From Slashdot:
In 2008, billionaire T. Boone Pickens unveiled his ‘Pickens Plan’ on national TV, which calls for America to end its dependence on foreign oil by increasing use of wind power and natural gas. Over the next two years, he spent $80 million on TV commercials and $2 billion on General Electric wind turbines.
Unfortunately market forces were not favorable to Mr. Pickens, and in December 2010 he announced that he is getting out of the wind power business. What does he plan to do with his $2 billion worth of idle wind turbines? He is trying to sell them to Canada, because of Canadian law that mandates consumers to buy more renewable electricity regardless of cost.
On his website he says this about 2011-
We’re not going away. If I’ve learned anything during the many years of my business career it is this: No one has ever accomplished his or her goal by quitting or failing to meet and overcome a challenge. You reach your goal by hitching up your pants and wading back into the fight.
That’s what I’m going to do in 2011. And I know you’ll be with me.
Likely the market forces will have a say.
Here’s a video of his plan in better days-
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Wind Farms – Solar Farms = Long winded but important info.
From my home in Vancouver, Canada. I look at a huge useless Wind turbine on the top of Grouse Mountain Ski resort, it is visible from 15 miles away and hardly ever turns, An expensive nod to green zealots and the madness of global whatever it is today, but it at least has an observation platform on top of the tower so it does have some use!
Not all Wind farms are a disaster and some do produce valid power, but at what cost? They cannot compete without massive public subsidization and guaranteed rate KwH tariffs that in many case are 3 to 4 times or more greater than regular electricity rates. The Maintenance and breakdown frequency is another cost that would not be acceptable in the real world but in the heavily subsidized world of renewable energy projects this is not a problem.
Then there is the huge expense of installing 1000s of miles of transmission lines, that often cost as much as or more than the wind or solar farm it self, Ontario Hydro in Canada or Spain’s renewable power follies are just a few sad examples. They and many other countries are now learning the hard economic facts between green desires and fiscal reality, they have and will find that out the hard way as the cost of power goes through the roof, the cost to the economy in jobs as businesses move out, you have to produce a product or service at a competitive rate or you wont survive. Example: jobs going to China, India and anywhere it can be done cheaper, energy cost are a very important component and can make or break a business or family budget! Never mind the fact that people worldwide need to heat their homes and carry on working to keep the economy running, this effort is becoming harder thanks to energy cost, we have and will become a lot poorer because of these bad political green at any cost decisions.
Here is the folly of wind power and solar, Thousands of abandoned wind turbines littered the landscape left to rot and blight on the landscape
Abandoned Wind Farms & Solar Farms
There are lots of abandoned energy projects both hydroelectric dams large and small. – BUT the following Wind farms and Solar power projects are inexcusable blights on the environment and were sold and promoted with such grand promises, at tremendous expense, never mind the energy and CO2 produced to manufacture them – Does this sound familiar, just change the dates from then to now = it’s the same scam and you pay for it over and over again!
Here are just a few shocking examples
See: Tehachapi Wind Farms – Southern California, USA. There are dozens of wind farms scattered around the Western rim of the Mojave Desert near Tehachapi pass. There are over 5,000 wind turbines in the area thanks to the wind rush of the 1970s and 1980s.
Many companies have come and gone, been bought, or gone belly-up. Some of the hundreds of turbines not spinning have been derelict now for decades. There is no law in Kern County that requires removal of broken or abandoned wind turbines, and as a result, the Tehachapi Pass area is an strange mix of healthy, active wind farms and a wind turbine graveyard/junkyard.
See: Kamaoa Wind Farm – South Point, Hawaii, USA. Built in 1986, the Kamaoa wind farm at South Point on the southern tip of the island of Hawaii stopped producing energy for the Big Island’s grid in the last ten years. The 37 battered and beaten Mitsubishi 250 kw turbines essentially went dormant and were recently replaced by fourteen newly 1.5 mw at the Pakini Nui wind farm heavily subsidized of coarse!
Five other abandoned wind sites dot the Hawaiian Isles — but it is in California where the impact of past mandates and subsidies is felt most strongly. Thousands of abandoned wind turbines littered the landscape of wind energy’s California “big three” locations — Altamont Pass, Tehachapi, and San Gorgonio — considered among the world’s best wind sites.
See: Tehachapi Gorge and the Air-tricity deserted Wind Source site. With 100s of abandoned defunct derelict turbines, a rusting disgusting mess.
See: Altamont Pass – Central California, USA. Home to one of the oldest wind farms in the U.S. Altamont Pass is still the largest concentration of wind turbines in the world. Unfortunately, wind turbines at Altamont Pass killed more birds of prey than any other wind farm in North America. The site is located on a major bird migratory route and there are large concentrations of raptors in this area including the largest population of breeding golden eagles in the world.
