By John Porretto, AP Energy
Plans for the world’s largest wind farm in the Texas Panhandle have been scrapped, energy baron T. Boone Pickens said Tuesday, and he’s looking for a home for 687 giant wind turbines. Pickens has already ordered the turbines, which can stand 400 feet tall -taller than most 30-story buildings.
“When I start receiving those turbines, I’ve got to… I said, my garage won’t hold them,” the legendary Texas oilman said. “They’ve got to go someplace.”
Pickens’ company Mesa Power ordered the turbines from General Electric Co. - a $2 billion investment - a little more than a year ago. Pickens said he has-leases on about 200,000 acres in Texas that were planned for the project, and he might place some of the turbines there, but he’s also looking for smaller wind projects to participate in. He said he’s looking at potential sites in the Midwest and Canada.
In Texas, the problem lies in getting power from the proposed site in the Panhandle to a distribution system, Pickens said in an interview with The Associated Press in New York. He’d hoped to build his own transmission lines but he said there were technical problems. Wind power is a big part of the “Pickens Plan,” which was announced a year ago Wednesday. Pickens has spent $60 million crisscrossing the country and buying advertising in an effort to reduce the nation’s reliance on foreign oil.
“It doesn’t mean that wind is dead,” said Pickens, who runs the Dallas-based energy investment fund BP Capital. “It just means we got a little bit too quick off the blocks.” Pickens announced in 2007 plans to install the turbines in parts of four Texas Panhandle counties. He had hoped to complete the four-phase project in 2014 and eventually have 4,000 megawatts of capacity, enough to power more than one million homes. The total cost was expected to approach $12 billion.
Renewable energy provides a small fraction of electricity used today, but the wind and solar sectors are the fastest growing in the U.S. In 2008, the U.S. became the world’s leading provider of wind power. Like most industries around the world, the recession has hurt wind turbine manufacturers and wind farm developers. Companies have shelved development plans and laid off workers. See post here.
Icecap Note: 24/7Wall Street reported this morning: Today marked the one-year anniversary of the launch of The Pickens Plan. Oil magnate T. Boone Pickens was giving a large update and gave his oil targets for 2009 and 2010 in a CNBC interview early this morning. He is still touting natural gas as the replacement for dependence upon foreign oil as a bridge until batteries and other technologies can be perfected. In the climate bill and in Washington they have now included the smart grid and renewables, and he is looking for natural gas to replace the gasoline or diesel in the hundreds of thousands of big trucks on the roads. While Pickens does not normally name his own play in natural gas for vehicles, the Pickens play is Clean Energy Fuels Corp. (NASDAQ: CLNE).
On wind, there is a change now that natural gas is so low and it has driven the cost effectiveness down.
Global Warming Claims a Lot of Hype
By Phil Brennan
S. Fred Singer, a renowned climatologist and professor of environmental sciences emeritus at the University of Virginia, discussed the background behind the recent open letter to Congress he and six other scientists sent to members of the House and Senate. In the letter, the scientists cited a letter sent by the Woods Hole Research Center, which exhorted Congress to act quickly to avoid a global disaster due to alleged global warming.
Singer said the Woods Hole group “put on a sort of scary exaggerated kind of letter to Congress ahead of the vote in the House in an obvious attempt to stampede them into voting for the Waxman-Markey [cap and trade environmental] bill.” Singer explained: “We thought it would be useful to write a letter that would provide a balance. The instigator of the letter was Harold Lewis, a retired professor of physics at the University of California in Santa Barbara.” Lewis, he said, “provided the initial draft, several of us made comments and seven of us signed our names to it.” Lewis sent the letter “to every member of Congress.
Asked if it is not established that the earth is cooling, Singer explained that “The earth is either always warming or cooling; one cannot tell which it is unless one specifies the time interval. “It’s like the stock market: it is rising or falling. Both depend on whether it’s a week or a month or a year. It’s the same with the temperature - if we start during the last Ice Age 15,000 years ago, then the temperatures have warmed. If you start from the Little Ice Age, which ended 200 years ago, it certainly has warmed.
“If you start from 1998, however, then it has not warmed - it has cooled. So it depends on the time interval. People argue about this, and much of the difference between groups comes about when you don’t specify the time interval. There’s no question that the climate has not been warming in the last 10 years.” Reminded that there were members of Congress standing up in the debate and talking about the terrible things that are happening now as a result of global warming, Singer said: “That’s all eye wash. That’s not true. That’s simply hype.”
He went on to explain that “Nothing untoward is happening. The ice is not melting any faster, the sea level is not rising any faster. Hurricanes are not increasing in intensity or frequency; there’s been no impact.
Top Physicist: Global Warming a Dangerous Belief
By Phil Brennan
Professor Gould told Newsmax that the evidence on cooling is being ignored by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) upon whose specious reports the cap and trade bill relied. Gould explained that both “global cooling and global warming have happened throughout much of the earth’s climate history,” adding that “there have, for example, been the great ice ages as well as the more recent little ice age - all this taking place well before the large buildup of 20th century human industrialization - an industrialization that resulted and continues to result in the increase in the standard of living and in the increased life expectancy of people around the globe.”
But even as we are lucky to be living in a relatively warm period Gould said, “the evidence...clearly shows global temperatures have been falling over the last decade.”
