We've heard this before, but coming from Pickens wind generated power is getting major air play. Are we finally getting a real push for clean energy? _____ "This is not about Republicans vs. Democrats," Pickens says. "This is about saving our country from the ruination of spending $700 billion a year on oil imports. Ninety days after the oil hits our shores, it's all burned up, and we've got nothing to show for it. But they (foreign oil producers) still have our money. It's killing our economy." _____ Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens wants to supplant oil with wind Get ready, America, T. Boone Pickens is coming to your living room. The legendary Texas oilman, corporate raider, shareholder-rights crusader, philanthropist and deep-pocketed moneyman for conservative politicians and causes, wants to drive the USA's political and economic agenda. "We're paying $700 billion a year for foreign oil. It's breaking us as a nation, and I want to elevate that question to the presidential debate, to make it the No. 1 issue of the campaign this year," Pickens says. Today, Pickens will take the wraps off what he's calling the Pickens Plan for cutting the USA's demand for foreign oil by more than a third in less than a decade. To promote it, he is bankrolling what his aides say will be the biggest public policy ad campaign ever. The website, pickensplan.com, goes live today. Jay Rosser, Pickens' ever-present public relations man, promises that Pickens' face will be seen on Americans' televisions this fall almost as frequently as John McCain's and Barack Obama's. "Neither presidential candidate is talking about solving the oil problem. So we're going to make 'em talk about it," Pickens says. "Nixon said in 1970 that we were importing 20% of our oil and that by 1980 it would be 0%. That didn't happen," Pickens says. "It went to 42% in 1991 with the Gulf War. It's just under 70% now. Where do you think we're going to be in 10 years when our economy is busted and we're importing 80% of our oil?" Finding solutions to other major issues, including health care, are important, he concedes. But "If you don't solve the energy problem, it's going to break us before we even get to solving health care and some of these other important issues." And it has to be done with the same sense of urgency that President Eisenhower had when he pushed the rapid development of the interstate highway system during the Cold War. Of course, Pickens also has a particular solution in mind. Wind. And natural gas. Last week, Pickens loaded up his $60 million, top-of-the-line Gulfstream G550 corporate jet with reporters and a few associates from his Dallas-based BP Capital energy hedge fund and related companies and flew here to illustrate just how big — and achievable — his vision is. There's not much to Sweetwater except for wild grasses, scraggy mesquite trees and rattlesnakes (Sweetwater hosts its famous Rattlesnake Roundup each spring). The gently rolling terrain and vegetation make it ideal for raising cattle, which is what its first settlers did in the 19th century, and what their descendants do today. A regional oil boom in the 1950s and 1960s poured money into the area's economy, as have two oil revivals since: one in the 1980s and one now. But the exciting new industry in town is wind energy. You can drive for 150 miles along Interstate 20 and never be out of sight of a giant wind turbine, claims Sweetwater Mayor Greg Wortham, who does double duty as executive director of the West Texas Wind Energy Consortium. Were it a country all by itself, Nolan County, Texas, would rank sixth on the list of wind-energy-producing nations, says Wortham. Year-round wind conditions, the terrain, low land prices and a small population make it an ideal location for wind farms. It already produces more wind-generated electricity in a year than all of California. And the business is growing so fast that he struggles to define it by numbers. By year's end, there'll be more than 1,500 turbines in Nolan County, representing a $5 billion investment. In the multicounty Rolling Plains region, there are already 2,000 operating turbines. Add those operating further west, the Permian Basin region around Midland and Odessa, and the entire area has more than 3,000 turbines operating, producing about 6,000 megawatts of electricity — about equal to the power produced by two to three nuclear power plants. Growth potential The growth potential is, well, electrifying. New turbine towers are going up at a rate of three to four a day in the Sweetwater area, Wortham says. "It depends on the (Texas) Public Utility Commission, but the number could be 20,000 ultimately," Wortham says. Pickens, who over the past two years has become the USA's biggest wind-power booster, is quick to note that "there could be lots of Sweetwaters out there," especially in the nation's midsection, where winds are ideal for power generation. Indeed, though Sweetwater is a windy place, plenty of locations farther north in the Great Plains are even better suited to wind farming. One is about 250 miles north of Sweetwater, near Pampa, northeast of Amarillo in the Texas Panhandle. That's where Pickens is building what would be the world's largest wind farm, four times larger than the current titleholder near here. So far, he has spent $2 billion on the project, including a record purchase of nearly 700 wind turbines this year from General Electric. He expects to spend up to $10 billion on the project and to begin generating electricity in 2011. Though Pickens doesn't own a single wind turbine in the Sweetwater area, Wortham was eager to play host to the oil baron and the reporters traveling with him. Sweetwater, he says, is proof that wind power has much more potential than its many skeptics believe. "People hear about the 8-foot-tall wind turbines at Logan airport in Boston or the five turbines at Atlantic City and think 'interesting,' " Wortham says. "But they don't see how we can get to the 300,000-megawatt-production level" established by the Bush administration as a national goal for 2030. "Once you come to Sweetwater, you see that it can be done, and be done pretty easily, not only here, but … anywhere there are prime wind conditions. None of this existed seven years ago. Now, we produce enough electricity in this one county to power a large city, and we do it cheaply and cleanly." full article Pickens Plan
Read this on CNN a day or two ago. Hey, I'm all for anything that gets this country away from dependency on foreign energy. My only thing is how is this going to help? 1%, maybe even less, of the oil we import is used for power stations like coal, wind, solar, hydro, etc. Most of the oil is used for automobiles, air industry, etc. So, how will this help get us off the oil teat?