See: Solar One/Solar Two – Daggett, California, USA the destruction of the Desert and now a huge, abandoned disgusting mess that will never be cleaned up!
See: Carrizo Plain Solar Power Plant – Southern, California, USA. More destruction of the Desert and another huge abandoned disgusting solar panel junk pile!
See: http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/02/wind_energys_ghosts_1.html
Haven’t been able to find the power being produced but there is this set of facts about the Wild Horse wind farm near Ellensburg, WA.
http://www.pse.com/energyEnvironment/energysupply/pages/EnergySupply_ElectricityWind.aspx?tab=3&chapter=5
One item is concrete: Each tower foundation reaches a minimum depth of 25 ft and a maximum of 32 ft depending on bedrock depth and takes an average of 100 to 260 cubic yards of concrete.
Wind Farms – Solar Farms
From my home in Vancouver, Canada. I look at a huge useless Wind turbine on the top of Grouse Mountain Ski resort it hardly ever turns, An expensive nod to green zealots and the madness of global whatever it is today, but it at least has an observation platform on top of the tower so it does have some use!
Not all Wind farms are a disaster and some do produce valid power, but at what cost? They cannot compete without massive public Subsidization and guaranteed rate KwH tariffs that in many case are 3 times or more greater than regular electricity rates. The Maintenance and breakdown frequency is another cost that would not be acceptable in the real world but is in the heavily subsidized world of renewable energy projects.
Then there is the huge expense of installing 1000s of miles of transmission lines, that often cost as much as or more than the wind or solar farm it self, Ontario Hydro in Canada or Spain s renewable power follies are just a few sad examples. They and many other countries are now learning the hard economic facts between green desires and fiscal reality, they have and will find that out the hard way as the cost of power goes through the roof, the cost to the economy in jobs as businesses move out you have to produce a product or service at a competitive rate or you wont survive. Example: jobs going to China, India and anywhere it can be done cheaper, energy cost is a very important price component! Never mind the fact that people worldwide need to heat their homes and carry on working to keep the economy running, this effort is becoming harder thanks to energy cost, we have and will become a lot poorer because of these bad political green at any cost decisions.
Here is the folly of wind power and solar, Thousands of abandoned wind turbines littered the landscape left to rot and blight on the landscape
Abandoned Wind Farms & Solar Farms
There are lots of abandoned energy projects both hydroelectric dams large and small. – BUT the following Wind farms and Solar power projects are inexcusable blights on the environment and were sold and promoted with such grand promises, at tremendous expense, never mind the energy and CO2 produced to manufacture them – Does this sound familiar, just change the dates from then to now = it’s the same scam and you pay for it over and over again!
Here are just a few shocking examples
See: Tehachapi Wind Farms – Southern California, USA. There are dozens of wind farms scattered around the Western rim of the Mojave Desert near Tehachapi pass. There are over 5,000 wind turbines in the area thanks to the wind rush of the 1970s and 1980s.
Many companies have come and gone, been bought, or gone belly-up. Some of the hundreds of turbines not spinning have been derelict now for decades. There is no law in Kern County that requires removal of broken or abandoned wind turbines, and as a result, the Tehachapi Pass area is an strange mix of healthy, active wind farms and a wind turbine graveyard/junkyard.
See: Kamaoa Wind Farm – South Point, Hawaii, USA. Built in 1986, the Kamaoa wind farm at South Point on the southern tip of the island of Hawaii stopped producing energy for the Big Island’s grid in the last ten years. The 37 battered and beaten Mitsubishi 250 kw turbines essentially went dormant and were recently replaced by fourteen newly 1.5 mw at the Pakini Nui wind farm heavily subsidized of coarse!
Five other abandoned wind sites dot the Hawaiian Isles — but it is in California where the impact of past mandates and subsidies is felt most strongly. Thousands of abandoned wind turbines littered the landscape of wind energy’s California “big three” locations — Altamont Pass, Tehachapi, and San Gorgonio — considered among the world’s best wind sites.
See: Tehachapi Gorge and the Air-tricity deserted Wind Source site. With 100s of abandoned defunct derelict turbines, a rusting disgusting mess.
See: Altamont Pass – Central California, USA. Home to one of the oldest wind farms in the U.S. Altamont Pass is still the largest concentration of wind turbines in the world. Unfortunately, wind turbines at Altamont Pass killed more birds of prey than any other wind farm in North America. The site is located on a major bird migratory route and there are large concentrations of raptors in this area including the largest population of breeding golden eagles in the world.
See: Solar One/Solar Two – Daggett, California, USA the destruction of the Desert and now a huge, abandoned disgusting mess that will never be cleaned up!
