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When completed in 2014, the Pampa Wind Project in northern Texas will be capable of producing 4,000 megawatts, the company said. That’s enough power for about 1.2 million average U.S. homes…
Abundant wind, open land, federal tax credits and rising electricity prices have made Texas the largest U.S. producer of electricity from wind. Mesa’s Pampa Wind Project would almost double that generating capacity…
“We’ve had a great response to this project,” Pickens said in the statement. “Landowners and local officials understand the economic benefits.”
Landowners leasing to the project will earn on average $20K/year from each wind turbine on their property.
And just to back up this kind of growth:
Spanish power company Iberdrola, the world’s largest renewable energy operator, said it plans to invest $8 billion in the United States between 2008 and 2010.
The Bilbao-based firm is aiming to have a 15 percent share of the wind power market in the US by 2010, it added in a statement.
It had a wind power production capacity of 2,400 megawatts in the US at the end of March and it expects to reach 3,600 megawatts by the end of the year, the statement added.
The Oil Patch Boys will have to find someone more impressive than timorous political mice and Know-Nothing nutballs to try to halt energy projects that turn a profit.
#31 – ECA,
Are you saying that it’s an insurmountable technical problem or merely that no one has put enough thought and research dollars into it? Would the answer have been different in an alternate universe where our president fought the war on terror by getting us off oil? Would the $2,000,000,000,000 we’ve spent on the Iraq war have made a difference in your answer?
Even now, would you imagine that it will take more than #30,000,000,000,000 a year to solve the problem?
Why thirty trillion dollars as my starting figure? Because in the late 1990s, someone added up all of the services provided to us by a functioning biosphere (clean water, clean air, topsoil, transpiration by trees bringing rain inland, etc., etc., etc.) and came up with the number thirty trillion dollars a year of services provided to humanity by the biosphere completely free of charge!
If we don’t take care of the biosphere, even for those who only care about economics, not the morality of mass extinction, that is the number we will have to cough up every year. Of course, that assumes we are even capable of doing so, a point I will not yet concede.
#32 – deowll,
Just a point you may be unaware of, every single minute 24 hours per day every single day of the year, enough energy hits earth from the sun to power the entire United States for a year.
I think that even with the relative inefficiency of today’s solar technologies and even without taking up the entire planet with solar panels, solar energy has the potential to be the only answer we need.
The fact that we also have wind power, tidal power, geothermal power, and wave power is a bonus.
So, yes, conserve energy. That’s a huge piece and certainly the most cost effective. Nothing is as cheap as simply improving the technologies by which we save energy instead of needing more. But, the energy is available.
34,
correct.
Battery storage hasnt advanced very fast in the last 50+ years…They are finally doing something, abit late, and VERY expensive.
36,
You will find that WINDMILLs are designed NOT to work above 40mph.. They are set to Flutter and shut down.
i would love to capture those 100mph winds and STORE the energy from all the storms in the Atlantic, from Florida thru the GOLF coast..
think about it…3 months of storms could power the 1/2 the USA for the rest of the year..IF’ you could store it.
#35–Scott==I thought sure you were wrong, that solar simply was not plentiful enough to replace oil even==much less all the other energy needs. But google says the sun falling on Arizona is sufficient to power all of USA. I won’t google further.
Interesting how the author of this site says concentrated solar is the way to go==low tech, distributed. Better than solar panels.
Obviously, the solution is a bit of everything.
Fun read:
http://www.naturalnews.com/021942.html
Another good way to go with solar is simply to heat water and store the hot water in an enormous thermos. Then, use conventional power means to heat the water the last few degrees to turn the turbine. Saves more fuel than the power you get from an equivalent solar array, according to some people. We’ll see if that pans out.
Concentrated solar is much better than photovoltaics. Either use the hot oil or other substance to boil water and turn a turbine as your article states or simply hit the photo voltaics with more concentrated sun to get better efficiency. Both seem highly promising. I believe both methods are already in medium or possibly even large scale use as well.
Minor glitch is that we need the infrastructure to get the energy from the areas of high production, solar or wind, to the areas of high use, our cities. It’s a technical hurdle that shouldn’t be hard to overcome. We may need to go to higher voltage transmission lines, as they’ve done in Europe for years. There’s less loss but higher risk if a line breaks. We’ll probably need to take the slightly higher risk. Always trade-offs.
Its a good idea when the wind blows.
Then, all of a sudden, the winds subside, the house goes dark – and suddenly its not such a great idea.
People and Business demand energy 24/7/365.
Imagine 99% of the time having power – which 3.7 days a year would YOU happily stay in the dark?