I heard a commercial on the radio a couple days ago. Oilman T. Boone Pickens has a Trillion dollar proposal to build wind farms. That’s
trillion with a “T”
Building wind facilities in the corridor that stretches from the Texas panhandle to North Dakota could produce 20% of the electricity for the United States at a cost of $1 trillion. It would take another $200 billion to build the capacity to transmit that energy to cities and towns. -pickens plan
What does T. Boone get out of this? And how much of his
own money is he willing to put where is mouth is? Interestingly enough,
2 - 10 Billion dollars.
T. Boone Pickens made his fortune in oil. But now the Dallas oilman and famed former corporate raider is betting $2 billion that he can have the same success with a new source of energy - wind. Pickens’ Mesa Power LLP …(May 15th, 2008)… unveiled the first phase of an eventual $10 billion alternative energy project that has the potential to become the world’s largest wind farm.
…Ultimately, Mesa Power plans to have enough turbines to produce 4,000 megawatts of energy, the overall project is expected to cost $10 billion and be completed in 2014.
4,000,000,000 watts of energy at a cost of
$10,000,000,000 figures out to
$2.50/Watt* of energy.
I don’t know about you, but currently, I buy my electric power at closer to
$0.13/ kilo watt hour. Or
$.00013/watt. So, at a little over
nineteen thousand times the cost (and I don’t believe that figure includes the cost of transmission infrastructure to deliver the power where it is needed) how cost effective could it be?
So, it's expensive, but will it
work? E.ON Netz GmbH, the largest grid operator in Germany, reports in its
Wind Report 2005, that:
"Wind energy cannot replace conventional power stations to any significant extent...The more wind power capacity [on] the grid, the lower the percentage of traditional generation it can replace."
Say what?? Factor in that the wind doesn’t blow 24/7, you don’t have batteries powerful enough to store that much power for when the wind goes off line, you need to have
conventional power generation to pick up the slack. How much? Again, according to E.ON Netz’s 2005 Report:
In 2004, Germany was once again the global world leader in the production of wind power. At the end of 2004, wind energy plants with an installed capacity of 16,400MW supplied the German electricity grids. The greatest proportion of this capacity, 7,050MW, was connected in the E.ON control area. E.ON Netz, the transmission system operator of the E.ON Group, consequently makes a key contribution towards the technically and commercial optimum integration of wind power into the electricity supply systems.
Wind energy is only able to replace traditional power stations to a limited extent. Their dependence on the prevailing wind conditions means that wind power has a limited
load factor even when technically available. It is not possible to guarantee its use for the continual cover of electricity consumption. Consequently, traditional power stations with capacities equal to 90% of the installed wind power capacity must be permanently online in order to guarantee power supply at all times.
(Pdf available for download)
So, one of the global leaders in wind power says you have to keep”
traditional power stations with capacities equal to 90% of the installed wind power capacity must be
permanently online in order to "guarantee power supply at all times".
At what cost??? And how much pollution does this really remove, if you have to keep
90% of your convention capacity online to guarantee power at all times?
At $2.50 a watt, I suspect
massive government subsidies either directly or through tax breaks to make this turkey fly. The fact that T. Boone Pickens is willing to venture 2-10 Billion dollars, makes me wonder just what kind of tax breaks and subsidies sit behind the curtain of Oilman T. Boone Pickens’ windy plan?
Correction: What I should have said was $2.50 to deliver the
first watt of electricity. After that, what the true cost over the lifetime will be, will be largely dictated by how much the wind blows, how hard the wind blows, how much down time for weather and maintenance and maintenance costs.
Cross Posted at
Say Anything