See: Carrizo Plain Solar Power Plant – Southern, California, USA. More destruction of the Desert and another huge abandoned disgusting solar panel junk pile!
See: http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/02/wind_energys_ghosts_1.html
The official sources seem unanimous that those are the right numbers; I’ve emailed John Droz, Jr., windpower debunker extraordinaire, for his comments. Will update when he replies!
Baa Humbug says: “What happens to those massive concrete slabs embedded in the ground when the turbines are taken away?”
Unless the owners’ attorneys made an unbelievable screw-up, the land contract would require all foundations and equipment to be removed when the project is canceled. It is possible that the water rights were handled in a separate contract.
Mike says:
December 25, 2010 at 9:12 am
So, it was not market forces but government bureaucracy [“the approvals fell through”] that caused Pickens to back off for now. I would think WUWT readers would be appalled and press the government to give Pickens the green light for his enterprise.
So, Mike, you think gov’t approval or regulatory processes wouldn’t or shouldn’t have anything to do with “market forces”, such as the multiple market negatives involving and manifested by the abject failure of wind power in Europe, which also should have been easily predicted from a few wind power basics, but weren’t in the European approval process?
Imo, what is “appalling” is instead the progressive, green thought process, which automatically pursues goals unquestioningly and neurotically as mere fetishes – such as “wind power” and “national health insurance”, “equality” and “justice”,etc., which are fed to the useful throngs by their charismatic leaders as simple, rather undefined memes, but allegedly good in themselves as is – yet nearly totally without regard to what the fetishes actually mean/do in practice here in the real world, which the gov’t permit or regulation process should take account of since it is not supposed to pursue these destructive fetishes – note, in stark contrast to what the EPA is still doing as we speak, that is, without any consideration of the fact that its alleged cure to its alleged Global Warming disease is obviously much worse than its alleged disease.
George says:
December 25, 2010 at 11:03 am
I call windmills ‘copper on a stick’. They are a huge waste of resources placed up on the end of a stick. You buy resources (copper, rare earth metals etc) for, say, 3MW of electricity and at best you only ever get 1MW. Two-thirds to three-quarters of the reources up on that stick are just wasted.
And the greens call this ‘sustainable’. Yeah, right.
I’m confused about the first entry posted here. It claims wind turbines have an Energy Returned on Energy Invested of 0.29. I agree that EROEI is a very good metric for determining the worth of any energy generation installation. If it’s less than 1, then such an installation would be an energy sink, not a source. This comment, if true, would be very confusing in a world where private businesses are ramping up production of wind generators.
But a simple Google search finds many detailed studies indicating a very high EROEI of at least 20:
http://www.eoearth.org/article/Energy_return_on_investment_(EROI)_for_wind_energy
These measurements, based on 60 existing installations, indicate that wind power has perhaps the highest EROEI of all types of energy generation installations. There are plenty of problems with wind generation, but complaining about energy return is way off base.
live webcams offshore
current wind speed below 7 m/s
http://fino-offshore.de/plattformen/content.html
Last week when it was very cold, coal generation provided 47% of UK power and wind provided 0.1% – it may be providing 1.0% currently but that represents a max of 420MW against a total capacity of 2430 MW. Coal is providing 40.6% or 16078 MW.
The daily figures can be found on:
http://www.bmreports.com/bsp/bsp_home.htm .
and the stats are fascinating.
sorry – should have said these are figures for the UK.
T Boone was all about the subsidies that would have guaranteed him a 50% or better profit margin. Since the election the new congress will be in a less giving mood (lest they be hanged) So T Boone exits this particular stage for now.
Picking on Pickens. He bought many millions of dollars of insurance to use proceeds to fund OSU sports. I guess he found out the insurance company ripped him off. Soo sorry.
To the point, I would build windmills with other people money.
Not my own.
1DandyTroll says:
December 25, 2010 at 11:56 am
I’m sorry if you were being rhetorical, but the water, or the water rights if you will, are as financially lucrative, or more so in some places even apparently, than the actual gas.
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The water rights are going to make him more money than those windmills ever would. He knew that when he started this scam……
Another instance of real tech progress (shale gas) making a victim out of someone’s uneconomic ideas.
I’m not saying wind and solar can’t compete with natural gas but given the quantity of natural gas now available and its proximity to the population centers that will need it they will need more than a few percentage improvements. They will need an order of magnitude better.
I honestly think it can be done but we as a society need to keep in mind that we have to be honest with ourselves about which option is most cost effective. Heck even coal may have problems competing with natural gas!
As to where to put the turbines might I suggest a location or two that are just about permanently windy and could heat things up with the wind like the Kerguelen and Aleutian islands. Keep all the extras for spare parts.
