Wind Energy or Water?

A bunch of Articles:

From CNN

Oil billionaire Pickens puts his money on wind power

• Story Highlights
• T. Boone Pickens launches plan to reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil
• Oilman calls for more use of wind power, switch to natural gas to power vehicles
• Pickens’ company has announced plan to build world’s largest wind farm in Texas
• Wind turbines could supply 20 percent or more of U.S. power needs, Pickens says

(CNN) — Billionaire oilman T. Boone Pickens is putting his clout behind renewable energy sources like wind power.

The legendary entrepreneur and philanthropist on Tuesday unveiled a new energy plan he says will decrease the United States’ dependency on foreign oil by more than one-third and help shift American energy production toward renewable natural resources.

“The Pickens Plan” calls for investing in domestic renewable resources such as wind, and switching from oil to natural gas as a transportation fuel.

In a news conference outlining his proposal, Pickens said his impetus for the plan is the country’s dangerous reliance on foreign oil.

“Our dependence on imported oil is killing our economy. It is the single biggest problem facing America today,” he said. Watch Pickens discuss plan for wind power »

“Wind power is … clean, it’s renewable. It’s everything you want. And it’s a stable supply of energy,” Pickens told CNN in May. “It’s unbelievable that we have not done more with wind.”

Pickens’ company, Mesa Power, recently announced a $2 billion investment as the first step in a multibillion-dollar plan to build the world’s largest wind farm in Pampa, Texas.

Pickens said Tuesday that if the United States takes advantage of the so-called “wind corridor,” stretching from the Canadian border to West Texas, energy from wind turbines built there could supply 20 percent or more of the nation’s power. He suggested the project could be funded by private investors.

Power from thousands of wind turbines that would line the corridor could be distributed throughout the country via electric power transmission lines and could fuel power plants in large population hubs, the oil baron said.

Fueling these plants with wind power would then free up the natural gas historically used to power them, and would mean that natural gas could replace foreign oil as fuel for motor vehicles, he said.

Using natural gas for transportation needs could replace one-third of the United States’ imported oil and would save more than $230 billion a year, Pickens said.

“We are going to have to do something different in America,” Pickens told CNN. “You can’t keep paying out $600 billion a year for oil.”

His energy plan could be implemented within 10 years if both Congress and the White House treat the current energy situation as a “national emergency and take immediate action,” he predicted.

Pickens, a lifelong Republican, says he is not advising either presidential candidate, but is prepared to work with the next president.

The Web site for the plan urges people to sign up and help spread the word.

Oil analyst Peter Beutel of Cameron Hanover, an energy risk manager, said Pickens’ plan could definitely reduce the country’s dependency on foreign oil.

“The best thing about it is that it’s a definite plan — it’s not something that either party has pitted itself outrightly against. It therefore has a tremendous chance for success on Capitol Hill.”

Analyst Fadel Gheit of Oppenheimer & Co. Inc., an investment firm, added that such a plan “has been on the drawing board for years.”

At least 21 states and the District of Columbia have set deadlines or goals for utilities to obtain electricity from clean, renewable sources instead of fossil fuel-burning plants. See where states stand on renewable resources »

The scramble has triggered construction of large-scale wind farms throughout much of the nation, including proposals for the first U.S. offshore facilities.

Delaware and Galveston, Texas, have offshore projects in the works, although a farm proposed off New York’s Long Island was shelved this year because of high projected construction costs.

In Massachusetts, where utilities are under the gun to obtain four percent of electricity from renewables by 2009, builders await federal approval of a hugely controversial wind farm off historic Cape Cod.

The Cape Wind project envisions 130 wind turbines each rising 440 feet above Nantucket Sound by 2011. State officials said the farm will eliminate pollution equal to 175,000 gas-burning cars.

CNN’s Emily Anderson and Thom Patterson contributed to this report.

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From http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,395304,00.html

Pickens Gives New Meaning to ‘Self-Government’

Thursday , July 31, 2008

By Steven Milloy

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The more you learn about T. Boone Pickens’ plan to switch America to wind power, the more you realize that he seems willing to say and do just about anything to make another billion or two.

This column previously discussed the plan’s technical and economic shortcomings and marketing ruses. Today, we’ll look into the diabolical machinations behind it.

