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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“But a simple Google search finds many detailed studies indicating a very high EROEI of at least 20.”
Windmills built of gold can have a high EROEI, but a low ROI, making them uneconomical for power generation. The advanced materials required to build and maintain windmills, coupled with the problems in load matching yield a poor ROI, as the EU is discovering.
@Charles S. Opalek, PE
Please document your claim that wind turbines EROEI is .29. Most other claims I have heard of place wind’s EROEI between 20 and 80.
He still could sell his windmills to some banana country, of course, after conveniently oiling the gears of some politicians.
Murray Grainger says:
December 25, 2010 at 7:38 am
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind,
The answer is blowin’ in the wind.
‘For the times they are a changing’
Indeed they are and i hope for the better?
Just came by on a very windy day, the Elkhorn wind farm in Telocaset, near North Powder, ok Union, ok La Grande, well, NE Oregon, and before wife and my incredulous
eyes half the farm blades Feathered…
Gee what happens if we really get wind and the lights go out?..
DanddyTroll, I know why someone would like water rights in Texas (I lived there for several years); what I don’t understand is how TBP could justify demanding water rights for wind mill work. That should have been a red flag since the two don’t have a natural connection.
Hmm.. please pardon if this is a duplicate. I thought I posted but it is not showing up.
Someone asked “What happens to Sweetwater Texas now?” (now that the subsidized wind money is going away).
And someone else asked how water rights fit into the picture.
Well, here’s how: you bring in Tenaska to build a
Water-cooled, Coal-Fired power plant of all things.
Coal is mined in East Texas, where there is lots of water, several hundreds of miles away from Sweetwater, which is oil and natural gas country, and dry as a bone. Here’s a map.
So why can’t we have tiny residential wind units that would power individual outlets inside the house? Sort of like the small satellite dishes anchored to our roofs, with their own special “green” outlets that we could plug our toasters and hair dryers into?
If someone can build me one for a couple of hundred dollars, I’ll budget to gradually buy several and even give as gifts.
I talked to somebody the other day who had some wind people trying to lease the wind rights on some mountaintop land he owned in Tennessee. A lot of his neighbors had signed off on it. In reading the fine print, he noticed the lease gave the wind people the right to clear (and sell) as much timber as they deemed necessary to maximize the airflow.
So, what it boils down to is an environmentalist scam to steal other people’s timber and clear cut for profit.
In the U.S., we have chosen to obfuscate the economic facts of both wind and photovoltaic solar by subsidizing the technologies through back-door subsidies such as tax credits, accelerated depreciation and depletion allowances. Europe has chosen to subsidize entirely on the revenue end of the pipe where the subsidy is plain and clear for all to see. The following is their experience concerning the MINIMUM wholesale power rate required to sustain large-scale wind and solar:
Onshore wind ………. 12-cents(U.S.)/kwh
Offshore wind……….. 20-cents/kwh
Photovoltaic solar….. 40-cents/kwh (This number is a theoretical minimum. Spain and Germany have actually had to pay in excess of 58-cents for 25-year contracts in order to attract developers. Spain has now found it necessary to abdicate some of those contracts as a matter of national economic survival.
The above numbers are “at the plant fence” and do not include fixed utility transmission and distribution costs.
Current average wholesale rate for the current U.S. electric power mix at the trading hubs is around 4.3-cents.
Neither wind nor solar can ever achieve competitive viability because their inherently poor energy density yields outlandish capital costs that no amount of projected fuel savings can be expected to offset.
CH
Obama administration is putting the brakes on a lot of the innovations that have led to falling gas prices. Look for gas prices to “necessarily” start going back up.
Not sure if this is redundant, but this is an interesting article that somehow appeared on Huffington Post… leaving some ‘green’ commenters there rather perplexed.
Wind Farm Projects Stalled Over Potential Golden Eagle Slaughter And Other Problems
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/13/ap-enterprise-eagle-conce_n_796096.html
I actually met T. Boone Pickens once upon a time many years ago. He’s always been full of himself. I think he’s nuttier than Stanley Marsh 3. In the late 80s (or possibly as late as 1990) Pickens announced he was moving Mesa Petroleum out of Amarillo. At the time Amarillo had a population of about 160,000. Pickens predicted that without him and Mesa Petroleum that Amarillo would dwindle to a population of less than 100,000 within ten years. A local pharmacist named Jerry Hodge bet Pickens a million dollars that he was wrong. Pickens blinked and gave some lame excuse that he would NEVER bet against Amarillo. Well, today the population of Amarillo is about 200,000 and as far as I know nobody misses T. Boone Pickens.
Al Gored says:
December 25, 2010 at 6:16 pm
Having just visited the Huffington Post Green website for the first time, I have a question. Are these people from the same planet as the rest of us?
old44 says:
December 25, 2010 at 7:00 pm
Yes. But they live in herds. With more points and little badges if you write comments that agree with the herd consensus. It used to be worse, believe it or not. A year ago questioning AGW, or merely using Gore’s name in vain, brought a horde of screaming attacks that would make the worst you see here seem like gentlemanly discussion. Now, despite their relentless biased coverage and spin, and their version of the Climate Thought Police always on guard, there are many more posters asking inconvenient questions and much smaller lynch mobs.
