything. If I find it I’ll post it. It would be nice to find a site that didn’t have an agenda and used ACTUAL numbers from a modern coal/wind/solar/nuclear plant.
And a Co2 scrubber is not going to scrub everything so that has to figure in on whatever goal that sought.
By “comparing the two technologies” in the post above, I mean comparing wind and coal. I’m interested in seeing what the cost of coal is, if coal does not externalize pollution as compared to wind. Thanks.
ETA: Didn’t see your previous post while I was writing. I see you understood my previous post, so ignore this one. Thanks.
Wouldn’t it be ironic if we had to build more coal to support wind? I’m sure that you’re more aware than I am of the political climate revolving around new coal construction. PSO and OG&E tried to build a new coal plant to meet Oklahoma’s growing needs but our Corporation Commission vetoed the idea thanks in large part to the efforts of gas men like Pickens. At the time (just last year) their logic was, “Sure, coal is cheap now but we don’t know that it always will be.” :rolleyes:
I don’t know about wheeling out of Texas but ERCOT makes it extremely difficult to get power into the Lone Star State. We were going to double our existing coal facility and send half the power to Texas cooperative but thanks to ERCOT, we couldn’t get it done. We’ve decided to buy CTs to handle our growing requirements which of course are much cleaner than coal but much more expensive per MWH. I’m sure gas prices will be coming down any day now. :dubious:
Given the high cost of gas, I’d have to say yes, our windfarm can stand on it’s own without subsidies. I don’t know what the useful life of a windmill is. We haven’t had any catastrophic failures (unlike one of our competitors) so we’ll just have to wait and see. I can’t imagine them lasting as long as our gas units (from the 50’s) but you never know. We have about 70 windmills and ISTM that 3 or 4 of them are usually down for maintenance. That’s actually a pretty big plus for wind power. When our coal unit is in its annual outage, it’s completely down and we have to buy the expensive stuff to replace it. With wind you don’t have this problem.
I can’t even fathom a farm the size that Pickens is talking about. 4 gigawatts?? How many DeLoreans does the man own? Last I checked, each unit was capable of about 2 MW but maybe he’s counting on some big improvements in efficiencies. If not, 2000 windmills is going to take up a lot of room. Our farm is about 4 square miles and is nothing compared to what he’s planning.
Sort of - as long as the net renewables content increases and the GHG emissions decrease, I can be happy with it. Radical environmental groups of course would probably rather sink the entire plan, rather than compromise…
For a laugh, see this article, and note the huge error they made.
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/20080515/boone-pickens-project-buys-667-ge-wind-turbines.htm
Holy dogshit, 1GW per turbine*? And he’s ordering 667 of them? Wow, we’re going to have so much renewable power it’ll be criminal. 
*(in reality, they’re 1.5 MW each…)
Do you mean recently created biomass or biomass from 300M years ago? 