Texas Billionaire Oilman Makes Big Bets on Wind. By Chris Baltimore, Reuters, April 18, 2008. "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... 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... 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."
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment