Last year at this time, T. Boone Pickens was bragging about building the world's largest wind farm here in the Texas Panhandle. Toward that effort, he ordered 600 wind turbines from General Electric. It looked like the Panhandle would finally be able to put one of it's natural wonders to good use -- an incessant wind.
It looks like that dream may now be dead. Pickens has cut the order for turbines in half. He now only wants 300 of the General Electric wind turbines, and NONE of them will be erected in the Texas Panhandle. He will be using them on smaller wind farms in Minnesota and Canada.
Pickens said he is doing this for two reasons. The drop in natural gas prices, making it cheap to run plants on gas and the lack of transmission lines in the Panhandle. That's a giant load of horse manure!
The truth is that gas prices rise and fall all the time. They may be cheap right now, but it won't be too long before they rise again. As for the transmission lines, they are in the final stages of being approved right now and would probably be well on the way to being finished before Pickens could start building his wind farms (delivery of the turbines is scheduled for 2011).
Let's look at the real reason he's fleeing the Panhandle. He wasn't just planning to build a wind farm. He wanted to use the same land and right-of-way to ship Panhandle water from the Ogallala aquifer to the Dallas-Fort Worth area. He was going to construct a 9 foot in diameter pipeline to ship thousands of gallons of precious Panhandle water every day.
Frankly, this scheme would have sucked all the water from the Panhandle in just a few years, making this semi-arid area a real desert, but he would have made a ton of money off of it (probably more than the wind farm would have provided). But Panhandle legislators got wind of his plans and acted to stop the theft of water from the Ogallala aquifer.
That's the real reason he's sending the wind farm somewhere else. If he can't suck the Panhandle dry of water, then he won't build his wind farm in the desert he would have created.
He's like the neighborhood kid who wasn't allowed to be the quarterback -- he's taken his ball and gone home. Good riddance!
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