Oil Billionaire Building World's Largest Wind Farm 661
gadzook33 writes "CNN is reporting that oil billionaire T. Boone Pickens is planning to invest billions of dollars in what will probably be the world's largest wind farm. It will eventually generate 4 gigawatts, enough to power 1.3 million homes. The first 600 GE wind turbines are scheduled for delivery in 2010. Pickens says that each turbine will generate about $20,000 in income annually for the landowner who hosts it."
Re:Who is responsible for maintenance? (Score:3, Informative)
On a side note, every time I see Boon Pickens, I think of a Michael McKean/Norm McDonald SNL sketch where they were Vincent Price and Slim Pickens, and Norm kept saying Sliiiiiimmmm Pickens. I always think to myself Boooooooooooon Pickens in the voice that Norm was using in the sketch.
Re:In other news (Score:4, Informative)
Pickens made his initial big money in oil and is still heavily invested in it.
Re:Who is responsible for maintenance? (Score:5, Informative)
This PDF [spiegel.de] contains some scary pictures. And there is nothing you can do if the turbine catches fire. It is to high up to put it out. Don't get me wrong I like wind energy but if these things are conventionally designed each one of them will be a bush fire waiting to happen.
Re:just a few thoughts on clena energy (Score:5, Informative)
Wait, so you think that developers are building these without incentives and that's a bad thing? Sadly, wind still does need incentives -- and gets it in the U.S. -- but the whole idea is for incentives to jump start the technology to where it becomes competitive without the incentives.
And these turbines, at least, aren't really gobbling land -- a lot of them get placed on ranch land, so it's essentially multi-use.
Pickens is not a good guy (Score:5, Informative)
FWIW, these two projects (the wind farm and the water system) are really the same [texaskaos.com]
Re:In other news (Score:4, Informative)
All in all, it seems like some people are trying to be realistic about this whole energy thing. Maybe. If we're lucky.
Some notes (Score:5, Informative)
I totally support wind energy and think the turbines have done good for the community.
They make noise. Even at 1/2 mile away, low whooshing sounds are clearly audible, especially at 4AM.
They are HUGE. Pictures don't do it justice. By the time your next to one, it's an awesome site.
The community here gets jobs and money from them. The government pays 1.8 cents per kilowatt hour for wind energy, netting the community here $150,000 a year. Also Florida Power and Electric pays about 12 employees here to service them. I've known a few that have worked on the turbines, they have some amazing pictures of being on top.
They significantly interfere with off-air television. I work for the cable company, and we had to build a giant antenna in another site because our first giant antenna was to close to the windmills. Local houses have trouble getting off-air signals, digital HD included.
They are a tourist attraction. The first few years they existed here, many people tried to sneak onto the private land to snap pictures etc..
An Oil Billionaire building a wind farm? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Footprint? (Score:3, Informative)
I've heard numbers like 1,500 - 1,800 foot radius being a minimum recommended spacing for this size turbine (the GE 1.65MW turbines which my utility is currently constructing 100 or so in my state). That would work out to about 162 acres per turbine. Of this, about a 30 foot circle is all that is taken out of use for the actual turbine. Disclaimer: No hard references on this, just my personal observations.
Re:Wow! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:They are industrially designed (Score:2, Informative)
Also, while a nuke plant might "break", new core designs are *theoretically* impossible to meltdown because the reaction isn't enough to maintain itself without assistance.
Re:just a few thoughts on clena energy (Score:5, Informative)
This is so utterly wrong it's funny. You OBVIOUSLY don't live anywhere near California. Try driving from Los Angeles to Las Vegas some time... Note the 3+ hours of driving (at 70MPH) through COMPLETELY VACANT FRICKIN' DESERT.
Land in Los Angeles county is ridiculously expensive. Land in immediately surrounding counties in the basin is fairly expensive also, but low enough that there are lots of farms, and the like, located there. As soon as you get out of the LA Basin, however (cross over the San Bernardino mountains) there are many, many thousands of square miles of utterly empty desert land...
That's why Sterling Systems/Southern California Edison is building a 7 square mile solar power facility north of Victorville. That's why there's a half dozen new state and federal prisons there, that's why there's one of the longest airport runways in the world located there. That's why Chinese airports are actually contracting to have maintenance on their jets done in Southern California. That's why BNSF railroad is building an absolutely gigantic intermodal facility there, adjacent to the airport. That's why the Army's National Training Center is located nearby, with 1000 square miles (2590 km) at Ft Irwin, not to mention NASA/JPL's North American Deep Space Network (DSN) facilities. There is an unimaginably huge amount of empty, dirt-cheap land in Southern California. Not only would dedicating hundreds of acres to wind farms be trivial... Dedicating THOUSANDS of square MILES of Southern California desert land to wind farms would go completely unnoticed by the public (the Bureau of Land Management might have a little something to say about it, though).
What's more, though, wind turbines are NOT like solar power plants. Wind turbines need as much space between them as can be practical done. In other words, you can have a few wind turbines across a farm, and continue to use the area as a farm, minus a small area that the base of the turbine takes up... It's not like the US is lacking in farm-land. In fact, most farmers LOVE wind turbines... Manufacturers just can't make them quickly enough.