Simply put, Pickens’ pitch is “embrace wind power to help break our ‘addiction’ to foreign oil.” There is, however, another intriguing component to Pickens’ plan that goes unmentioned in his TV commercials, media interviews and web site — water rights, which he owns more of than any other American.

Pickens hopes that his recent $100 million investment in 200,000 acres worth of groundwater rights in Roberts County, Texas, located over the Ogallala Aquifer, will earn him $1 billion. But there’s more to earning such a profit than simply acquiring the water. Rights-of-way must be purchased to install pipelines, and opposition from anti-development environmental groups must be overcome. Here’s where it gets interesting, according to information compiled by the Water Research Group, a small grassroots group focusing on local water issues in Texas.

Purchasing rights-of-way is often expensive and time-consuming — and what if landowners won’t sell? While private entities may be frustrated, governments can exercise eminent domain to compel sales. This is Pickens’ route of choice. But wait, you say, Pickens is not a government entity. How can he use eminent domain? Are you sitting down?

At Pickens’ behest, the Texas legislature changed state law to allow the two residents of an 8-acre parcel of land in Roberts County to vote to create a municipal water district, a government agency with eminent domain powers. Who were the voters? They were Pickens’ wife and the manager of Pickens’ nearby ranch. And who sits on the board of directors of this water district? They are the parcel’s three other non-resident landowners, all Pickens’ employees.

A member of a local water conservation board told Bloomberg News that, “[Pickens has] obtained the right of eminent domain like he was a big city. It’s supposed to be for the public good, not a private company.”

What’s this got to do with Pickens’ wind-power plan? Just as he needs pipelines to sell his water, he also needs transmission lines to sell his wind-generated power. Rights of way for transmission lines are also acquired through eminent domain — and, once again, the Texas legislature has come to Pickens’ aid.

Earlier this year, Texas changed its law to allow renewable energy projects (like Pickens’ wind farm) to obtain rights-of-way by piggybacking on a water district’s eminent domain power. So Pickens can now use his water district’s authority to also condemn land for his future wind farm’s transmission lines.

Who will pay for the rights-of-way and the transmission lines and pipelines? Thanks to another gift from Texas politicians, Pickens’ water district can sell tax-free, taxpayer-guaranteed municipal bonds to finance the $2.2 billion cost of the water pipeline. And then earlier this month, the Texas legislature voted to spend $4.93 billion for wind farm transmission lines. While Pickens has denied that this money is earmarked for him, he nevertheless is building the largest wind farm in the world.

Despite this legislative largesse, a fly in the ointment remains.

Although Pickens hopes to sell as much as $165 million worth of water annually to Dallas alone, no city in Texas has signed up yet — partly because they don’t yet need the water and partly because of resentment against water profiteering.

Enter the Sierra Club.

While Green groups support wind power, “the privatization of water is an entirely different thing,” says the Sierra Club. Moreover, the activist group has long opposed further exploitation of the very groundwater Pickens wants to use — the Ogallala Aquifer.

“The source of drinking water and irrigation for Plains residents from Nebraska to Texas, the Ogallala Aquifer is one of the world’s largest — as well as one of the most rapidly dissipating… If current irrigation practices continue, agribusiness will deplete the Ogallala Aquifer in the next century,” says the Sierra Club.

In March 2002, the Sierra Club opposed the construction of a slaughterhouse in Pampa, Texas, because it would require a mere 275 million gallons per year from the Ogallala Aquifer. Yet Pickens wants to sell 65 billion gallons of water per year — to Dallas alone. In a 2004 lamentation about local government facilitation of Pickens’ plan for the Ogallala, the Sierra Club slammed Pickens as a “junk bond dealer” who wanted to make “Blue Gold” from the Ogallala.

But while the Sierra Club can’t seem to do anything about Pickens’ influence with state legislators, they do have enough influence to make his water politically unpotable. This opposition may soon abate, however, now that Pickens has buddied up with Sierra Club president Carl Pope.

As noted last week, Pope now flies in Pickens’ private jet and publicly lauds him. The two are newly-minted “friends,” since Pope needs the famous Republican oilman to lend propaganda value to the Sierra Club’s anti-oil agenda and Pickens needs Pope to ease up on the Ogallala water opposition.

