I saw this on my Yahoo homepage the other night and couldn’t believe my eyes. Big Oil is investing in clean energy technology.
Billionaire oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens plans to invest 10 billion-yes thats BILLION with a B-dollars to build what will be the worlds largest wind farm. His company, Mesa Power, will begin buying land - up to 200,000 acres- and ordering turbines next month. If all goes as planned, the farm will have 2,700 turbines on it, producing 4,000 megawatts. Thats enough power to supply 1 million homes.
While Pickens is answering the call for cleaner energy, this doesn’t mean he just putting up this kind of money “because it is the right thing to do”. In fact he says,
“I’m an environmentalist - I can pass the saliva test.”
He is out to make a profit and knows that the profits won’t be as good as oil, but expects to make a 25% return on his investment and today with oil prices ready to top $120 a barrel, the realization that we need other forms of energy should help guarantee him a return on his money.
I guess Pickens is a man of vision and may just be getting ahead of the pack. From Yahoo news:
Pickens’ wind farm is part of his wider vision for replacing natural gas with wind and solar for power generation, and using the natural gas instead to power vehicles.
To picture Pickens’ energy strategy, imagine a compass.
Stretching from north to south from Saskatchewan to Texas would be thousands of wind turbines, which could take advantage of some of the best U.S. wind production conditions.
On the east-west axis from Texas to California would be large arrays of solar generation, which could send electricity into growing Southern California cities like Los Angeles.
The end result would be to free up more clean-burning natural gas - primarily a power-generation fuel now - to power automobiles.
Major oil companies have embraced so-called natural gas liquids because they have spent billions of dollars building refineries and pipelines to turn crude oil into gasoline, Pickens said.
But shifting natural gas used in power generation to transportation needs could cut U.S. crude oil imports by nearly 40 percent, he said.
It will be interesting to see how this all plays out. I wonder when the true environmentalist are going to step out of the woodwork against the turbines. What are the other Texas oil men thinking about this? Whats Big Coal gonna do?
I guess all of these questions will be answered over time. More projects like this could help end our dependence on coal and put an end to mountaintop removal. Maybe Blankenship would even get on board….. NAH!!!
Hey Brian - NAH!! is right unless there is maybe some kind of migrating pattern for some form of exotic bird that Massey’s windmills could interfere with. A windmill would be right up Massey’s alley in that case.
Thats not funny Denny… The environmentalists here just put a stop to a proposed wind farm in Somerset county. It seems there are some endangered bats in that area. Okay, I’m all for protecting the animals, but bats? I thought bats have sonar…. How is a blade gonna hit em? Mind you I’m not a biologist, but sumtin smells like guano.
Hey brian, i know that you can go pick up dead bats at the base of some of the windmills around here. and all kinds of dead birds. i am a biologist but I don’t know if the rate of incidental deaths is enough to harm population sizes.
frustrating to see folks contriving solutions that don’t involve reducing demand.
Folk - As far as the bats, I find that kind of odd as well. Obviously I don’t know all of the impacts associated with windmills because there are none in the coalfields of WV.
In my opinion - I think bats and mountains aside, we should be focused on finding a renewable energy source. We have proven time and again we will go to any length for energy - we can either kill a few birds or destroy an entire mountain culture and all associated with it. This gets into the which is the lesser of the two evils equation. I’m not saying it is a good thing to kill birds to satisfy our thirst for energy - but, is it a good thing to destroy the Appalachian Mountains to quench an insatiable thirst for IPod power? I think the information/technology era is going to be our downfall simply because we want to be able to talk to a long lost cousin in Spain from our local coffee shop.
Reducing demand is something we can do right now but getting someone to lay their IPod down would be similar to getting a junky to give up the needle - it’s not going to happen without a fight. If an example is needed - look at mountaintop removal coal mining, we actually have to fight this madness. Why? Because coal keeps the lights on… or so I’ve heard.
I use IPod as an example because too many times I have seen the question - If we stop mountaintop removal how are we going to power our IPods?