Re:Some notes (Score:3, Informative)
For the record, I support fission power as well. But that's betting against the future. Besides killing migratory birds, there's no permanent harm done with wind power. With nuclear, we have Yucca Mountain. [wikipedia.org]
Re:Question? (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/housing/ahs/ahsfaq.html [census.gov]
Re:Who is responsible for maintenance? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Don't bring up "killing birds" (Score:3, Informative)
Let me harp on some recurring themes (Score:3, Informative)
1) Land area. What will the impact be on farmable land? Probably far less than strip mining or oil and gas. Strip mines in my part of the world are huge. And while they are operating the land can not be used and they require a huge support infrastructure. I have also seen heavily developed oil and gas fields. These too have enormous impacts on agriculture and wildlife due to the large amount of infrastructure they need (roads, compressor stations, pipelines, electrical plants etc.). Since most wind farms are far above ground they are often far less intrusive.
2) Related to the above, environmental impacts. Instead of beating a dead horse, see the point above.
3) Why can't wind power make it without huge subsidies? Why can't the free market solve the problem? Because it is not a free market. You have the Bush/Cheney energy "plan" shoveling subsidies to oil and gas companies, this distorts the market. But even if you removed the subsidies you wouldn't have a free market since a large chunk of the world's oil supply is controlled by a corrupt cartel called OPEC. When one group can manipulate supply and demand like OPEC can, free market principles cannot operate at all. It is a horrible situation, but the only way to level the the playing field for alternative energy sources is via subsidies.
Anyway, HTH.
Re:In other news (Score:3, Informative)
Re:In other news (Score:5, Informative)
National Geographic had a program which described how the latest skyscrapers in New York were being designed to save on energy by using rainwater.
Although, they were saying that every skyscraper increased the surface area of the city due to the vertical walls, but failed to mention the shadow created by the building.
Re:Who is responsible for maintenance? (Score:3, Informative)
1) Moron tosses cigarette out of truck, starts brush fire
2) Moron tries to burn something outside in high winds, starts brush fire
3) Lightning
4) Wind generator suffers unexpected, catastrophic failure and does what you see here
Sorry, I live in Colorado, and I've learned that when it comes to wildfires, always bet on morons. Lightning comes in a close second.
Re:1st Law of Thermodynamics (Score:3, Informative)
Why can't you? We are used to not storing electricity, but places already have systems in place to store energy, whether high altitude water storage for peak-time hydro, flywheels, high-temperature sodium solar that generates electricity after sundown, or other storage methods. To say it can't be done is an incorrect oversimplification of the situation.
Re:In other news (Score:2, Informative)
Indeed? Based on what?
It seems that figuring out what gas prices ought to be involves figuring out how much it costs, ultimately, to give you that gas. That might include:
Extraction, transport, and refining costs. However, note that the current production system is borrowing heavily against the future. For example, ultimately, extraction that does not take into account replenishment of the supply is tantamount to living off the savings in your bank account, rather than living off the interest. And no, so far biofuels are turning into a worse disaster than oil.
Furthermore, who should bear the cost of cleaning up the mess made by extraction, transportation, and burning? Who pays for the cleanup of oil spills? Who pays to repair the damage done by global warming? Who pays the healthcare costs incurred by those who are injured or killed by breathing my toxic exhaust? There is no question that while catalytic converters help enormously with some pollutants, burning hydrocarbons releases toxins and carcinogens, and the cost of making sure that those have no ill effects is a very real part of the cost of the fuel.
On top of that, it does not seem unreasonable to include a "sin tax"---cars cause enormous harm even outside their role as fossil-fuel burners. They are large, and the eternal creation of parking spots (which often cost more than the cars they serve) leads to urban sprawl, among other things. They are fast-moving and heavy, leading to many hundreds of thousands of deaths per year. They are loud---when was the last time you heard silence? A "sin tax" is not part of the true cost of fuel, but a disincentive to car use would not be unreasonable.
Of course, if you include cleanup costs in the price of gasoline, a sin tax would probably be unnecessary.
Re:In other news (Score:1, Informative)
Actually, the accident rate for cyclists on roads is about 7 times lower than that on sidewalks.
Re:In other news (Score:3, Informative)
I even have a video of such incidents, watch this one here: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3995379778782687414&hl=en [google.com] and fast forward it to 7 minutes 20 seconds. I'm doing the speed limit "in the bike lane" and someone (black truck) still cut me off while both of us were going very fast. It's a good thing that bicycles can stop way better than vehicles, but still, it's just another example of no respect.
Speed can be an issue, but as a avid cyclist, respect is the real issue all cyclist encounter way more times than the speed issue.
Re:just a few thoughts on clena energy (Score:3, Informative)
Re:In other news (Score:1, Informative)
Many of our office buildings have some sort of shower facilities though, that is definitely a necessity.
Re:In other news (Score:3, Informative)
Fortunately Colorado was a lot more positive towards bikes.
Re:In other news (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Idiocy (Score:3, Informative)
Things like air and groundwater can't be sliced up into pieces and parceled out to different owners. That's not some hippie ideology, it's a physical fact (unless we develop the technology to prevent air and water from crossing property lines).
So, if a capitalist dumps poison in the groundwater used by all his neighbors because he's too lazy to clean up after himself, is he not infringing their rights? Shouldn't they be able to collectively (i.e. by petitioning the government to pass laws) decide to stop him?
Re:In other news (Score:3, Informative)
We all have limits. If I tried to sprint for an hour I'd end up exhausted too. But picking a pace that you can sustain should be a pretty simple skill compared to those that most slashdotters have learned.
Re:Idiocy (Score:3, Informative)