Pickens Wind-Power Plan Comes To a Whimpering End 346
Spy Handler writes "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."
The real plan (Score:5, Interesting)
Pickens real plan wasn't wind energy - it was water. He wanted the government to grant him free land for the power lines that would be required to get the power back to where it would be used (cities). The land he was trying to get was going to also be used for water transport pipelines, which is going to be a huge moneymaker in this century - particularly in the south and west. Pickens doesn't give a crap about wind energy, I'm glad he was defeated.
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The emulation of the railroads in being granted huge rights-of-way would have been extremely lucrative and in the robber baron tradition.
Such folk built vital infrastructure we would not otherwise have, but lack of water will be a useful constraint on growth.
We don't need growth everywhere.
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The emulation of the railroads in being granted huge rights-of-way would have been extremely lucrative and in the robber baron tradition.
FWIW In Texas, oil drilling is regulated by the Railroad Comission.
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I am not conceding that there really are that much in the way of government subsidies for automobiles, but even if there is, the government subsidies occurred after the economic success of the automobile. The
Eminent Domain Wins Again (Score:2)
So if Pickens buys water and his water actually becomes critical at some point, eminent domain will work, for once, as it was intended: the government will take the damn water and the public will at least be dealing with a regulated monopoly. Politicians can be bought in the short term, but an entire starving (thirsting) populace tends to destabilize the best of plans.
Green power (Score:2)
Green/clean/renewable/buzzword power is a funny market, I've seen them try something similar here. Basically what happens is that the current pool of power is already a mix with some parts good and bad. All the special offers do is take part of it and charge a premium for it, while the normal power becomes "dirtier". The overall production mix remains the same, the people willing to pay feelgood money are too few to actually increase demand. That and the environmentalists usually are also opposed to the lar
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So here it is: We can make clean oil alternatives from Algae, less clean from coal; but the cost is ~$70 a barrel. $70 is high, but we've been there before, and we can manage, we stop selling SUV and start buying Hybrids for example; but the economy doesn't crash etc. So when Oil gets to and stays > $70. alternatives will comes in.
The fear is that it will spike; but this fear is largely unfounded, because in order for oil to be unaffordable in the US, it would also be unaffordable everywhere else - redu
What Canadian law is that? (Score:5, Informative)
I'm in Canada. There are several provincial efforts to specify a certain percentage of renewable power by a particular date (e.g., 25% of power from renewable sources by 2015), and/or the ability for customers to voluntarily pay more if they want to buy renewable power -- as in, pay an extra few percent on your power bill and the power company guarantees that all that money will be invested in renewable power production (e.g., wind turbines). The laws don't say "regardless of cost", and don't specify doing it by wind turbines. They usually say "achieve this benchmark for renewable power by this date". The power companies are free to achieve that goal however they want, including importing power from elsewhere (e.g., Nova Scotia recently made a deal for a new hydroelectric power project in Labrador). It *may* cost more money, or maybe not. Depending upon how high the price of oil or other fossil fuels go in the next few years, it might not actually be more expensive in the long run. Realistically, it probably will be in the short term, but I think of it as "achieve this renewable energy target the cheapest way the market can figure out", not "regardless of cost".
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Pickens wants water (Score:4, Interesting)
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I fail to see a problem here. Electricity is generally considered to be a necessary staple of living in the US, yet we pay people to generate and deliver it to us. Why should water, with appropriate regulation in place, not be privatized?
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Why should water, with appropriate regulation in place, not be privatized?
A better question would be, what do ratepayers have to gain by allowing water to be sold to them by a regulated monopoly--with all the adminstrative overhead and bureaucracy that entails--rather than simply having the government own the water system outright?
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The problem is that he's developed a network that taps into the Ogallala Aquaifer. The Ogallala is an aquifer that's been over-tapped before Pickens arrived on the scene and with his newly acquired water rights, looks to be drained completely making Pickens richer than he already is and leav
Re:Pickens wants water (Score:4, Insightful)
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On the other hand, maybe it will force the cities to be more self-reliant when it comes to water. Currently, water is wasted and few cities want to recover waste water because of the 'yuck' factor; yet, the water from those recovery facilities is just as clean as from anywhere else. It's the cities' problem, let them solve it without sucking aquifers dry.
He didn't pull out just for market concerns (Score:5, Informative)
Pickens placed a $1.5 billion wind turbine order from GE. But the problem: transporting the energy from West Texas to the rest of the state. Pickens planned to build his own transmission, but the approvals fell through, says economist Mike Giberson at Texas Tech.