Put enough of these turbines out in a prairie -- you get energy and you get a fine little tourist attraction as well.
He also has a plan to suck all the water out of the Ogallala Aquifer in the panhandle area and sell it to Dallas. It's a 2 billion dollar project, but that's ok because he can issue tax free bonds like a city or other municipality. Also, since he has to build a 250 mile pipeline to do so, he can take your private property to make it happen so long as he pays "fair market value". HE DRINKS YOUR MILKSHAKE.
Wind energy is great, but doesn't displace much oil, but rather coal and natural gas used in power generation. T Boone's idea to use natural gas as a transportation fuel would do a lot more, but given where natural gas prices are today, wouldn't be a cheap solution. The good news is there is tons of natural gas in the US, but a lot of capex is required to get the unconventional supplies out of the ground. I'm not sure how much of this is Pickens trying to pimp his clean energy stock, CLNE, which provides natural gas as an alternative fuel for vehicle fleets
I think there's still a waiting list on windmills, so an immediate save won't come anytime soon unless there's a drastic change in making them.
I guess theoretically you would eventually have a plug-in electric automobile that in fact, would be powered by wind. Oil is better used for plastics, fertilizers and aviation fuels that can never be replaced with alternatives, T Boone has made and lost billions. He currently has billions. Though I'm sure he always plans on making a little profit, I don't think he is doing a pump and dump on the price of his little clean energy stock. He's like 80 and gives away money about as fast as he makes it. I keep thinking what a boon to the shuttered manufacturing capacity of the rust belt this could be. I think we should incentivize domestic production of these turbines. I don't want them made in South Korea. Almost every time I drive out I-10 West these days, I see either giant towers or giant blades rolling on extra long truck trailers...where are they coming from? The port of Houston?
what ever happened to the electric car produced by gm? im sure theyre kicking themselves in the arse for not producing it on a mass scale.
Who killed the electric car ? Edit: <object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/MSBykAngDpY&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/MSBykAngDpY&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>
This is the Al Gore/global warming approach to debate -- head straight to the ignorant people willing to accept anything that 'sounds good' as truth. Pickens has a vested financial interest in wind energy and in natural gas. This is HIGHLY motivated by his own selfish profit interest, just as the 'Coal is Filthy' media campaign a year ago was funded by the natural gas producer Chesapeake. Wind/Solar will never be a commercially viable alternative to today's transportation fuels. Just get that out of your mind. It's not where they are being applied. They are currently a very tiny fraction of electricity generation, but the problem is they are not scalable. Each of those mammoth towers is about 1 MW of generating capacity. Unless you cover the entire available windy areas of the state with them, you aren't going to put a dent into coal/gas production. Solar is nice, but the same problem and it works intermittantly -- i.e. when the sun is shining. Same for wind -- no wind, no power. There are too many applications that need an uninterruptible supply to accept this as a solution. You can't store electricity. Mark my words -- the same crowd that so blindly runs to Obama and runs to Al Gore's global warming charade will be the same crowd that enthusiastically accepts Pickens Plan as the truth. They don't want to face the hard facts, they just want to hear something that sounds good and is easy. It's the same public relations temptation that they have fallen victim to in analyzing the War on Terror. Pickens is incredibly intelligent to prey on society's most uninformed and intellectually lazy. That's exactly what he's doing here, by taking a page out of Al Gore's playbook.
