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T. Boone Pickens' wind farm plan dies out

T. Boone Pickens' wind farm plan dies out

Posted Jul 8th 2009 6:06PM

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T. Boone Pickens has spent $60 million in the last year promoting the "Pickens Plan," an idea for a giant wind farm in Texas. Now, the billionaire oil man is saying he will postpone the project for at lesat a couple of years. The first hints that things weren't going as planned came last November, when PIckens couldn't get a loan to finance the farm. Pickens made the delay official yesterday, blaming the tight financial markets and trouble distributing the energy that was to be generated. The 81-year-old Pickens was valued at $3 billion in 2007.

Today, Pickens' told NPR that people still want renewables and that the wind farm will someday come to fruition. Until then, though, he's still touting natural gas as a replacement for oil and said he would find places to install the 667 wind turbines that he had already ordered for the farm. There's a video report on the cancellation after the jump. Thanks to Yanquetino for the tip!

[Source: CNN]

Category: Emerging Technologies, Natural Gas

Tags: pickens, pickens plan, PickensPlan, t boone, t boone pickens, TBoone, TBoonePickens

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alice_sandidge

Then why is Obama now touting wind for clean energy?

April 06 2011 at 6:26 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

philski

It takes 450 acres to produce the same power one nuclear reactor would make,,A nuke would require an acre,,,you could power boston for 5- 7 years and the waste would fit in a coke can.There is no evidence of man caused global warming ,there is large amounts of evidence that any variation is naturallly caused(solar storms etc)

September 20 2010 at 11:54 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

John

Correct. Wind turbines are only capable of producing 30% of rated capacity. The are not a sound investment or practical for commercial applications to generate power on any scale which is the main reason why the media never provides data on wind farms to the public.
The costs are usually 3-5 times that of conventional requiring constant maintenance and a huge footprint to operate and has always been subsidized by the taxpayer. It sounds "green", but in reality it is a burden to the taxpayer and to the communities who have to deal with it. It just makes no sense to waste that kind of money on something that is totally unreliable and inefficient.

July 13 2009 at 2:43 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Bill

Low capacity factor is still an issue with wind energy, regardless of where the windmills are sited.

It never made sense to build billions of dollars worth of transmission lines from the midwest to the coasts when wind energy has a capacity factor under 30%.

Backup to wind is usually natural gas.

July 11 2009 at 7:42 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Richard

Mr. Pickens is politically conservative and makes no pretense about it. He wants to make money and makes no pretense about that either. He has been extemely successful in business. He made himself rich exploring for oil and gas with his early business, Mesa Petroleum based in Amarillo, TX and then parlayed that into billions with brilliant financial trades in the 1980's. Then he was divorced and for those of you who do not know he was almost broke in the 1990's after oil dropped to $10 a barrel. Despite being almost broke he moved to Dallas and used his business knowledge to start over. Sensing that oil and gas would come back he invested heavily in risky oil and gas futures and made himself a billionaire again. He has given away more money than I can possibly know, but i do know he is one of the largest benefactors of Oklahoma State University, West Texas A&M University and countless other charities all across Oklahoma and Texas. I have seen news articles of him giving over $100 million to various charities. Unlike Madoff or Sanford (real scam artists), Mr. Pickens gives away his own money to charities.

Boone Pickens is a ruthless businessman but he plays by the rules. He and I differ on what those rules should be, but he does earn money legally and gives it away generously. He thinks the Dallas area will someday run out of water and wants to pipe it from the Ogalla reservoir. The wind farm would have been a two-fer. He would have gotten a utility easement for power that could also have been used for water lines. That was frankly, brilliant. Whether or not he should be piping that water is open to debate, but it was a brilliant business idea to satisfy two needs, water and power with the cost of one easement line.

I totally understand the people who disagree with Mr. Picken's politics, I do myself, but he is not a scam artist. He is an astute businessman who hates the idea we are sending billions of dollars a month to finance middle east countries when he knows there is natural gas, cleaner burning and easy to get, right here in the USA. On that, I agree with him and support his efforts to green America. I expect he thinks global warming is bunk, but his opinion on the matter is irrelvant if his efforts are honest and result in a cleaner fuel bought right here.

As to the wind farms, he wants to make money, pure and simple, and do it by reducing middle east oil. Again, motives aside, it is a good idea that I respect.

July 09 2009 at 8:25 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

4 replies to Richard's comment

Max

He is a scam artist, and his plan was no exception.

But like someone pointed out, he's old and has only (statistically) a few years left. I would spend it all on a huge project with a good impact rather than hand it to some 'managing trust'.

July 09 2009 at 12:38 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

BlackbirdHighway

Anyone who could finance the swiftboaters is a despicable scoundrel and should not be trusted.

July 09 2009 at 12:03 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

david burgdorff

He still intends to build hundreds of wind generators. He just needs to find locations that are close to available power line capacity.

July 08 2009 at 9:44 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

FitFan

Damn. I was hoping we'd get something useful out of T. Boone before he dies.

July 08 2009 at 7:49 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

UtahAlumnus

Wind energy has never been effecient or practical. People have no idea the costs involved. He only set this up to be politically correct, but all along new he couldn't make money from it.

As the Global Warming movement peters out, he doens't feel the need to throw away money to prove how much he "cares" about the environment.

July 08 2009 at 7:10 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

5 replies to UtahAlumnus's comment