This isn't an issue of relative energy cost. This is an issue of not being given permission to build the basic infrastructure he needed for his system to work.
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Anyone seen any reports on what approvals those were and on what grounds were they denied? Two minutes on Google didn't come up with anything useful.
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Part of the issue was that he also wanted to move water on the same throughfares, believing that water was going to be a bigger commodity than electricity. He needed both to make it uberprofitable, he ended up getting none.
While I question his motives in much of this, I do think that he is right in that we should be investing money in electrical infrastructure and wind power. Once more electric cars hit the market, we are going to hit a wall that will raise rates astronomically, and of course, make gasoli
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I can see how moving water might make it more complex approval process, as that probably requires permissions from different regulators, but hopefully that wasn't the reason the project was denied permissions. I mean, if you're building infrastructure, doesn't it make sense to build as much of it as you can on the same area of land?
Re:He didn't pull out just for market concerns (Score:5, Insightful)
It wasn't the moving water that was complex.
It was the fact he wanted water rights, aka, to pump water from the ground. From dry areas. That are already at the very fringe of not having enough water. And he wanted to take that water and sell it to the cities, the exact same cities that are currently fighting with water rights over the same areas.
The regulators, quite sanely, said 'Uh, no'.
Re:He didn't pull out just for market concerns (Score:5, Informative)
Refusing extortion seems like a good idea. Even if the power would have been nice, giving away billions in subsidies to a billionaire extortionist doesn't sound like a good thing for the people.
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The stimulus package included many billions of dollars specifically marked for upgrading the grid. While this may seem like no big deal, I'm told that it's one of the biggest single investments in the grid (especially R&D) in decades. And there would have been more except that the funds had to be spent immediately and thus many non-shovel-ready projects were left out. We could do a lot more with a second stimulus package. Unfortunately, as your post illustrates, people are so misinformed about the pack
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That is a real shame - plain and simple. I might have hoped a less distracted President might have made green energy more of a priority.
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Right of ways and land use permissions are part of the process of quantifying how well something works economically. Such things are used regularly in arguing against some forms of mining/energy production. Yet, here it's not taken as being relevant to the economics of the venture.
Nice to be able to pick and choose. This is sorta like loading the whole defense budget of the US on nuclear or oil as a subsidy when arguing against them.
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Pickens is an Oil Cartel, Texas and Texans know how these guys think, would you want your electricity and water coming from an Enron?
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would you want your electricity and water coming from an Enron?
It happened to me with electricity in San Jose. Sure, my utility PG&E went bankrupt, but I did quite well with cheap electricity.
Solving the wrong problem (Score:3)
The failure of T. Boone Pickens has nothing to do with "market forces". It has to do with trying to solve the wrong problem. Or not even understanding what the problem is in the first place. Just because you're rich doesn't mean you know what you're talking about.
I keep hearing the phrase "reduce our dependence on foreign oil" associated with things like wind turbines and nuclear power. Maybe somebody should do a little research and discover that 1% of the electricity in the U.S. is generated using oil as fuel. Unless you're planning on cars, trucks, buses and trains powered by wind turbines or nuclear reactors, how exactly does this "reduce our dependence on foreign oil"?
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That would be part II of his plan -- replace natural gas power generation capacity with wind, and use the saved natural gas to replace oil as a transportation fuel. 1 gallon of saved compressed natural gas is 1 gallon of fuel for a vehicle. It was fairly sane in that respect, I just don't think CNG stands a chance of taking off in the US. It's extremely hard to transition to a new transportation fuel due to the well modeled chicken/egg problems with fueling stations. And if we're going to try to transition
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1 cargo ship = 50 million cars (Score:2)
I am no expert but I wonder if the majority air/water pollution is coming from automobiles, trucks, and buses.
Nope, cargo ships. Each one pollutes like 50 million cars [greencarreports.com].
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I would think there's lots of replacements for CNG. Methane? You have to spend energy compressing it but you can get it for free from shit.
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Compressing NG isn't that big of a deal, Our public transit buses run on CNG and they compress their own at the bus park; and it's not much more complicated to dual fuel personal vehicles. Farmers often supplement their diesel fuel in equipment with propane to get more horsepower out of it for heavy work. CNG handles about the same as propane and there are plenty of propane refillers, most rural areas heat with propane so there is a lot more infrastructure and experience than you'd imagine.
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Pickens's idea was as follows:
1) while 1% of our electricity is from oil, about 25% is from gas.
2) Replace that 25% with wind.
3) Take the gas freed up and use it to power vehicles.
Result: Reduction of foreign oil.
