The Pickens Plan
Politically conservative oil prospector T. Boone Pickens is making a big (ahem . . .) splash with his proposal to generate 20 percent of the country’s electricity by building wind farms from the Canadian border to West Texas.
In a public statement yesterday, he said:
I am calling on the next President and Congress to take immediate action in the first 100 days of the new Administration to do whatever is necessary to make this plan a reality. . . . We are asking the American public to get behind this plan and to help us reduce our dangerous dependency on foreign oil.
The bills in Congress currently that deal with wind power are listed here and they include House and Senate versions of a bill called the Rural Wind Energy Development Act. It’s among several bills that would offer tax credits for wind energy and other renewables.
It’s unknown what legislative changes might be needed to move the Pickens Plan forward, but it may not be much. According to at least one report, he proposes that the private sector finance the investment.
The Pickens Plan Web site features the entertaining(ish), well-produced video embedded above, and the site has lots of social networking features on it.
It’s just one of many, but here’s a look at the voting on the House version of the Rural Wind Energy Development Act. Click to vote, comment, learn more, and edit the wiki article:
nezumi
I was discussing this with a particularly smart man, who sent me the following:
Billionaires become billionaires by being more clever than other
businessmen - not smarter, clever.
Right now, if you invest in alternative energy sources:
1. the investment is tax free. So if your other businesses made $1B
profit and you invest half in wind power, you pay no taxes on that
profit.
2. the federal government subsidizes your investment. So if you invest
$500M from #1 in wind, the federal government will pony up matching
funds (to some limit) and you get, for example, a $750M facility that is completely yours for the cost (to you) of $500M. Pretty sweet.
3. the federal government requires power companies to buy your excess
capacity. So if your $750M facility generates power, the eclectic company MUST buy it from you, at their established rates.
4. the profits from alternative energy generation are tax free, unless the company that generates them is an established energy company, like an electric company or ExxonMobil.
So Pickens gets a tax break on the money he invests in building his wind farm, gets the US taxpayers to pay part of the bill to build it, gets money from the local power company for the electricity it generates, and then does not have to pay taxes on the money he gets from the power company. Which in other instances is termed “money laundering,” since
the net effect on Pickens is to eliminate taxes on money he made in
other business ventures.
If the tax and incentives were eliminated, Pickens would drop this (and take a tax write-off as a business loss on any money he had
spent)
Wind power is a good deal for individual homeowners. The power company puts a meter that can run backwards on your house, so it adds up how much power you draw from the grid (which is reduced by whatever your wind turbine generates) and subtracts any power you put back into the grid (when the turbine generates more than you use). They actually pay
you in any month that you provide more electricity than you use.
Wind power is not a good deal for a community or electric grid. Wind
power is not constant or predictable, so the electric grid must have alternate sources on constant standby to meet load if the wind is insufficient. And, for a grid, “on standby” means “running.” So a large power company cannot reduce conventional infrastructure because of
wind power contributions. Also, electric power cannot be stored in
large scale, so in a power grid there is no mechanism for storing high wind power generated and using it during low wind power generation.
Excess wind generation is literally put into resistors and used up as heat (thus wind power directly contributes to Global Warming). The impact of a few individual homeowners on an electric grid is negligible
due to relative scale of power generation.
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calvin al hoogerhyde sr.
This is not a joke at all it’s real. I have built a motor that runs on energy only, no fules at all like gas, fuel oil, or electric, There is no cost to run this motor, that’s right no cost at all. This motor can be used in any operation from car, truck to making electric.