This alliance isn’t sitting well with everyone on the Left.

A TreeHugger.com writer recently observed, “… I am left asking myself why the green media have neglected [the water] aspect of Pickens’ wind-farm plans? Have we been so distracted by the prospect of Texas’ renewable energy portfolio growing by 4000 megawatts that we are willing to overlook some potentially dodgy aspects to the project?”

It shouldn’t sit well with the rest of us either. Pickens has gamed Texas for his own ends, and now he’s trying to game the rest of us, too. Worse, his gamesmanship includes lending his billionaire resources, prominent stature and feudal powers bestowed upon him by the Texas legislature to help the Greens gain control over the U.S. energy supply.

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From: Forbes

Green In Greentech For Pickens
Sarah Terry-Cobo and Wendy Tanaka 07.11.08, 12:24 AM ET

Burlingame, Calif. –

The Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens seems to be turning environmentalist, pushing a plan to address the nation’s energy crisis by reducing “America’s staggering dependence on imported oil.”

The goal of the “Pickens Plan,” announced Tuesday, is to replace more than a third of the oil the United States imports with wind, natural gas and other green energy sources, in the process, saving the country more than $230 billion annually. Currently, the U.S. spends $700 billion a year on foreign oil.

“Our dependence on imported oil is killing our economy,” Pickens said in a statement. “It is the single biggest problem facing America today.”

While the billionaire’s goals are laudable, his renewable energy proposals likely would serve his business interests as well. He has direct investments in a plethora of energy companies, including BP Capital, a hedge fund that invests in renewable energy companies, Exco Resources, Clean Energy Fuels, Interoil, Westport Innovations, Mesa Power and Mesa Water. And the scope of Pickens’ projects are massive. Mesa Power, for instance, is set to spend $2 billion on 667 General Electric wind turbines as part of the first phase of a four-stage effort to build the world’s largest wind farm in Texas.

Analysts say if Pickens’ renewable energy plan catches on, it would mean more business for his Seal Beach, Calif.-based Clean Energy Fuels, which sells natural gas to service stations and municipalities, and Westport Innovations, a Canadian company that makes heavy-duty trucks that use natural gas.

Brian Fan, senior director of research at the Cleantech Group, sees the plan as a crafty way to get the public to let Pickens’ companies put up transmission lines anywhere, even in their backyards. “He is really quite savvy in trying to rally public support of his plan and overcome these obstacles,” Fan says.

Pickens is hoping to rally support to get the next president to enact his plan. “The plan … is doable in five to 10 years if we can get Congress and the Administration to act quickly,” he said. Since 1990, Pickens has contributed nearly $350,000 to political campaigns, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

National Bank Financial analyst Rupert Merer says the Pickens Plan won’t be a hard sell to Republicans and Democrats. Presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama are both in favor of expanding use of renewable energy, and McCain recently voiced support for using natural gas in vehicles. The real challenge Pickens faces is building grassroots support that will keep pressure on the new president.

Pickens is spending $58 million of his own money to market his plan. He started airing ads on TV, radio and in print this week. He’s also launched his campaign on social networks Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn, YouTube and instant messaging service Twitter.

Stay tuned to see if Pickens can save America–and reap a harvest of greenbacks.

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As much as I support massive investment in Wind, I think it would be absurd to let Mr. Pickens obtain the rights to all that water. While it may not seem like a big problem now, I am willing to bet that shortages of clean water are going to cause big problems in the future.

World Bank VP Ismail Serageldin: “If the wars of this century were fought over oil, the wars of the next century will be fought over water.”

We may come up with advanced desalination/purification technologies and be able to use sea/ocean water for daily purposes, but it’s going to be a difficult venture for all these prairie states located in the middle of nowhere to benifit from those technologies.

I do not find this wind/water tradeoff to be worth it in the future. I would much rather leave the Ogallala aquifer under the current management rather than give it to this Pickens guy to make a quick buck out of it.

From here:

“The future economy of the High Plains depends heavily on the Ogallala Aquifer, the main source of water for all uses. The Ogallala will continue to be the lifeblood of the region only if it is managed properly to limit both depletion and contamination.”