Now, the problems with that plan were:
1) Wind is variable, and therefor cannot be used to replace base load generation, which is where much of the gas is used.
2) Wind power needs land. The land that has good wind is NOT where people need power, so you need to build transmission lines to move the po
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Pickens's idea was as follows: 1) while 1% of our electricity is from oil, about 25% is from gas. 2) Replace that 25% with wind. 3) Take the gas freed up and use it to power vehicles. Result: Reduction of foreign oil.
Now, the problems with that plan were:
That is still flawed logic. Again, I am not expert but my guess is that you might free up enough oil to last two days at present U.S. consumption. With the rate at which automobiles increase on the road every year, any short term benefit realized is quickly negated.
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You are quite correct, but you're misunderstanding the error. People know that a significant portion of our electric generation is from natural gas (24%) [doe.gov], and they know that the majority of the world's reserves are in the Middle East [naturalgas.org]. What you need to correct them on is the reasonable (but false) assumption that what portion of our supply we import comes from there and not Canada [doe.gov].
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The failure of T. Boone Pickens has nothing to do with "market forces". It has to do with trying to solve the wrong problem. Or not even understanding what the problem is in the first place. Just because you're rich doesn't mean you know what you're talking about.
I keep hearing the phrase "reduce our dependence on foreign oil" associated with things like wind turbines and nuclear power. Maybe somebody should do a little research and discover that 1% of the electricity in the U.S. is generated using oil as fuel. Unless you're planning on cars, trucks, buses and trains powered by wind turbines or nuclear reactors, how exactly does this "reduce our dependence on foreign oil"?
Now that is the best argument I've heard thus far! T. Boone Pickens would have been better off investing in green energy for powering the transportation industry. Unfortunately, Americans seem to hold the wealthy on undeserved pedestals. Pickens conclusion was quite far off. Mod the parent up!
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I keep hearing the phrase "reduce our dependence on foreign oil" associated with things like wind turbines and nuclear power. Maybe somebody should do a little research and discover that 1% of the electricity in the U.S. is generated using oil as fuel. Unless you're planning on cars, trucks, buses and trains powered by wind turbines or nuclear reactors, how exactly does this "reduce our dependence on foreign oil"?
I think the idea is that people would buy electric cars and hence start putting far more load on the electricity grid instead of going to filling stations. It is a long way off but the idea of running your personal transportation device on stuff that explodes to provide momentum is doomed in the long run. Electric is the way to go as we already have a way of distributing it around the country so you can save on infrastructure:
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1705518,00.html [time.com]
Israel is far more s
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"decadent westerners"??? Hmm...child brides? Women with no rights? Persecution of non-Muslim minorities? No concept of human (as opposed to religious) rights? Support for some Muslim sects killing other Muslim sects, 'cause, you know, Allah wills it? And you are calling Westerners decadent?
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But quite a lot of oil is used for heating whereas in for example the UK, oil heating is pretty rare. The extra electricity could be used for heating which would displace oil in that sector.
"Market Forces" (Score:2)
The conspiracy: (Score:2, Interesting)
I was wondering how the crowd that claims wind and other renewables are more economical than anything else would spin this.
It can't possibly be that he lost money, if it's so economical. So, it must have been something else, like a secret agenda that required him to lose money for a greater gain.
A bit like the 200 mpg carburetor that the big corporations are keeping secret.
But, obviously I must be part of the conspiracy, since I'm not out supporting the 200 mpg carbu... I mean wind farms, enthusiastically e
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He was denied approval to build any of the electric transmission lines needed to transport power from these wind farms to cities but do go on with that old troll.
BUILD more nuke plants and then in 2040 fusion! (Score:2)
BUILD more nuke plants and then in 2040 fusion!
Only put the satellite microwave ones in areas away from where people live.
Con Man Deserves to Starve (Score:3)
Pickens was one of the top cowboys in getting us into this oil mess. Then he invested oil profits heavily in natural gas, which indeed did pay off: production has risen some [wikipedia.org] as consumption has risen slightly more [wikipedia.org], but prices have doubled [wikipedia.org], with frequent sevenfold spikes that last most of a year. Nice racket, but not good enough for a snakey oil salesman like Pickens.
So Pickens started pitching his plan to move America's cars from gasoline to natgas, switching the natgas flow away from our gas turbines. New combined cycle gas turbines get up to 85% energy efficiency, because the plants can usefully consume the heat, but cars will just pump it out into the air - at about 20% energy efficiency (or worse: about 17% for gasoline cars converted to natgas). Which all means that we'd have to burn 4-5x as much natgas to get the use in cars we do now in CCGT plants. Which means buying 4-5x as much gas, from Pickens, just to burn 80% out in his backyard.
