New Energy Project Will Be Even Larger than the Pickens Plan
Move over, T. Boone Pickens. You’re about to be overshadowed by Babcock and Brown.
Australian developer Babcock and Brown has announced that it is working on a 79.5 MW wind farm in the Texas Panhandle— but the company has much larger ambitions than a single farm. Majestic Wind Farm is only one part of a $1 billion effort company to build 567.5 MW of wind power throughout Texas, Wisconsin, and South Dakota. But there’s more.
Babcock and Brown’s current plans are part of an even bigger project in the Texas Panhandle Loop to create 8,000 MW of power from renewables, natural gas, and coal-fired plants. Companies including Airtricity, Celanese, and Occidental Energy Ventures will join Babcock and Brown in the massive effort.
Compare that to Pickens’ plan to install 4,000 MW of wind power in Texas—a staggering number in its own right. And lets not forget that Pickens is only one man, while the larger plan is part of a combined effort from multiple companies.
Babcock and Brown hasn’t announced a completion date for the 8,000 MW plan, but its Majestic Wind Farm will be up and running by the end of the year. Here’s hoping for an even bigger project to come along and steal Babcock and Brown’s thunder.
Posts Related to T. Boone Pickens and Alternative Energy Plans:
- World’s First Commercial-Scale Tidal Power Turbine Begins Feeding Electricity to the Grid
- Texas To Build Wind Power Superhighway
- Missouri Town Powered Fully By Wind
Misleading article. They’re planning also non-renewables including COAL. Wind could be 10% of their 8,000 MW, for all the information we have here, or 800 MW.
The article states: “…8,000 MW of power from renewables, natural gas, and coal-fired plants.”
The article quotes an initial “79.5 MW plant”, with plans for only “567.5″ MW in several states. That’s far below T. Boone’s 4,000 MW in Texas alone.
Ariel:
I am not sure why you are so excited about this announcement. Look at the numbers - the wind component of the announced project is described as being 1,000 MW out of a planned 8,000 MW total that includes “renewables, natural gas and coal-fired power plants”.
Since wind developers normally advertise their system CAPACITY, not output, that means that the wind component will be about 333 MW when average capacity factor is taken into account compared to perhaps 6,000 MW of fossil fuel power when those capacity factors are included.
Building new coal fired plants now locks us in to 60 or more years of burning a dirty fuel that is not only an air pollution problem, but that also causes a significant negative environmental impact on the mining, transportation and solid waste disposal portion of the fuel cycle.
In other words, I think that the wind component of this project is strictly diversionary and designed to gain the approval of “the green community”. It did not succeed for me.
Wind power is great, but it won’t be enough If the U.S. had chosen to be a moral people, and leaving Iraqi oil alone, and following Al Gore, decided to develop the South Western deserts, with the technology of the times - solar/thermal-molten sodium - electricity installations, for the same amount of money as that war cost, ($650 Billion), today, we would be tapping into the largest, renewable, sustainable, energy source the world has ever known. It would have paid every energy bill in the U.S.A. for maintenance fees only - FOREVER! It would be equivalent to an oil field that can NEVER run dry! Low cost electric power, and storeable hydrogen gasoline replacement from the electricity, for all!
After the millions of murders, and $650 billions of dollars, borrowed from our children’s futures and pissed away, with thousands of our own and others maimed and disfigured for life, millions of families utterly destroyed, ours and theirs, we are no closer to Iraqi oil production than the Iraqis are!
The next time you hear a blithering idiot spoiled brat, drunken, drug addicted, sociopath, rich Arabic saber dancing daddie’s boy oilman, stand at a microphone and threaten YOUR safety with someone ELSE’S weapons, remember what you lost America, remember, and weep! (also see http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=a-solar-grand-plan)