We recently had a personal meeting with T. Boone Pickens followed by a conference call with the plan’s marketing staff. I am intrigued by this plan, which has good points, bad points, and more importantly a tremendous amount of marketing muscle and public visibility behind it.
We’re going to go piece by piece through it, discussing the implications, and today’s topic is the wind energy aspect of the plan.
First things first, a little bit about wind turbines for those who know nothing at all.
Modern utility scale wind turbines are mounted on tubular steel poles that tower 250’ or more above the landscape. The large blades make a good bit of noise when in operation. Forget everything you’ve heard about wind turbines killing birds – that is true of the ancient, small wind turbines in Altamont Pass, California, but it has little to do with the giants a hundred times their size that we’re installing these days. Birds have nowhere to roost and they hear the blades moving long before they get close to them.
Wind turbines have ‘capacity factor’. This is a fancy way of saying the wind doesn’t blow all of the time and that yield is variable. Most turbine projects are built in areas with a capacity factor of .33 or higher, which means you multiply their capacity, say 3.0 megawatts, times the factor of .33, and you’re going to get a year’s worth of energy with an average output of a megawatt out of the machine.
There is an inverse correlation between high wind and high population areas. There are stories of early settlers in my home of the Iowa Great Lakes region committing suicide ... they couldn’t stand the loneliness coupled with the constant whistle of the wind for nine months of the year. So ... the center of the country is indeed the Saudi Arabia of wind, but it’s the Rub'alKhali or empty quarter in terms of power lines. The Stranded Wind Initiative was formed to find ways to use the power locally for industrial chemical production and other manufacturing, while the Pickens Plan wants transmission corridors built from the center of the country to the markets on the coasts.
I very much like the idea of new transmission corridors, but there are two ways to go about doing that. The Pickens Plan is in favor of building from areas where they have wind rights to the dry cities of Texas, then on to the coasts. We’ll get to Pickens’ water holdings in another diary specifically on that topic. I prefer Alan Drake’s plan, which couples the use of railroad right of way as a transmission corridor along with the electrification of rail. Spiraling diesel costs are going to drive freight back to rail and airlines out of business. This country once had a fantastic rail and trolley network that was dismantled in favor of autos and freeways. The faster we restore this the safer we are from a national security perspective – electric rail is twenty times more effective than diesel trucks for moving freight.
There are a lot of different plans out there and unfortunately there are going to be an immense number of boondoggles ... unless we do something to put a stop to it. I’m not saying the Pickens Plan is a boondoggle, mind you, as the guy is playing with his own money, I’m just stating that as a matter of principle our new Congress is going to try to apply political solutions to technical problems and that is a recipe for disaster.
I trust Alan Drake’s work in this area ... because it has been subjected to the modeling discipline of the Millennium Institute. This organizing, currently headed by Hans Herren, the man who won the 1995 World Food Prize, is trusted by the IMF, the World Bank, and others to provide detailed models that explore the effects of policy before they’re implemented. We simply can’t afford any more missteps with the time and crude oil we have left, a fact that I hope is obvious after the eight year drunken binge that was the Bush administration, and this seems to be the best way to ensure we get some actual results in the realm of energy policy rather than ear marks, pork barrel, and wheel spin.
(UPDATE: Hey, thanks for the rescue. Hang on a few minutes and the second of three parts goes up :-)