He invested $2B in wind farms because he expected at least that much more profit from natgas. He's getting that profit anyway, without the wind farms. If he'd been serious about the wind farms, he'd have them up and running, producing power, instead of letting them depreciate and then selling them to a foreign country.
Pickens has done all he could to get us into this energy crisis, and has no skills in getting us out of one. Indeed, if oil money weren't so easy once you're in the old boy club, that old boy wouldn't have made much anywhere that takes skills that actually serve and develop a market, rather than shooting fish in a barrel - Texas style, which means oil barrel.
Wind power vs. Pickens (Score:4, Informative)
To understand wind power, look at the wind map of the United States [windpoweringamerica.gov]. Wind turbines aren't useful unless the average wind speed is in the 8 m/sec range and up. Note the huge high-wind area from the Texas panhandle up to Canada. That's where Pickens wanted to operate. Good place for wind turbines, but no nearby place that needs the power. So some long transmission lines were needed. The problem is not that "regulators" wouldn't let Pickens build transmission lines. It's that he wanted governments to pay for them. [wikipedia.org] See Pickens' testimony before Congress. [googleusercontent.com] He wanted eminent domain powers and tax credits for high-tension lines. Back in 2009, though, he couldn't raise the $2 billion needed to build them. [washingtonpost.com]
Those wind charts come in much finer detail. Look at the California wind map. [windpoweringamerica.gov] There are four really good wind areas in California, and they all have large wind farms operating. There's room for further expansion out at Mojave, but the other three sites are essentially full. Those are all successful operations, because they're reasonably near big loads.
Also, the Pickens claim that collecting wind power over a large area would provide significant base load capacity may be bogus. See the live data for the PJM grid [pjm.com]. (This brings up a big Flash application showing what the power grid for the Northeastern US is doing. Switch one of the panels to "Wind Power" and set the scale to "All Data".) Within a 3-day period, total wind power for the entire Northeast US can range over an 8 to 1 range. That's from real, operating wind farms.
Re:And so (Score:5, Insightful)
It depends where you are, here in WA state, we have a high gas tax which helps to level things a bit, but given the amount of experience that we have with oil and related technologies, it's hard to get the scale necessary to compete with oil.
Alternative energy would probably be coming along a lot more quickly, if oil wasn't subsidized and oil companies were required to pay the full cost of the externalities that their product creates.
Re:And so (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not sure quite what you are referring to.
Oil gets subsidized to a certain degree. But if you really want to see massive subsidies and protectionist, fucked-up tariffs and other governmental screwups at work, you need to look at the corn lobby. For the past five years, corn subsidies have been $37b; oil subsidies only $14b.
The end result is our diet is fucked up (way, way too much chemically incorrect HFCS [cnn.com]), and regular sugar being way more expensive than it should be.
Plus, because corn is subsidized, all the farmers grow corn (which actually is a shit-poor source of energy once you calculate the net gain post-processing) instead of something better.
Re:And so (Score:5, Insightful)
Thank two private organizations: the RNC and the DNC - which conspire to begin primaries in Iowa. The solution to obesity in America is single-day primaries.
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Some people may be able to claim genetics, but I dont think the average obese person's diet would stand up to much scrutiny-- even if you dont look at what kind of sugar theyre ingesting.
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Most people who post suggestions like this that want to look at diet don't want to look at how difficult it is for most americans to get quality food. Mostly urbanites who have no idea how horrible the food choices are available to lower income americans.
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Re:And so (Score:4, Interesting)
http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2010/0510dancs.html [dollarsandsense.org]
The US military subsidizes the security of oil, some estimate to the tune of $100/bbl if the Iraq war is included (and while Iraq may not be a 'war for oil', we wouldn't have had anything to do with that whole godforsaken region of the world if it weren't for oil in the first place).
What's worse, we pay that money and the rest of the world is a free rider on the back of our military. I would like all "freedom of the seas" military spending stopped, and the US military return to a defensive posture plus R&D and maintenance of industrial readiness (enough work to keep a core of contractors going in case of another war). Let Europe and Asia pay the cost of world peace, especially if the US loses seignorage of world currency if/when the dollar loses its 'reserve status'.
Re:And so (Score:4, Interesting)
The U.S. isn't supporting Israel in defense of oil. U.S. would still be interested in the region without the oil. And Iran bucking for nuclear weapons would surely catch the U.S.'s interest.
