I was wondering what wind power advocate 'dopers think of the pull out of T. Boone Pickens and the much touted Pickens Plan? How serious a blow will this be to getting wind power up and running in large enough quantities to matter? How does the news that one of the problems with the plan was the transmission problems (i.e. getting the power from the wind far to the actual grid where people need it) effect your own stance on the future of mass wind power in the US?
Do you think the timing was just bad…or that Mr. Pickens was, perhaps, hoping for more, um, contributions, to make his proposed $12 billion dollar dream a reality?
I think the market will correct for this and in the long run it is not a big deal, except for the people who have gone into business with Mr. Pickens. It is my understanding that he wanted easier access to putting in the necessary new transmission lines. There was also some conspiracy stuff about his real motive was to get to water rights in aquifers, which I don’t particularly follow or credit. So now he has bunches of very efficient turbines that he is looking for a new home for. These are the largest and most efficient turbines that GE makes, and it looks like they will go to existing windfarms that can use them as add-ons to their existing infrastructure. The various windfarms in my East SF Bay Area don’t have any turbines this large, perhaps they will pick some up cheap. They are still going up like gangbusters out here.
So, as a wind power gasbag I say this is a temporary set back and is ultimately of small importance to the growing industry.
Pickens’ interest is Pickens’ profits. Now nothing wrong with that but what’s good for Pickens is not necessarily what’s good for the country … and visaversa.
His plan was several fold: sell the water, sell the windpower, create new higher margin demand for natural gas.
Now maybe he’d have gone ahead without the water pipeline if capital was easier to get ahold of right now, but what with the water pipeline nixed and his capital and cashflow spigots turned down, the transmission infrastructure investment was too big to take on … for now.
So he’ll put the windmills in elsewhere where less new transmission is needed - sites to be determined, and stick with his idiotic push for natural gas vehicles.
What does it say about windpower? That Pickens is not its champion. And that transmission from big projects at the best wind resource locations is a big issue that requires deep deep pockets.
Natural gas vehicles are an interesting idea. A car that will run on farts. Methane. Other than CO2 being a byproduct they are non-polluting, natural gas is inexpensive and can in fact be manufactured if necessary. And there is a lot. But range on such a vehicle is less than half for gasoline. And at half the efficiency, it is just as expensive as gasoline. A home refueling station will cost $5000 and take all night to refuel.
My brother has a natural gas Honda Civic and he likes it. But it just isn’t cut out for long trips.
It’s still going on. Pickens idea was for Texas to fund the transmission lines and make it easy for him to get the land, plus the water factor. Money is tight these days, so grandious plans like Pickens’ don’t have much of a chance. Smaller projects that make economic sense to private industry are still getting built.
I hope this makes people think twice about just how much energy can be economically produced from wind. Because Pickens was selling a bill of goods.
Wind is great technology. I love wind farms. I think they’re beautiful and inspirational to look at. Wind can be competitively priced. So rah rah wind, etc.
However. Wind turbines are very fussy about where they are located. They operate efficiently in a very narrow band of wind speeds. There are a relatively small number of locations on the continent that have constant winds at maximally efficient velocity. Many of these sites are already being developed or are in operation. But many of them are also unusable because of geographic issues with access, or because of lack of rights to the property, or because they are too far away from customers, increasing infrastructure cost and transmission line losses.
And if you drop down to the next tier of wind speeds that are more widely available, you find that wind power pretty much doubles in cost, and it gets worse from there.
You can realistically claim that wind power might one day make up 10% of the power consumption at today’s level. I might even accept 20%, although with a whole lot of risk attached to the success of achieving that, because it would take extreme effort.
But that’s about all you’re going to get. My guess is that you might get to 20% if you combine wind with solar.
So let’s take those off the table, assume that they provide 20% of the power, and ignore those technologies.
What do you propose we use to make up the other 80%? More fossil fuels? You’re good with that?
If not, please explain the alternative, with some specificity.
Nuclear, among others. And nobody is claiming that wind power is effectively gathered everywhere in the country. Just as nobody is claiming that you can supply the nation with oil drilled in Wisconsin. That’s a ridiculous strawman.
Sam, this op was asking a narrow question: what is the significance of Pickens’ pull-back from this project at this time?
The answer to that question has to do with the cost of transmission infrastructure and Pickens specific risk benefit analysis when the water pipeline is out of the question and capital is this tight.
The question was not whether or not wind can provide for the vast majority of America’s power needs all by itself and the issues regarding how much wind can power, the challenges associated with getting wind from its best resource locations to its greatest need, the difficulty all capital intensive energy projects are having in this capital sparse environment (which includes nuclear btw, and even new oil exploration), etc. These have been discussed before. Do you really want to rehash another one of those threads, or just answer the question a bit more narrowly?
