http://www.pickensplan.com/theplan/

It's an interesting read anyway.

There are things to question. Using tax policy to direct investments is fundamentally bad policy, and is subject to political winds. Think of the oil companies now suddenly threatened with loss of tax breaks they had used when calculating how much they could afford to invest.

And how you move electricity efficiently from the Great Plains to Connecticut where we like natural gas power plants (burn clean) I don't know.

But the core idea is to replace the 20% of our electricity generated by other sources and use that natural gas to power cars. In my mind, that can be achieved through a combination of great plains wind, far offshore wind, far offshore currents, and nuclear.

And many large projects like those do need government help. Not necessarily tax breaks, but they things like the ability to use emminent domain to build electrical transmission lines; regulation of natural monopolies like the eletric grid, etc.

T Boone's certainly has big financial interests in this all around -- not only the wind, but he has big natural gas interests and I'm sure he'd love to sell it retail to automobile owners instead of wholesale to power plants.

Still...it's an interesting idea faults and all.

Now if I can just find a F350 plug-in hybrid whose engine is powered by natural gas...

Well there are several things to consider. First burning natural gas to make electricity is incredibly wastely. It is much more efficient to use it to heat homes in the snowbelt. Use of it in power plants is the main reason natural gas prices have doubled in one year. Either burn coal and properly treat the smoke stack exhaust, use nuclear power plants, or put offshore windmills along the seacoast much closer to where the population needs the power. Scr#$ the people complaining about how it spoils their view. Check the law on riparian rights, they don't own navigatible waters. Solar panels aren't economically feasible in the northeast yet. A combination of a bottleneck in the manufacturer, low sunlight levels in the northeast as opposed to the southwest, and with the exception of nanosolar(whose entire production has been bought out by Germany)the cost is still $4.00 a watt.

But as how to get the power from the great plains to the northeast, I posted that once before. Run dedicated DC lines along railroad right of ways in exchange for a little help electrifying the railroads.

Made me google HVDC to look up it's advantages. I know we have at least one HVDC line from Hydro Quebec that comes into central Massachusetts.

Another good article I found this afternoon:
http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/energy/2008-07...an-wind-energy_N.htm

It points out, at least for you city folks, you would be able to install home refill station that work off the natural gas utility network.

Which in my mind suddenly expands -- many gas stations, in urban and decent suburban areas -- now no longer need tanker trucks delivering fuel; at least for CNG they can get it by pipe and pressurize it to compress it themselves.

I've long been skeptical of wind power; I think many of my questions have been answered adequately over the years.

Googling around a bit tells me bi-fuel Gasoline / CNG is possible, with the main draw-back the tank is heavy. Bi-fuel Gasoline / LPG (which is a bit different from CNG) conversion kits currently run about $2,500, which I'd expect to drop in half if they were a common item. Buying cars built for CNG is more practical since their springs, etc would be designed for the weight distribution of the CNG tank.

This is a moonshot folks -- I think he's got enough details even if some bits need filling in and a few good questions asked and answered. Between mining / recycling materials to build the towers, electric lines, and pipelines; building and erecting the infrastructure; maintaining it afterwards; developing the new car models to take advantage; remodeling the gas stations...we haven't seen a program that would goose U.S. manufacturing like it since Reagan's military rebuild. Unlike military spending though, this would have a dramatic economic impact and cut down on the trade deficit dramatically. Even though I'm an unrepentant supporter of nuclear, I think you could scale up wind now to produce more power sooner, at least within a reasonable limit like 20% of the overall supply. For the Global Warming crowd while the cars are still burning fossil fuel, it's fuel that's been displaced by a non-carbon source.

Like I mentioned the problems with wind power are basically 3: first there are basically only 2 main companys making commercial wind turbines and they are operating at capacity, second unless you install offshore turbines the power loss from transmitting the power over AC lines from areas of high wind to population centers is to great(using the current electrical grid), third and largest are NIMBYS who believe that the turbines would spoil their view or are too noisy or who object to the necessary transmission lines. With the exception of the third reason all the others are relatively easy to solve.

quote:

first there are basically only 2 main companys making commercial wind turbines

It's interesting to look at some of the back-end industrial stuff.

For nuclear power plants, the preferred way in the West and China currently is single piece, forged containment vessels.

And right now there's just one steel mill on earth that can make forgings that big -- it's in Japan and it's the same plant that made their 18" battleship gun barrels in WWII. They just expanded, doubling from 4 to 8 per year. $100 Million deposit to reserve a spot in their production schedule.