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The end result is our diet is fucked up (way, way too much chemically incorrect HFCS [cnn.com]),
I see this meme all over the place, and yet I have yet to see a study which actually shows a causation of bad health in any way to HFCS, in a way that sucrose would not also be responsible.
Heres my theory as to why that wont happen--
Re:And so (Score:5, Informative)
Here you go:
http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S26/91/22K07/ [princeton.edu]
If you have a supposition about why the human studies will turn out differently, that would be interesting to hear.
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As I replied to others: go hit google scholar for hfcs. This is one study among many, many studies showing problems with hfcs. If you want to live in denial, fine, just know you're on the side of the people who thought they shouldn't stop smoking in the 60's because the nicotine studies weren't perfect.
Is it possible hfcs is perfectly safe? Yes. Is it likely? No. About as likely as smoking being perfectly safe.
Re:And so (Score:5, Informative)
The issue its convoluted by special interest, however, I do believe HFCS is not a healthy product, and here is my argument.
You point out that surcrose breaks down to about the same thing that is in HFCS, but what you fail to take into consideration that there is an energy cost associated with the body doing the work vs having both products readily available to your body.
The net result is that while on paper they seem to be equivalent and the gross calories in similar quantities are close enough to not seem different, the reality is that HFCS is ready for rapid absorption and and use by your body, while straight up sucrose takes some work to prepare which to some degree lowers the net caloric intake for sugar over HFCS.
Check out the wikipedia article on fructose and check out the metabolism section.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fructose [slashdot.org]
The whole argument that HFCS is the same as sugar and no different to your body is complete horseshit.
The fact that HFCS is usually a 1:1 ratio of glucose and fructose may even exacerbate the issue since there have been some recent studies which indicate increased uptake and absorption when fructose and glucose are administered this way.
There are other factors as well, since HFCS is cheaper (due to subsidies) and has a longer shelf life than sucrose, and sweeter than sucrose, food manufacturers looking to make a palatable shelf stable product turn to HFCS because its cheaper, sweeter(thus less is needed), and easier to deal with. Sweet is a flavor humans are biologically predisposed to and makes things taste better, but somethings shouldn't be sweet, so they have to add sodium to offset this sweetness and maintain palatability while "tasting" better than other products. This has led to an arms race in the food industry that has been increasing sugar and sodium content in prepared foods over the last 25 years.
Don't believe me? Compare similar products in the store, I will bet you that the products using HFCS have more salt and sugar than a similar product that uses sucrose.
So yes, I think HFCS is not healthy because it adds easy to process calories and it is in so much of the food that people can afford to eat and while it may not be single handedly causing the obesity issues in the USA and to a lesser degree the world, but its inclusion into high caloric, shelf stable, cheap, unfilling food leads to consumption of unhealthy amounts. Its difficult to moderate intake when its in everything that you can afford to eat.
Re:And so (Score:4, Interesting)
Exactly. Sucrose, glucose and fructose use separate metabolic pathways so the comparison of HFCS and sucrose in chemical terms is meaningless. You have to compare their metabolic effects (including absorption rates, satiety (leptin/ghrelin response) and effect on the intestinal flora.)
Those have shown to be different.
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First off, you meant hypothesis, considering your "theory" lacks any supporting experimental data.
Second, it's been demonstrated that HFCS is processed through different metabolic pathways in the liver than sucrose and that our large acute doses of HFCS specifically overload these pathways and get preferentially converted to fat.
http://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/issa14.htm [bodybuilding.com]
There's many more reasons why HFCS metabolism differs from that of sucrose in damaging ways, but it's Christmas and I've got things to do.
Re:And so (Score:4, Insightful)
Excessive sugar is bad for you. Period.
It doesn't matter what form it takes.
The problem with sugar added to industrial foods is the fact that it is usually there to mask crap quality.
Most foods that have added HFCS don't need it and are really better off without it.
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Re:And so (Score:4, Interesting)
Many farmers would agree that corn subsidies need to end, but the situation is much more complicated than "evil corn lobby and farmers!" I honestly dont expect most people to dig deep enough to figure out whats actually going on, for the same reason I've stopped trying to explain to homophobes why gays aren't evil. Everyone seems to need a little "us versus them" in their diet. But I'll give a quick rundown.
-Ag subsidies in general are a way to slow the bleeding of population out of rural America. The price of commodities in general is so low (due to advancements in machinery and genetics) that the majority of farms would simply go under without some subsidies and tax breaks (either directly or through things like ethanol). In the short term this would lead to all kinds of problems, and frankly some government intervention this way is better than welfare. In the long term all of that freed land would be acquired by superfarms, and we all know how fond slashdot is of cartels...
