Texas Billionaire Pickens Blows Off Plans for Wind Farm
HOUSTON – Plans for the world’s largest wind farm in the Texas Panhandle have been scrapped, energy baron T. Boone Pickens said Tuesday, and he’s looking for a home for 687 giant wind turbines.
Pickens said he has leases on about 200,000 acres in Texas that were planned for the project, and he might place some of the turbines there, but he’s also looking for smaller wind projects to participate in. He said he’s looking at potential sites in the Midwest and Canada.
In Texas, the problem lies in getting power from the proposed site in the Panhandle to a distribution system, Pickens said in an interview with The Associated Press in New York. He’d hoped to build his own transmission lines but he said there were technical problems.
Wind power is a big part of the “Pickens Plan,” which was announced a year ago Wednesday. Pickens has spent $60 million crisscrossing the country and buying advertising in an effort to reduce the nation’s reliance on foreign oil.
“It doesn’t mean that wind is dead,” said Pickens, who runs the Dallas-based energy investment fund BP Capital. “It just means we got a little bit too quick off the blocks.”
Pickens announced in 2007 plans to install the turbines in parts of four Texas Panhandle counties.
He had hoped to complete the four-phase project in 2014 and eventually have 4,000 megawatts of capacity, enough to power more than one million homes. The total cost was expected to approach $12 billion.
Published July 8, 2009 8:23am EDT | Updated January 14, 2015 12:54am EST
https://www.foxnews.com/story/texas-billionaire-pickens-blows-off-plans-for-wind-farm
Good info.
“... the problem lies in getting power from the proposed site in the Panhandle to a distribution system,”
Some things haven’t and won’t change.
The big problem is that wind has a 20% to 28% capacity factor. That means you get 20% to 28% of the nameplate rating of the turbine. Of course, the bigger problem is what Texas is experiencing now - the wind doesn’t blow when it is extremely hot and you need the power the most. To get through the “wind droughts,” you need massive amounts of storage. The 4X to 5X overbuild of the turbines plus the batteries to get through week-long wind droughts means wind costs 10X to 20X conventional plants.
It is utterly ridiculous.