Winningreen ENERGY Alert NO. 24
T. Boone Pickens’ plan for your pocketbook: empty it
By Tom Randall Date: July 21, 2008
Situation: Oil billionaire T. Boone Pickens is touting his grand new plan for energy independence: generate electricity with windmills thereby freeing natural gas to be used in vehicles instead of gasoline.
It is a scam. It would raise gas prices. Currently, when natural gas is used to generate electricity, it is almost exclusively in “peaker” plants — plants of relatively small capacity (usually about 250 megawatts) that can be turned on and off at short notice to boost output during peak demand periods. Baseload plants, which produce most of our electricity, are fired with less costly coal or nuclear energy but they must run almost continuously because they can’t be easily or economically stopped and restarted.
Generating large amounts of electricity with wind also requires natural gas peaker plants to take up the slack when the wind doesn't blow at the required speed to drive a wind turbine.
Therefore, for every 1,000 megawats of wind generation you would need four new natural-gas-fired peaker plants.
By Tom Randall Date: July 21, 2008
Situation: Oil billionaire T. Boone Pickens is touting his grand new plan for energy independence: generate electricity with windmills thereby freeing natural gas to be used in vehicles instead of gasoline.
It is a scam. It would raise gas prices. Currently, when natural gas is used to generate electricity, it is almost exclusively in “peaker” plants — plants of relatively small capacity (usually about 250 megawatts) that can be turned on and off at short notice to boost output during peak demand periods. Baseload plants, which produce most of our electricity, are fired with less costly coal or nuclear energy but they must run almost continuously because they can’t be easily or economically stopped and restarted.
Generating large amounts of electricity with wind also requires natural gas peaker plants to take up the slack when the wind doesn't blow at the required speed to drive a wind turbine.
Therefore, for every 1,000 megawats of wind generation you would need four new natural-gas-fired peaker plants.
This would require the U.S. to burn more natural gas, not less. Less would be available for non-electricity purposes, such as transportation and, particularly, home heating,
The increasing use of natural gas for electricity is one of the principal reasons your natural gas home heating costs have been skyrocketing in recent years. Pickens’ scheme would only increase this price spiral as environmentalists block increased gas supplies.
Response 1: Pickens, in his commercials and opinion pieces, fails to mention his extensive holdings in wind farms and natural gas. He does say that he has been an “oil man” most of this life. Well, now he’s a wind and gas man…’scuse the pun.
Response 2: The fact is wind and solar are not renewable resources. There is nothing we can do to renew them. They are capricious resources that must be regularly replaced by conventional energy.
Response 3: If Pickens were truly interested in clean abundant energy he would be touting genuinely clean coal-to- liquids technology and absolutely emission-free and nearly limitless recyclable nuclear energy.
Response 4: Pickens could also go back to being an oil man and break the grip of foreign producers by producing oil from shale where we have reserves greater than any country in the world located in just three western states.
Link: Read more about "Pitfalls in Pickens Plan" at: http://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/2008/07/10/pitfalls-in-the-pickens-plan/
Just like the ethanol scam.
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