-Agriculture in general is used as a bargaining chip on the world market, usually in diplomatic negotiations. The money that goes into ag subsidies could be reduced substantially if actual free market forces existed internationally. As it stands, there is a curious correlation between favorable agricultural tariffs/import bans for other nations and technology/manufacturing/??? deals favoring the United States. China blatantly manipulates demand to keep its rural areas from revolting. Europe in general tends to find "health risks" in American ag exports right as their own home industries decline, and ban imports until the local prices increase. Its a dirty business.
-And just fyi, corn isn't grown because there is some large conspiracy. It is very hearty, and with the current genetic modifications can take a lot of abuse from temperamental climates. If cellulistic ethanol pans out modified switch grass will likely take its place, but at the moment there just aren't that many crops positioned to displace corn. Since we went to all the trouble developing industries to create things like bio-degradable plastics from corn, why suddenly yank the rug out and force a move back to non-renewable?
This is just my two cents of course. I just find it discouraging to see so much negativity about rural Americans and farmers specifically. Most are just trying to make minimum wage on a consistent basis. I think if people actually interacted with farmers and were exposed to agriculture (ever) positions such as yours would soften a bit.
Re:And so (Score:4, Insightful)
I'll play opposition advocate. If rural America is unsustainable economically without subsidies it should go away. If the international market does Crete demand even if only political then that should be incorporated into the market value for those commodities. If not, again, let it collapse. Super farms for grains and vegetables make a lot of sense, why not let them take over? The alternatives for small farmers is to buy land closer to cities and specialize in organic or other niche varieties or move more heavily into livestock where there is a higher margin, etc.
It's not the public's responsibility to keep families on their ancestral lands so they don't have to change their lives or those of their children. It's also not our responsibility to keep Iowa's a viable state economy. It sounds like corn is sustainable but not at the yields which are being grown. So the farmers need to grow something else or do something else with the land which is currently growing subsidized crops.
I feel little sympathy for farmers plight you describe. If it's not profitable it's because it is so heavily subsidized that the value of their labor is artificially reduced. Stop taking the handouts and the value will rise, competition will be fierce, many will go out of business but those who survive will have a viable business again.
In short let the market do it's dirty work. The rest of us have to live with it, why should farmers be any different.
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You don't need to because the US is one of the world's largest agricultural producers. Wars over water supplies and agricultural land do happen though.
Re:And so (Score:5, Interesting)
The water wars are going to get nasty very soon. The US Federal government is trying to get greater control over all water. They diverted a great deal out of the San Joaquin Valley, which devastated the farms, put 40,000 farmers out of work, and forced many farmers to sell off their land cheap or hand it over to the Federal conservation programs for relief.
The Bush's bought a lot of land in Parguay [dailykos.com], which prompted a lot of speculation, but the big deal is that the land sits on top of one of the largest fresh water aquifers in the world, giving them control of all that water.
T. Boone Pickens himself gets it, too. I'm skeptical whether the whole wind idea was real, anyway, as it created an excellent diversion from speculation what his land purchases were all about. As it turns out, the land he now owns and/or controls gives him access to a huge portion of America's fresh water supply [washingtonexaminer.com], as it's sitting in a mid-west aquifer that he now has right to drain.
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The parent is suggesting that fighting trillion dollar wars is a subsidy that is not but should be factored into the subsidy balance. Consider how 214B in oil subsidies compares to 37b in corn subsidies when you add in the wars.
Re:And so (Score:4, Informative)
His two biggest issues were distribution and the ever decreasing price of natural gas.
First was where he was putting a bunch of the turbines. This was northern Texas and Oklahoma. Lots of flat plains and wind there, but no serious energy distribution grid. Pickens specifically lamented the lack of transmission capability.
The second was as the processes of recovering natural gas from shale and other sources becomes cheaper and more efficient, the price of natgas dropped like a rock.
Look here, especially at the drop in the last column for 2009: http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/ng/ng_pri_sum_dcu_nus_a.htm [doe.gov]
From what I understand, it is even lower in 2010. Pickens was touting competitiveness of wind with an electric power price of $7 or greater on natural gas. In 2008 it was over $9 and had been rising, but today it is hovering around $4.
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What community in the United States has undrinkable tap water?
Read up on Camp Lejuene.
