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 "The yearly boom-and-bust cycle that characterized the U.S. wind market from 1999 through 2004...has now been replaced by three consecutive years of sizable growth."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.
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