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Science & Technology
T. Boone Pickens $10 B Wind Farm
2008-04-19
Legendary Texas oil man T. Boone Pickens has gone green with a plan to spend $10 billion to build the world's biggest wind farm. But he's not doing it out of generosity - he expects to turn a buck. The Southern octogenarian's plans are as big as the Texas prairie, where he lives on a ranch with his horses, and entail fundamentally reworking how Americans use energy.

Next month, Pickens' company, Mesa Power, will begin buying land and ordering 2,700 wind turbines that will eventually generate 4,000 megawatts of electricity - the equivalent of building two commercial scale nuclear power plants - enough power for about 1 million homes.
What do Kennedy (L) and Kerry (R) think about a Cape Cod wind farm?
"These are substantial," said Pickens, speaking to students at Georgetown University on Thursday. "They're big." Pickens knows a thing or two about big. He heads the BP Capital hedge fund with over $4 billion under management, and earned about $1 billion in 2006 making big bets on commodity and equity markets.

Though a long-time oil man, Pickens said he has embraced the call for cleaner energy sources that don't emit heat-trapping greenhouse gases. "I'm an environmentalist - I can pass the saliva test," he said.
Maybe somebody can explain that to me?
But Pickens is not out to save the planet except through capitalism. He intends to make money. Though Pickens admits that wind power won't be as lucrative as oil deals, he still expects the Texas project to turn at least a 25 percent return. "When I go into these markets, I expect to make money on them," Pickens said. "I don't expect to lose."
Posted by:Bobby

#8  That's ok, then. Thank you, bman -- all your answers have been comforting as well as informative, lately. :-)
Posted by: trailing wife    2008-04-19 21:26  

#7  The agricultural practice continues below the turbines. Cattle graze, wheat grows, the turbines are an additional income for the farmer or rancher.
Posted by: bman   2008-04-19 19:05  

#6  Wind power would be a good way to generate hydrogen, but not much use for anything else.
Posted by: Bright Pebbles   2008-04-19 18:37  

#5  Is wheat planted around the turbines, bman? With the market as it is these days, it'd be a shame to forgo a second source of income.
Posted by: trailing wife    2008-04-19 14:45  

#4  And on calm days we will more likely have power outages as more and more we rely on sources that rely on windy days. I would favor such a system if we also had some mechanism to store power when it was windy and we had excess (a windy night at 3am when it is 70 degrees).
Posted by: crosspatch   2008-04-19 14:20  

#3  2700 wind turbans be a lot o' turbans.......
Posted by: Alaska Paul   2008-04-19 14:16  

#2  Mesa leased a lot of land, but I don't recall them buying here in western kansas during the oil boom. Likewise, Sky energy and the others lease the ground and put up the turbines. The most interesting wind farm to me is down by Woodward OK. where it is located on small mesas and on top of the hills as compared to Montezuma where the turbines are laid out in a grid over many acres of wheat ground.
Posted by: bman   2008-04-19 10:29  

#1  Mesa used to own huge tracts of land in the Hugoton gas field - Boone probably remembers how WINDY it is out there (when driving through, your car will jump upwind as you go under an overpass and are still compensating for the wind that is suddenly blocked.)
Posted by: Glenmore   2008-04-19 07:49  

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