“That evidence flatly contradicts the claim by the head of the IPCC [R.K. Pachauri] that he made when he gave the 2008 Wallace Wurth Memorial Lecture at the University of New South Wales [in Sydney, Australia] on Oct. 23, 2008: ‘I’d like to emphasize the fact that we’re at a stage where warming is taking place at a much faster rate.’”
That, said Gould, is flatly contradicted by the evidence: “Yet we are supposed to continue to believe their claims that we are all in danger if we don’t do something in spite of the evidence that there are no grounds for alarm. And we are supposed to accept it while the alarmist scientists let many in the media believe the many fantastic climate-disaster stories, even though there is no causal tie between those fantasies and the scientific evidence.”
MIT Climate Scientist on man-made climate fears: ‘Ordinary people see thorough this—but educated people are very vulnerable’
By Marc Morano, Climate Depot
MIT climate scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen mocked man-made global warming fears in a July 2, 2009 Radio interview on WRKO’s Howie Carr program. Lindzen noted that man-made climate fears were “divorced from nature” and he said the scientific foundation for climate fears was “falling apart.”
“How did we get a population that can be told something that contradicts their senses and go crazy over it?” Lindzen asked on the program. Lindzen recently co-signed an open letter to Congress with a team of scientists warning: “You Are Being Deceived About Global Warming’—‘Earth has been cooling for ten years.’
When asked about climate fears, Lindzen dismissed the notion that “ordinary” Americans are buying into former Vice President Al Gore’s climate views.
“We are too smart for that. You look at the polls, ordinary people see through this, but educated people are very vulnerable,” Lindzen quipped. (at 09:14 min. mark on audio)
Lindzen noted that people are being told that if they change a lightbulb, they are “saving the Earth”, they are “virtuous, they are smart.” “Now you are told that if you don’t understand global warming is going on, you are dumb, but if you agree to it, you are smart,” Lindzen explained.
World Climate Report
The risk of impacts from climate change is rapidly growing - not from potential future changes in the weather, mind you, but instead, from potential massive government oversight in how we generate and consume energy. The government is seriously considering rules that will impact the daily lives of each and every one of us - in the name of protecting the earth’s climate.
The past week has been quite a busy one on this front. Here are some of the highlights (or lowlights) depending on whether you think that it is climate change or government intervention that needs mitigating:
* Last Tuesday (June 23, 2009) public comments were due on the EPA’s Proposed Endangerment finding (that greenhouse gases in the atmosphere endanger the public health and welfare). By the deadline, the EPA had received more than 4,000 comments. A quick glance through the public record seems to indicate that most were offered in opposition to EPA’s proposal. If you want to have a gander at the myriad comments yourself, they are available at the website regulations.gov, (search under “EPA-HQ-OAR-2009-0171”, or here to go directly to them). For starters, a particularly thorough set of comments were submitted jointly by the American Farm Bureau Federation, Deseret Power Electric Cooperative and Sunflower Electric Power Corporation (comment id: EPA-HQ-OAR-2009-0171-3596), which includes an attachment of comments made by the good folks at World Climate Report.)
* In its filing to the EPA, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) revealed the existence of an internal EPA document that was critical of the EPA’s Proposed Endangerment finding but which the EPA swept under the rug. Here is how CEI introduced its comments:
CEI is submitting a set of four EPA emails, dated March 12-17, 2009, which indicate that a significant internal critique of EPA’s position on Endangerment was essentially put under wraps and concealed. The study was barred from being circulated within EPA, it was never disclosed to the public, and it was not placed in the docket of this proceeding. The emails further show that the study was treated in this manner not because of any problem with its quality, but for political reasons.
CEI hereby requests that EPA make this study public, place it into the docket, and either extend or reopen the comment period to allow public response to this new study. We also request that EPA publicly declare that it will engage in no reprisals against the author of the study, who has worked at EPA for over 35 years.
CEI did make public the suppressed document, which, as it turns out, reveals that the document’s authors were big fans of World Climate Report (but then, who isn’t!?), relying heavily on many of our own complaints about the EPA’s Proposed Endangerment. This whole issue has garnered a lot of attention both in various places around the web and in the more traditional media.
* On Friday June 26, 2009, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Waxman-Markey Climate Bill by a vote of 219-212. The bill requires that U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases be reduced by the year 2050 to a level that is 83% below our emissions in 2005. Currently, the know-how to meet such a target and keep our economy chugging along at the same time doesn’t exist. And what’s worse, the bill would have no scientifically meaningful effect on the projected course of global climate anyway. So the House has cast its support for risking a lot while gaining a little. Next step, on to the Senate.
* Despite the fact that the Waxman-Markey Climate Bill would have virtually no impact on the climate, the bill’s supporters were overjoyed. Some, such as New York Times op-ed columnist Paul Krugman even got a little carried away suggesting that most of the 212 Representatives who voted against the bill had committed “treason against the planet” as he suggested that there were few legitimate reasons to have cast a ‘no’ vote. Krugman’s support for this supposition was atrocious. Other, more level-headed columnists in the New York Times’ organization provided plenty of reasons why opposition to the Waxman-Markey provision was justified. Perhaps Krugman ought to at least talk to his colleagues before setting science and logic aside.
We’re sure that the rest of the year will have many more climate change highlights. In what form they take is still uncertain, but more than likely they will be announced by politicians rather than weathermen.
Read post here.