Maybe some day we’ll figure out how to store massive amounts of electricity or hydrogen cheaply and then they can sell the excess.
No time to read all the comments so this might be redundant, but…
About a month ago the BBC’s idiot environmental correspondent David Shukman did a marvellously dishonest piece extolling the virtues of wind power – he managed to cover this topic without mentioning government subsidies – and he used Pickens’s ‘good works’ as one of his prime examples.
Perfect.
Wind generated power also challenges the reliability of the grid. Here’s a presentation by the California ISO:
http://www.caiso.com/docs/2005/03/22/2005032215420815213.pdf
Some issues–
Wind generation varies widely over the day. Page 9 in the above shows a drop in wind generation of a 1000 MW in about 7 hours. Spinning reserves usually pick up the load when this happens. Later in the same day there’s a ramp-up of 800 MW over 6 hours.
Page 10–combine cycle power generation is designed to handle base loads, cutting back on this generation drops the units into less efficient operation–more CO2 per MW produced. If non-operating units have to be brought online to cover the drop in wind generation the costs are very high.
Wind generation is often out of phase with load (page 13). When it is hot it is generally not windy. It is usually not windy during the peak load in the middle of the day.
This presentation is from 2005. I assume improvements in integration have been made, but the fundamental issues remain: we can’t control when it is windy, for every MW of wind you need a MW of conventional, ramping conventional generation up and down reduces efficiency. Demand response, AKA virtual power plants, can play role; pay people or industries to stop using electricity when generation falls off. Economics of demand response got to be interesting.
>One item is concrete: Each tower foundation reaches a minimum depth of 25 ft and a maximum of 32 ft depending on bedrock depth and takes an average of 100 to 260 cubic yards of concrete.
Google says there is 3,000 lbs of concrete in one cubic yard, so that is about 600,000 pounds of concrete for each wind tower. I live in the Northeast and two of our states that are heavily pushing windpower are Maine and Vermont. Both of these states have a history of fiercely protecting their natural heritage, now they are fiercely promoting constructing thousands of these monsters on their ridge lines.
Erik Ramberg says:
December 25, 2010 at 12:49 pm
“If it’s less than 1, then such an installation would be an energy sink, not a source. This comment, if true, would be very confusing in a world where private businesses are ramping up production of wind generators.”
While i don’t know an objective number for the EROEI of wind turbines, your confusion can easily be clarified: For businesses, EROEI is not important; for them it’s all about simple ROI.
Wind power is a fraud. Last summer Texas set a record for electrical power usage on August 4 and then broke that record again on August 10. The west Texas wind turbines were setting idle on calm hot days when they were needed the most. Meanwhile the State of Texas has funded 4.93 billion dollars for electrical transmissions lines to bring wind farm power (that produce little power on hot summer days) to the larger cities. Since Texas is in the business of wasting the citizens money why don’t they do something with 4.93 billion that will save energy, like replacing 950,000 inefficient air conditioning systems with ones that will immediately put a damper on the August power consumption in Texas. I replaced my 10 SEER system with a 16 SEER heat pump and am saving an average of 450 kwh per month.
T. Boone Pickens, got lost in the wilderness chasing the wind, and returns with a plan to pass gas.
Will the taxpayer light his fire, again??
polistra has it right. T. Boone was counting on a growing shortage of natural gas, and the attendant price increase in natural gas. That did not happen, as is well-documented. Shale gas is the innovation that killed wind-power. More specifically, the drilling technology (read: innovation by some clever guys) that allows for pinpoint-accuracy and horizontal drilling into beds of shale that contain natural gas.
Wind power does indeed “back out” natural gas from power plants. Therefore, if natural gas were to increase in price, then wind-power would be more valuable. Only when natural gas price rises in the future, if it ever rises, will wind-power be economic on its own merits.
T. Boone is first and foremost a natural gas man. He has seen the future, and it is cheap, abundant natural gas. In 2008, wellhead (USA) price was $10 and $11 per million Btu for natural gas. Today, in the dead of winter, a very cold winter, the price is right at $4.
Now, if only the greeny-weenies could accomplish a major innovation for their favored technologies, such as the oil and gas men have done for producing natural gas from shale. Don’t hold your breath, folks.
Erik Ramberg says:
December 25, 2010 at 12:49 pm
“These measurements, based on 60 existing installations, indicate that wind power has perhaps the highest EROEI of all types of energy generation installations. ”
I notice these folks claim nuclear is at best 5:1. Something smells here.
Over to you Charles Opalek. I bought your book on line.
It’s too bad that there isn’t a way to direct wind/solar electric energy to those that insist that those are the only ways to save the planet. Let them then figure out how to run a civilization with adequate power available only 5% of the time. No backup sources allowed! I think the tune would change very quickly.