Re:And so (Score:5, Insightful)
What I understand the biggest show stopper was the installation of the transmission lines to get the power from where it was generated to where it would be used. The Reason the transmission lines couldn't be built is because they couldn't get the right-of-way for it. The reason they couldn't get the right-of-ways is because they wanted the mineral and water rights as well; and the reason they wanted the water rights was to suck the ground dry and to ship the farmer's and rancher's water to the big-cities in aquaducts built under the transmission right-of way.
Personally I think wind-power is over-hyped and uneconomical, yet it would be interesting to see one honest project happen to find out for sure if and why and by how much.
Re:And so (Score:4, Insightful)
The reason they couldn't get the right-of-ways is because they wanted the mineral and water rights as well; and the reason they wanted the water rights was to suck the ground dry and to ship the farmer's and rancher's water to the big-cities in aquaducts built under the transmission right-of way.
This is correct. He wanted the government to use its power of eminent domain to secure the route and he wanted the land to build a pipeline. T.Boone already holds hundreds of thousands of acres of water rights to the Ogallala Aquifer. [quote] He’s T. Boone Pickens. Yes, that T. Boone Pickens. And he’s gobbling up water rights in Texas. Pickens’ new company, Mesa Water, has been buying up ground water rights in Roberts County, Texas - 200,000 acres in all.[/quote] He wanted the power grid to go to Dallas and El Paso and San Antonio....wonder why
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I'm not particularly familiar with how he was planning to go about this, but it's a pretty good bet that a lot of the trouble came from subsidies.
Yes, he failed to convince politicians to give him sufficient subsidies to make this a profitable venture. When he got involved in this he ran a big advertising campaign that federal and state governments should make a big push for wind power by increasing the amount of tax dollars that went to subsidize it. He failed to generate the public support necessary to get politicians to spend the kind of money on it he needed to make a profit.
Re:And so (Score:5, Insightful)
Alternative energy companies want to lump in literally a century's worth of development and infrastructure and label this as an "unfair advantage" to the oil companies, when in fact it's just business. I'm sure that the buggy whip makers had all kinds of "unfair advantages" with roads suitable to buggies and watering holes everywhere when the automobile burst onto the scene--and yet it still happened. Why? Because it was *better*.
The facts are that billions have been pumped into alternative energy (solar, wind, geo) and they are ALL promising technologies. Some day they'll be able to pull their own weight. I just built a 100% solar powered house--completely off the grid and I can tell ya first hand....this is some of the most immature and "not ready for primetime" technology you've ever seen. The government pumping money into it just makes it worse since the manufacturers don't have to make anything *better* that way, they just have to force people to *buy* it. This is probably why the most significant development in battery technology has been to ADD A FRICKIN STRAP so you can move the battery more easily....it's pathetic.
No subsides for ANYBODY, ANYWHERE is the only way to go. Let the ideas fight it out in the marketplace. THIS will improve gasoline efficiency, advance solar technology, make windmills more durable and less prone to breakdown. Having the federal government back ANY of it is not in their list of duties, nor does it allow the industry to mature.
Re:And so (Score:4, Insightful)
What facts? You included none in your post. Since you claim the facts support you, but can't present any, that makes me think that the facts don't support you, but that if you tell the opposite of the truth enough, people will start to believe you. We call this Faux Syndrome.
Re:And so (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm for no subsidies if, and only if, we include 'free pollution' as a subsidy.
In my universe, the fact people can buy and freely burn oil for energy counts as a 'subsidy'. People should have to pay for that. They're using up a public resource.
Same with rate earth magnets for wind and semiconductor manufacturing for solar and nuclear waste disposal. (1) Everyone should have to pay.
Once all that is leveled out, we can look around and ask ourselves if we need subsidies. Possibly we do, possibly we don't, but it's impossible to see from here, where some power production industries can trash the environment and others can't.
1) Although we've already done enough with nuclear protection...it's like, for some reason, with nuclear waste, we need a goddamn submarine door that can withstand 20,000 feet, whereas with, for example, coal ash, we have a screen door with holes in it and a broken latch. It's fucking absurdly imbalanced the lengths nuclear must go through thanks to a generation of idiots trained to jump when people say 'nuclear.
If we treated coal like we treated nuclear we'd be running coal engines in a dome of air surrounded by a dome of vacuum, with massive scrubbers operating to recycle the air in the first dome, and it'd cost about a thousand times more. That shit is the only reason nuclear isn't 'competitive', but the solution isn't to subside is, it's to recognize that we can't stop the world because a nuclear plants raises background radioactivity by 5% for a square mile or whatever. OMG, two hundred extra people might get cancer...unlike coal plants, which regularly kill tens of thousands of people each year.
