Just as the rest of the world begins to realize that SDA is Canada’s greatest untapped source for investment advice on alternative energy…
After 30 months, countless TV appearances, and $80 million spent on an extravagant PR campaign, T. Boone Pickens has finally admitted the obvious: The wind energy business isn’t a very good one.
The Dallas-based entrepreneur, who has relentlessly promoted his “Pickens Plan” since July 4, 2008, announced earlier this month that he’s abandoning the wind business to focus on natural gas.
It’s too late for T. Boone Pickens – but is there time to save Sask Power?
Off topic, but Lawrence Martin and Michal Harris are having a lefty bash of Harper right now on http://www.cfra.com
Ignatieff is great
Layton is great
Mulclair is great
Harris just called Martin ‘columnist par excellence’.
This segment was aired just moments after Harris called David McGuinty ‘unbiased.
Stay on topic, please.
I always thought T Boone was always about natural gas….wind was just an enabler of his natural gas plan. It doesnt need it.
Yes, it’s too late to save SaskPower. Every utility in the world is still pursuing this chimera.
Note that the brochure from SaskPower is a lie. These are Vestas turbines. Vestas notes in their tech specifications that their nominal rating to get the full 20 year lifespan is at a wind speed that produces only about 2/3 of full rated power. So it’s not a 150 MW facility, it’s only at best 100 MW and only for the time that it’s getting that optimal speed. Power generated varies with the cube of the speed, so any wind speed below its optimal rating results in disproportionate drops in power. Wind speeds above the optimal speed greatly reduce turbine life, so you don’t get the lifetime service life.
Speaking of which, who foots the decommissioning cost for taking them down at the end of their service life? Or is Saskatchewan to be littered with the dead hulks of wind farms a third of a century from now, as is the case in Hawaii?
It’s difficult to say what will happen at SaskPower. Brad Wall seems to be at least light green. So Saskpower, like all crown corporations, has the ever present friction between the government/ political appointees who think they are electricity experts and people who actually understand how to make affordable, reliable electricity. On the positive side is this story:
SaskPower, a provincial Crown corporation, announced Friday that it will rebuild its aging Unit 3 at the coal-fired Boundary Dam power plant near Estevan, Sask.
The company said a decision on a fully integrated carbon-capture and storage facility will have to wait until it gets more details on emissions regulations from Ottawa…
The company estimates it would cost $1.2 billion to rebuild Boundary Dam 3 as a fully integrated carbon-capture and storage unit.
Instead, refurbishing the 45-year-old unit to extend its life by another 30 years would cost an estimated $354 million.
“We’re going to rebuild it so it’s carbon-capture ready,” said Watson
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/saskatchewan/story/2010/12/10/sk-sask-power-clean-coal-101210.html
T Boone gave up on windmills when Texas would not hook him into the grid. He placed a 2 Billion dollar order for turbines from GE, a strong bambam supporter and nearing severe financial trouble. He figured the Feds would jump in.
His natural gas for cars depends on States picking up the cost of making the fuel available in gas stations to form a network.
T Boone didn’t get rich by being stupid. He tried to sell the windmills to Canada.
Britain’s politically correct governments are stuck on stupid…..shutting down “fossil fueled” thermal generators and shelving plans for nuclear…in favour of a massive wind scheme.
Their media futily attempts to hide in the inconvenient truth that in those fabled isles, any winter high pressure system results in brass monkey weather and no wind….same as here in Canada.
These wind turbine thingy’s will predictably serve as monuments to the folly of heeding the advise of credentialed experts….without vetting their political ideology.
I challenge Sask Powers’ specifications….that works out to only 30 truckloads of cement/tower…here in Bantario the estimate is 1000 tons of reinforced concrete/tower. Logical otherwise they would blow over. The base’ function is more to hold the thing down than hold it up.
Denmark in principle uses none of it’s wind power…building NG generators or exporting it to Sweden and Norway…in return for Hydro and Nuclear….
Norway gets to conserve it’s reservoirs and Hydro is the most flexible source. It literally can be turned of and on like a tap.
I think t-Bone’s real intent all along was to move natural gas, which he has a lot of, away from electricity generation into transportation. He figured he could garner a bigger premium in that area, given the relatively expensive cost of crude vs natural gas.
If he could make a few extra bucks chopping birds, so much the better.
John, not quite. Because of the variability of wind, you need gas fired as a backup. This was Boone’s pitch to increase greatly the demand for nat gas. That’s where all the kWh really would come from in such a system. The bird slicers are just the loss leader.
Here is a good site for information about how the greens have been laying the foundation for energy starvation in the US: http://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/states/ My home state of Montana, with about a quarter of known coal reserves in the US: … has a de facto ban on new coal-fired power plants. House Bill 25, passed in 2007, prohibits regulatory pre-approval of new coal plants that do not sequester 50 percent of carbon dioxide. This is a de facto prohibition on pre-approval of all new coal-fired power plants, because such sequestration technology is not yet commercially available.
We also will be stuck paying extra for 15% “renewable” energy by 2015. We have gone from a nation that could do almost anything to one that can’t turn a wheel. Thanks a lot, Sierra Club.
Wind energy is a waste of time and money and has been proven so on many occasions. When you need it, it isn’t there, it is expensive, the generation is usually extremely far from the end user, the life span of the units is suspect and the clean-up of worn-out projects is expensive. Not to mention the multitude of operating problems the variable wind creates for the operators of the base load coal plants.
Regarding the refurbishment of the unit at Boundary Dam it should be remembered that the carbon capture process will result in a net loss of generation from this unit after it has been installed. Meaning this new technology may be cleaner but only adds to SaskPower’s electrical supply problems as the 150 megawatt unit will only deliver a fraction of that to the system once the clean-coal equipment is installed.
Surely the Greens know what will eventually happen with all this wind power b.s. They’re nuts, not stupid, well at least not all of them. There’s something else going on here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Texas
Surely the greens know that the price of oil will always be going down. OOOps wait a minute….. oil is going up how can that be ? I mean the stupid greens said that was going to happen
No, Mike, they’re fanatics, and that’s worse than stupid. They WANT us to be strangled by a lack of energy supply. When you get to the real fanatics, like EarthFIRST, they want most of the technological progress of the last thousand years repealed.
Who put up the windmills off Hwy. 1 near the Manitoba border?
David @ 9:28, I suspect that it is Sask Power that is putting those windmills up. We counted about 30 that we could see in various stages of construction in early November. Tough to count doing 110 km.
‘Environmentalists’ are welcome to starve while freezing in the dark right now? If they’re so committed, why are they waiting for the rest of us?
Can’t tell you how i know this, but the province that has wagered the heaviest on wind power – pei (and maybe the most anywhere in the world as a percentage of consumption) has recently signed a delivery contract with a natural gas generator in Penn for less than 6 cents fob PEI. At that price none of the windmills currently operating will operate after their scheduled major re and re a couple of years from now (unless it’s politically imperative).
The era of ridiculously cheap natural gas that is now upon us and will remain the status quo for a century or more has the greens beside themselves as it is the biggest threat to their dreams of global control and green socialism.
even with solar and wind power, you need powerlines that transfer power…through lines. miles and miles and miles of power lines. be they above ground or above ground they are still power lines. a blight on the precious landscape.
Pickens bailing indicates the wind-power scam is pretty much over. Look for McGuinty to double down now that the end is near. Ontario Liberals, always happy to ride every doofus trend in politics down in flames, right to the very sudden stop at the bottom.
With my money, of course.