Gas prices. What can we do?

[kerrige]

Boone Pickens attempted a giant windfarm in OK... It failed miserably. He's one of the biggest oil tycoons around.

Do you know why it failed?

[Frenchy]

Because he's an oil tycoon. Try to look good by being "green" but set it up to fail as to not compete with your own income source.

[pl4yboy]

Because he's an oil tycoon. Try to look good by being "green" but set it up to fail as to not compete with your own income source.

Negative. Take a look at what Boone Pickens has done in recent years. He is trying to cut us off of foreign oil other than OPEC. China has implemented the "Picken's Plan" as well as many other countries. The USA has yet to accept it since it was proposed 10 years ago. Boone Pickens stated publicly on the Daily Show that he has made enough money off oil, it's time to do something more.

[pl4yboy]

Do you know why it failed?

Location and lack of facilities most likely.

[kerrige]

Interesting I think places like Arizona and Texas need to utilize more solar since we get soooo much dang sun. Obviously some places like Cali are taking advantage of the wind power but it all needs to be expanded on. I do like the increase in solar panels on peoples houses but Walmart needs to put them on every single one of their stores in the sun belt or anywhere they expect at least 200 days of sun and gov't should do the same.

[RedHeartbeat]

If you are a multi billionaire and successfully fail at making a profit on an endeavor that is in direct competition with what made you a billionaire, others may believe that wind doesn't work and will not attempt to set it up. All the while TBoone is raking in the profits from oil sales.

[pl4yboy]

If you are a multi billionaire and successfully fail at making a profit on an endeavor that is in direct competition with what made you a billionaire, others may believe that wind doesn't work and will not attempt to set it up. All the while TBoone is raking in the profits from oil sales.

I would agree if he hadn't been so adamant about alternatives in the past few years. He's been preaching natural gas and wind power fairly hard.

Sorry, my information was incorrect. The wind farm was supposed to be in the Texas panhandle. He does still have 200,000 acres leased there though for future plans.

[Frenchy]

I live right smack dab in the middle of hundreds of wind turbines. Annoying as hell, and all the power they make gets routed to Michigan.

[bartjo06]

While I'm an advocate of alternative energy there are a lot of misconceptions. Maine has a lot of wind generation and probably 75% of the power to the grid is being sent to Canada. We should be bringing the pipeline (nat gas) into the more rural parts of the state to make the paper mills more cost effective, and clean power producers. For every MW of generation made from a renewable, there needs to be enough rolling reserve (from base loaded plants i.e. combined cycle, coal fired, or nuclear) to cover the power made. No way there is going to be enough wind mills put up to cover our growing demand, we need more nuclear, gas, and coal (IGCC) plants, wind just doesn't have the power density needed.

For all you guys that like numbers, a wind farm with 30 windmills will produce about 45-60 MW PEAK while a single GE Frame 7FA with an attached HRSG will produce about 300 MW BASE...

The unfortunate catch 22 with nuclear is that while it's a great clean source of power, the naysayers are going to be fighting every step of the way now that they have the Japan incident to use against it. It'll be interesting to see what happens to the nuke plants that are already underway in the U.S. by companies like Progress (now Duke).

We have an abundance of coal and nat gas and we should be using it.


And to get back on topic, I don't mind paying high prices for gas, it's nice to have the creature comforts of a truck and the power too. I'll support the oil field guys any day rather than drive a Prius.

[pl4yboy]

Oh yeah, theres no way to rely 100% on wind or renewables at this time. Switching to gas + wind + still using domestic oil would work though.