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Texas: the world’s largest wind farm

26th April 2008

“You need a giant plan for America. Not the pissant 83-megawatt deals all over the country. There needs to be a huge plan from someone with leadership.”

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Texan oil magnate T. Boone Pickens is making the first payment this month toward the construction of the world’s largest wind farm. The Texan farm will eventually cost $10-billion, have 2,700 turbines and produce 4,000 megawatts of energy – enough to power more than a million homes. He’s not in it for the eco-credentials, but for another kind of green: He expects to make a 25-per-cent return on the investment.

Renegade ecologist James Lovelock (originator of the Earth-as-one-living-organism “Gaia hypothesis”) has derided wind farms as pathetically inefficient, “a waste of time” (he thinks nuclear is the answer). But Mr. Pickens says wind doesn’t dry up, like oil or uranium. He wants to blanket the American prairies with turbines, then cover the deserts from California to Texas with solar power stations. “You need a giant plan for America” for energy independence, he told The Guardian. “Not the pissant 83-megawatt deals being stamped all over the country. There needs to be a huge plan from someone with leadership.”

Mr. Pickens isn’t the only wind fan. Turbines have become so popular that production can’t keep up. General Electric announced this month that its order backlog for turbines has grown to $12-billion.

Published in The Green Report in The Globe and Mail

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• Tags:
• America
• Energy
• James Lovelock
• Money Matters
• T. Boone Pickens
• Wind farms
• Wind Power

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