Pickens Reduces Order for Wind Turbines, Puts Panhandle Wind Farm on Hold . . . . “Oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens has cut his massive order for wind turbines from GE by more than half. . . . “

You've been Pickened

Who didn’t see this coming?

The T. Boone Pickens Texas wind farm idea in Texas is now on hold and will not be built until the infrastructure of Texas changes.   Instead, he’ll be building smaller wind farms in Canada and Minnesota.

Foreign oil from Canada is no good to Pickens — foreign wind is just fine.

You have to agree that Canada’s dirty oil sands oil (tar sands) are not something we want to use, but the pipeline into Minnesota is already approved and being built.   We wish it wasn’t.

Meanwhile, T. Boone Pickens has cut his massive order for wind turbines from GE by more than half. He says it’s because there are no transmission lines in the Texas Panhandle, the same place there were no transmission lines when Boone Pickens came up with his idea of a giant wind farm there.   Now it’s obvious this entire wind farm idea was to get a grassroots organization to support his natural gas plan and impress the public and lawmakers with his idea.

If he or any other billionaire really wants to “get the U.S. off of foreign oil” as he continually emphasizes (not a bad idea in itself) then he’d be investing in solar panel factories and planning for solar arrays in Texas along with wind farms.   A person like Pickens, with all his money, would make more of an impact by simply investing in the technology of the future.  But he really always wanted all American trucks to run on natural gas instead of gasoline made from “foreign oil” and this was his investment gamble, one which got him invited to a lot of environmental meetings with other corporate types and people from the new Obama administration.  Boone Pickens has never cared about renewable energy other than as a way for himself to make money.  The gullible thousands who signed up for his plans thinking they were supporting green energy now find themselves in the position of supporting one fossil fuel over another. They all emit CO2 when they’re burned and most people would argue that  natural gas is a little better than burning diesel. Is it really better?  Not so much.

“In spite of trade-offs, many still believe that diesel fuel is a viable alternative to natural gas. Why? Because diesel engines are efficient. They operate at high compression ratios and convert a large percentage of the fuel’s available energy into usable work. Diesel engines’ higher fuel efficiency generally lowers the carbon dioxide emissions that contribute to the greenhouse effect.

Another central subject for this debate is methane emissions. According to Toy, “methane is approximately 20 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.” One study suggests [...]