Boone Pickens Mega Texas Wind Farm on Ice
Short and sweet.
Boone Pickens announced this week that his mega wind farm was icing an eventual 4,000 MW windfarm this week. Apparently he’s looking for buyers for $2 Bill in turbines. A far cry from a year ago when your credibility as a wind developer hung in part on whether or not you had turbine supply.
As difficulty constructing the transmission lines was the stated reason for the the about face, I guess even Texas can’t always throw up a transmission line wherever it wants. California utilities have been struggling with this issue for years.
T&D remains the seminal issue, second only to how big are the subsidies and RPS requirements, in building renewables into true scale.
And for those of you who haven’t read the Pickens Plan to switch a chunk of our power sector from gas to wind, and a chunk of our transport sector from oil to gas, details here.
Neal Dikeman is a partner at Jane Capital Partners, and has cofounded, run, invested in, or served as a director of multiple startups in cleantech and technology. He is Chairman of Carbonflow and Cleantech.org, and Texas Aggie.
Here is another reason why the project is on ice. Commercial viability vs the price of gas today. This is an example of how government subsidies can only do so much, in the end the technology has to stand on its own vs other generation options. Read my blog for further analysis and backu phttp://villarrealjuan.blogspot.com/Juan Villarrealjuanfvillarreal01@comcast.net
It's not just the technology. Currently, technology dictates price, which is why coal is only 5 c/kWh. That's a flawed pricing model. Once we have system that includes the numerous externalities of fossil fuels the commercial viability of wind and solar will be apparent.