http://money.cnn.com/2008/07/07/technology/woody_solar.fortune/index.htm?cnn=yes The Southwest desert's real estate boom From California to Arizona, demand for sites for solar power projects has ignited a land grab. By Todd Woody, senior editor Last Updated: July 11, 2008: 4:38 AM EDT (Fortune Magazine) -- Doug Buchanan grins with relief when he sees the carcasses. He has just driven up a steep dirt road onto a vast, sunbaked mesa overlooking the Mojave Desert in western Nevada. There, a few feet from the trail, lie the corpses of two steers. A raven perches on one, the only object more than three feet above the ground on this pancake-flat plateau. Cattle, dead or alive, qualify as good news in Buchanan's line of work. If cattle are present, that means grazing is permitted, and that in turn means that this land is most likely not protected habitat for the desert tortoise. Buchanan, 53, is scouting sites for a solar power company called BrightSource Energy, an Oakland-based startup backed by Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) and Morgan Stanley (MS, Fortune 500). The blunt, fifth-generation Californian, who used to survey the same area for natural-gas power sites, knows that the presence of an endangered species such as the tortoise could derail BrightSource's plans to build a multibillion-dollar solar energy plant on the mesa. BrightSource badly wants these 20 square miles of federal land on what is called Mormon Mesa. The company was in such a hurry to stake its claim with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management that it applied for a lease sight unseen. That's an expensive gamble for a startup, given that application fees alone run in the six figures. "I usually like to go out and kick the tires before filing a claim," Buchanan says, "but there's a lot of competitive pressure these days to move fast." That's putting it mildly. A solar land rush is rolling across the desert Southwest. Goldman Sachs, utilities PG&E and FPL, Silicon Valley startups, Israeli and German solar firms, Chevron, speculators - all are scrambling to lock up hundreds of thousands of acres of long-worthless land now coveted as sites for solar power plants. The race has barely begun - finished plants are years away - but it's blazing fastest in the Mojave, where the federal government controls immense stretches of some of the world's best solar real estate right next to the nation's biggest electricity markets. Just 20 months ago only five applications for solar sites had been filed with the BLM in the California Mojave. Today 104 claims have been received for nearly a million acres of land, representing a theoretical 60 gigawatts of electricity. (The entire state of California currently consumes 33 gigawatts annually.) if they can just get 50% efficiency out of these plants... It's not just a federal-land grab either. Buyers are also vying for private property. Some are paying upwards of $10,000 an acre for desert dirt that a few years ago would have sold for $500. No doubt the prospect of potential riches is overheating expectations. But California and surrounding states have mandated massive increases in renewable energy in the next few years. That has led some experts at Emerging Energy Research of Cambridge, Mass., to predict that Big Solar could be a $45 billion market by 2020. Meanwhile, the land rush is setting the stage for a showdown between solar investors and those who want to protect a fragile environment that is home to the desert tortoise and other rare critters. The Southwest is on the cusp of what could be a green revolution. And the biggest obstacle of all may be ... environmentalists. *** Over the past year a parade of executives bearing land claims have made the trek to a stucco BLM office just off the interstate in the dusty city of Needles, Calif., a 110-mile drive south from Las Vegas. (It's the town where the late "Peanuts" cartoonist, Charles M. Schulz, briefly lived as a boy; in the comic strip, Snoopy's brother Spike is a resident.) The Bush administration has instructed the BLM to facilitate renewable-energy projects (along with nonrenewable ones). But Sterling White, the BLM's earnest Needles field manager, is also concerned about what could happen if they transform the Mojave into a collection of giant power stations. "One of our biggest challenges is the cumulative impact of these projects," he says. Nearly 80% of the land that White's office oversees is federally protected wilderness or endangered-species habitat. That leaves about 700,000 acres for solar power plants, only some of which are near transmission lines. Land leases are handed out on a first-come, first-served basis, but White is also supposed to weed out speculators from genuine solar developers based on loose criteria such as who is negotiating with utilities and who is applying for state power licenses. White has yet to approve a single lease, but he has summarily rejected four because they lie in protected-species habitat. *** Solar prospectors tend to be as secretive about their land as forty-niners were about the veins of gold they discovered. Most bids are placed by limited-liability corporations with opaque names that conceal their ownership. And no one has been as quick to move into the Mojave - or as tightlipped about it - as Solar Investments. That entity, it turns out, is Goldman Sachs's (GS, Fortune 500) solar subsidiary. The investment bank's designs on the desert are a topic of intense interest and speculation. Goldman declined to comment. But here's what we know: Solar Investments filed its first land claim in December 2006 and within a month had applied for more than 125,000 acres for power plants that would produce ten gigawatts of electricity. Many of the sites lie close to the transmission lines that connect the desert to coastal cities. (Goldman has also staked claims on 40,000 acres of the Nevada desert.) ** Nobody expects Goldman to begin operating solar plants. It will probably either partner with another developer or sell its limited-liability company (and its leases) outright. The firm has been making the rounds of solar developers. "The conversation's been pretty wide-ranging, primarily as an investor interested in financing deals," says one solar energy executive approached by Goldman. "But there's clearly an element of interest in our technology." Goldman has requested permission to install meteorological equipment on its sites and is evaluating "competing technologies, including solar dish systems, power towers, and large-scale photovoltaic arrays," according to a letter Goldman sent to the BLM in August 2007.
When I read this in Fortune Magazine I almost dropped my Montecristo Zino Classic No. 8 ashes in my Courvoisieur ! -Jon Stewart-
Pickens is just using this plan to divert attention away from his incredibly shady water rights battle in north texas. Google it.
