Could Indiana Host Pickens' Wind Farm?

[Pat Coyle]

News.com - T. Boone Pickens' massive wind farm, planned for Texas, is looking for a new home.

The energy tycoon and wind advocate told the Dallas Morning News that a project to install hundreds of wind turbines in the Texas panhandle will not work because of a lack of transmission lines. Instead, Pickens' wind company is looking for other locations in the Midwest and possibly Texas.

"I don't think the first place we build, though, is where we thought we would because we don't have the transmission," Pickens said in an interview done last week.

"You had them standing in line to finance you when natural gas was $9 (per million BTUs)...Natural gas at $4 doesn't have many people trying to finance you," he told the Dallas newspaper (video). "I'm going to start receiving those turbines in the first quarter of '11 and I don't have that big of a garage to put them in there so I got to start getting ready to use them."

Could Indiana host Pickens' wind farm? Share your thoughts here


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[Linda J Ranger]

In my opinion most of urban Indiana does not have a consistent wind speed to justify the cost of the windmills vs. the amount of electricity they can produce. The only areas that may produce enough wind power are normally by large bodies of water or over areas of flat open fields which are often not near large cities. I understand that to be efficient it takes a fairly constant speed of 10 miles per hour wind speed or higher for the windmills to be effective. Technology needs to find a better solution before we cut off our nose from coal and all of us pay dearly for the electricity we all rely on for daily living. Windmills as the large units that are being built today are not cost effective.

[Dave Goush]

I agree Linda,
I work with wind farm companies and what you just pointed out is correct. There are not a lot of places in Indiana that have the consistent wind speed to maintain a profitable wind farm such as the one he proposes. I'm sure he has his engineers looking at the national wind map to survey the best locations.

[Elaine Whitesides]

The issue I have heard raised, although I don't know much about the subject, is that even if the turbine fields were built and put in use there isn't enough of a transmission gridwork in place to get the electricity from the turbine fields to consumers.

It would make sense that the minds who advise wind power producers would consider this before investing tremendous amounts of capital into building a field.

[Pat Coyle]

I don't know anything about wind or power grids...but I've been hearing the term "smart grid" a lot lately...does Indiana need to do anything in order to be better positioned as a player on this grid? If we made infrastructure investments, could we position ourselves to bring more green energy projects here?

[Dave Goush]

'Smart Grid" is nationwide. It is the upgrading of the whole power grid throughout the nation to better effectively deliver energy without all the loss of energy in the transmission processes and also more evenly distributing the power generation across the entire grid instead of ramping up and ramping down in specific locations to match demand

[Dave Goush]

Yes that is part of the initial discovery process that takes 12-18 months minimun to explore the capacities and also the trend of the wind in the targeted area.