Same trend for their Obama Love.
In any case, Huffpo worth an occasional look to see what they are spinning and what that part of the planet is saying, and once in a while you find an article like the one I posted. How it got published there is beyond me. They prefer Simple Green.
Al Gored says:
December 25, 2010 at 6:16 pm
“Not sure if this is redundant, but this is an interesting article that somehow appeared on Huffington Post… leaving some ‘green’ commenters there rather perplexed.”
I like this comment at HuffPo, suggesting technical workarounds:
“Slower moving blades reduce mortality, radar is used to detect the approach of migrating birds so turbines can be turned off, […]”
That would be fun to watch.
Good riddance!
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Some things never change. Once upon a time a toothy president with a nuclear background promoted nuclear power and Yucca Mtn. federal spending. The sleight of hand on construction and safety costs, captive consumers impact, and long-term storage and disposal costs largely succeeded to a diasterous degree and then the same political party killed Yucca Mtn after its grand expenditure cycle had ended. Similar sleight of hand is used on wind power projects and component costs and replacement or deconstruction. The taxpayers will find out later and there lies the common thread.
How does the calculation work?
Say you have a 2.2 megawatt generator, and say there are 8760 hours in a years; this makes for 19,000 and some megawatt hours per year or about 19 million kilowatt hours per year. Further say that a kilowatt hour wholesales for 2 cents, but your turbine only operates 30% of full capability. This still grosses $133,000 per annum. Your mortgage costs on an $800,000 tower would be something like $60000 per year if you had a 6.5 % loan. Your land rent and real estate taxes would be something like $20,000 (using rents and taxes that I’ve heard of). We are still talking about $50,000 per year per tower to cover insurance and transmission costs.
Remember that the power curves on these turbines are steep because the energy in wind increases as the cube of the wind speed. If your tower starts turning in a 5 mph wind a 10 mph wind has 8 times the power.
I have to think that in the right circumstances these wind turbines are economic.
There HAS to be something wrong with those numbers!
There is no way in this world that they would be getting 66% of plated capacity EVER, let alone if half the turbines were iced up.
They are giving the installed potential output figures, as they always do – to mislead and lie to the public. With the current slack winds in that area, I doubt if they are getting 10% of installed capacity as output.
The whole industry is a fraud, and is being maintained by dreams, wishful thinking, cover-ups and lies.
Oh, and even slight icing on the other blades, will cut theit output bu 30%.
.
Unfortunately for Mr. Pikens, the Ontario content requirements for green energy would eliminate the possibility that he can just sell his unused wind turbines to Ontario.
“On October 1, 2009, The Feed-in-Tariff (FIT) Program was implemented in Ontario, Canada. The program attempts to establish a firmer pricing structure for renewable energy in Ontario. The program covers wind, solar, all water-based energy sources and bio-mass. One aspect of this program is local content requirements for the project expenses involved in wind and solar projects, which are listed in section 1.1 b of the program overview document.
These local content requirements are, from 2009-2011, 25% of costs for wind projects to be local (ie – from Ontario) and 50% of solar projects. From 2012 onward, these restrictions increase to 50% and 60% respectively”
@Ricard Wakefield
You plan to ‘do something’ about about subsidising wind in Ontario has merit. I also like the phrase above, “Split atoms, not birds.” Thorium-flouride. Yes.
I plotted the UK wind power generation data for the last 3 months of 2010 and it show just what a folly wind power is as the best sustainable electricity source. In the UK the government hopes it is going to save us all from frying in the years to come. This morning it wa -10 deg C here.
See the graph at the bottom of this page.
http://www.akk.me.uk/Climate_Change.htm
The median household income in 2008 was $52,026, meaning that for every $1 million the government causes to be wasted, we have set ourselves back by the annual income of about 20 families. Given the massive economic distortions involved in wind power, we have been destroying wealth that should be measured by the town and the county.
And all this wind power equipment has been installed without nary a thought to the cost of decommissioning. In a few years, when government’s ability to sustain this fraud will finally be exhausted, the forests of wind machines in some areas will fall into a state of disrepair, and finally, disuse when the cost of repairs is even found to economically unsustainable. This will be some new insult to add to those endured by those who live close to the humming, whirring machines now. Idle eyesores to remind us of past madness.
The left loves to scold the rest of us on the topic of “sustainability”, yet they happily insist that wind power is a “sustainable” source of power. This is yet one more proof of Margaret Thatcher’s quip that socialism is successful until they run out of other people’s money. Sadly, we can no longer afford to entertain or buy of the left by funding their mad schemes. Indeed, their mad schemes now are a threat to our lives and prosperity. It is time for some tough love. Just say no to socialist madness.
Imagine that, the solutions to a nonexistent problem created by fraud, does not work.
@HankHenry
$800,000 for a 2.2 MW wind mill sounds optimistic. So does a 30% capacity factor. Less than 10% is probably more accurate. Use the correct cost and capacity factor and re-do the calculations.
$800,000 per tower might be in the ballpark for the transmission infrastructure cost.