As far as nuclear though. It will certainly also play a role for some undetermined fraction of our future power needs but again it is also being affected by the same tight capital that infrastructure for wind is. Pickens, Exelon, whoever - they all want the rest of us to take the financial risk and leave them with the potential gain. Minimally the competition needs to be an even playing field is all.
Also for those who have previously brought up what happens when the wind dies … nuclear apparently has to deal with what happens when the temperature rises.
Day saved by good transmission infrastructure! Too bad ours sucks.
No single source will be the solution and none can predict with complete accuracy which solution will be most cost effective for which location. There’s a lot to be said for a high efficiency long range transmission infrastructure in which various locations and various sorts of power generation can complement each other (as happened between Britain and France) but that is a long range and very capital intensive project. There is also a lot to be said for distributed generation and local storage to deal with spikes in demand as an alternative. If this says anything it is that some early focus on distributed generation with local storage may be more likely to succeed.
BTW, this particular project isn’t necessarily dead forever either. He’s just not willing/able to put up the infrastructure bucks himself right now, not without getting the water deal done too at the same time as part of the package. But Texas is already planning their own transmission build-out into that region. Problem for him is that that project is a few years out which is too long of a timeline for him to proceed with his mega windfarm now. He’d also proceed I am sure if some stimulus monies (some of which are pegged for improved transmission infrastructure) found their way to his project. But I also doubt that is too likely to happen.
Lots of little things, mostly. Maybe we can get some milage out of tidal power, or geothermal. There will be at least some fossil fuel in the mix, just less than now (preferably natural gas, but we won’t completely kick the coal habit overnight, either). Biomass generation is practical in some places. We can reduce usage a fair bit while maintaining the same standard of living with more efficient technologies, like CFL or LED bulbs and better insulation. And nuclear is a significant part of the solution as well.
Answering the specific question, I agree that it will have little effect. GE is probably unhappy about it, because it will probably impact their sales of wind turbines for the quarter. But wind is a very large industry now, with lots of players. The overall trend is towards putting wind turbines wherever it’s economical and feasibile to do so, and that will continue. Why wouldn’t it? The wind industry wasn’t dependent on Pickens’ plan, and I’m sure the big players knew it was snake oil anyway. Wind is a 50 billion dollar industry, growing at 15% per year. And Pickens’ contribution to that is tiny.
People like Pickens actually hurt the industry. They draw attention to themselves, they become easy targets for opponents of wind power, and when they ultimately fail, the entire industry gets smeared.
I agree that Pickens was selling snake oil and smeared the wind industry.
I didn’t mind that he promoted wind turbines. But the natural-gas cars were a terrible idea. Coupled with ev’s, wind power offers the promise of energy independence, and a way out of our crushing debt. Natural gas cars leave us dependent on a (different) limited fossil fuel.
Basic math: US consumes ~21 million bbl oil/day. At $70/bbl, that is ~$1.5 billion per day spent on oil. In a year it amounts to more than half a trillion dollars. Replace this expenditure with green energy and the federal deficit is shed in about 20 years.
The example is simpleminded of course, assuming green energy is free. It isn’t. But it can be our own, and profit us.
T. Boone Pickens is probably better out of the spotlight.
I work for an electric utility in Oklahoma. Even though the Pickens plan was scheduled to be implemented right next door to us, its cancellation will not effect our plans. We still intend to have renewable energy (excluding hydro) account for 15% of our mix by 2015.
Without governmental subsidies, the price of delivering wind energy to the grid is about $80/megawatt. That’s about twice the cost of natural gas generation and 7 or 8 times the price of coal. You don’t want to know about solar. It’s outrageous.
So the cost of a wind-generated Kwh is about 8 cents?
I compare wind power to gasoline to gauge its cost-effectiveness. An ev will get around 5 miles per Kwh. At 7 cents per Kwh, you could drive 100 miles for $1.60. That feels a little low actually, but you can see that it beats the heck out of gasoline.
Coal and natural gas are cheaper, sure. But it isn’t appropriate to construct one of those plants just anywhere. Wind and other green methods give us more options. And their costs continue to fall.
Achieving energy independence will be about reaching a certain capacity. I don’t think we’ll want to get there on coal and natural gas alone.
No. That’s what it costs us to deliver it to the grid without subsidies. Your price at home will be higher. IIRC, on my last electric bill, I paid about 12 cents/kw in a state that has relatively low energy costs.
However, you are correct that it’s cheaper than gasoline. It’s also better policy IMHO.
