Boone Pickens and Wind Power. Huh?

Posted by JD 08/19/2008 at 21:15

The Pickens Plan
Picken’s says that if only 20% of wind power can be captured in the USA, then we’d have enough energy for 7x what we need. And that North Dakota can provide 20% of our nation’s energy requirements.

Nice sounding, right? Well, it is too good to be true. Here’s why.

  • would you like your entire neighborhood covered with HUGE windmills? I wouldn’t even if where I lived was windy. Average speed in my area is 3 mph.
  • I’ve lived in North Dakota and Nebraska. There’s wind there and we should use it, when the land owner agrees. The entire state won’t agree. There are wonderful areas where windmills won’t work and were the noise would be detrimental for wildlife. Let’s forget that occasionally wildlife get killed by windmills.
  • Windmills are noisy and
  • they break.
  • Long distance transmission of electricity is problematic and is estimated to lose 7.2% of the power in the USA. Distance is critical to the amount of loss, so shipping electricity from ND isn’t likely. Think within the a tri-state area around your home as the practical distance limit.

Ok, I’m not anti-windmill. I’m a practical person. There will never be 20% of our land covered with windmills. It simply can’t happen. Even 1% would be impressive. I read somewhere that 20% of USA land is set aside for reserves and parks – imagine all that land covered in windmills. Now, we’ve eaten up 40% of the land in the USA for power and parks, not gonna happen.

In one of those videos, they stated that each windmill cost US$300,000 and running them is subsidized by local taxes. Each creates enough energy in 1 hour to power an average home for a month. My electric bill is less than $1,000/yr (2500 sq ft home). Let’s break this down a little using simple math – it will be close enough.
|cost of windmill |$300,000 |
|annual power 1 home |$1,000|
|years for 1 home to
equate to 1 windmill |300 yrs|
|Payback years for 30 homes |10 yrs|

Ok, so this can make sense assuming $0 maintenance costs in windy areas of the country. These devices have a 12-25 year lifespan. I’ve seen newer cost estimates with much lower costs, around $40K, but also, much lower generation capacity, so the formulas used above don’t work.

Ok, the idea that natural gas powered cars should be much more popular in the USA is perfectly correct. I agree with Pickens. When in Buenos Aires last spring, I saw cars, trucks and fueling stations for CNG. It works.

10-19-2008 Update

The Dirty Jobs tv show did an episode on maintaining the large wind power. Twice a week, someone climbs them, monitors them for maintenance needs and performs a 2 hour cleaning effort. It seems that there’s lots of dirt and dust that interact with the grease and oil needed to allow the generation of power. Wasps, crickets, and other “items” were found on that episode.

That takes away the idea that these are maintenance free.