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There were also some interesting tricks played by the automobile producers, which could certainly have been called "anti-competetive." Read the stories of how GM cried foul about the efficient tram network in Los Angeles and had it dismantled so that GM buses (and subsequently, cars) could take over.
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Or rather, they hate Chernobyl style nuclear polution more than they hate CO2, and they want an answer to what we do with the waste. The free market doesn't provide for paying for cleanup costs hundreds or even thousands of years after the plant reaches the end of its productive life.
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Chernobyl can't happen at a US plant. Being worried about Chernobyl style disaster at a US plant is as logical as not flying on a 747 because of the Hindenburg or not going on a cruise ship because of the Titanic.
Also the waste isn't a big problem with fuel reprocessing and breeder reactors.
Re:And so (Score:5, Informative)
Re:And so (Score:5, Informative)
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Nobody has come up with a non-polluting way of making the rare-earth magnets required to make wind turbines. But still, it is felt that this minor environmental cost is more than compensated by the benefits of wind energy, such as they are. A small amount of pollution is easy to clean up.
Wind is good, because we get a good energy to pollution ratio. Lots of energy for minimal pollution.
But on the same terms, nuclear is even better, because you get even more energy for the same amount of pollution. And also
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Most wind turbines use induction generators, which don't require magnets. Only small-scale turbines in poor locations require magnets.
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Shoot it into space! Is it really so difficult and costly to do that?
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Well, even reprocessing typical fuel reprocessing plants (the kind that don't produce much waste) produce around 100,000 pounds of waste per year. The low end of the cost to get into geosynchronous orbit (highest orbit for which reliable estimates are available, we'd actually want a higher cost launch to make the waste LEAVE orbit) is about $5000/lb. So the cost would be $500 million per year, roughly, for the nuke plants that produce very little waste.
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Yes, especially given the cost of failure: a rocket exploding and showering the earth with large amounts of radioactive material.
Re:I'll tell you where the subsidies went (Score:4, Insightful)
If you add up the subsidies sunk in nuclear (from the good ol' times started with the Manhattan Project)
It's not reasonable to count any weapons development costs as "subsidies" to the nuclear power generation industry. Even if a nuclear power plant had never been designed or built, these weapons expenditures would have still have been made.
Without advances made for the space program, today's iPhone would not exist - would you therefore claim the iPhone was subsidized by the government via the Apollo program?
It is probably, however, fair to claim that some costs of military intervention in the Middle East are subsidies to the petroleum industry because if that area didn't have oil (leaving mostly sand, rocks, and some horrific weather), we wouldn't care nearly as much about it and might just let Israel nuke much of it as a warning.
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It looks like it is handled directly thru the gov't.
http://www.ec.gc.ca/energie-energy/default.asp?lang=En&n=6766D86C-1 [ec.gc.ca]
Are your electric companies gov't owned up there? Or are they gov't regulated, but privately owned?
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Plus, new equipment is now cheaper than what Pickens bought (China has moved into wnd manufacturing in a big way)
Plus, you have the additional costs of dismantling and shipping, as well as inspection and repair of all the used equipment to make sure it's in good shape.
Give him 5 cents on the dollar ...
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Yeah. The U.S. has just last week made a WTO complaint against China for their heavy subsidization of the wind energy sector. Wind turbine manufacturing in specific.
I wonder if there is a connection... :-)
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I suppose it's possible you've managed to find a state that's not doing it, but there are quite a few states that are putting a specific kind of particularly sinister subsidy on renewable projects:
They are legislating that the power distribution company must buy energy from the "alternative" project at greater than wholesale rates. Significantly greater. As in two or three times the market rate.
And that cost is passed on to the retail rates that you pay. When the project is small, you won't notice it, bu
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typical knee-jerk half-assed expensive solution to deal with the high priced oil.
The era of big government typical knee-jerk half-assed expensive solutions is over. Oh wait.
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What does a story about a failed architect have anything to do with wind turbines?
Re:Atlas Shrugged (Score:4, Informative)
Wrong story. "The Fountainhead" was about an architect (Howard Roark). Atlas Shrugged was primarily about a railroad tycoon (Dagny Taggart), a steel baron (Henry Reardon) and a philosophist-hero (John Galt).
Re:Atlas Shrugged (Score:4, Insightful)
No. I don't think the problem is people interfering with "Atlas" but not pandering to him.
This is American business remember. It is likely that he was depending on some sort of subsidy or handout or other sweet special deal and that didn't go through.
Infact, I am pretty sure that's what happened in this case.