"Texas Is Runnin' In The Wind"

Texas, headquarters of America's oil industry, is about to stake a fortune on wind power.

In what experts say is the biggest investment in the clean and renewable energy in U.S. history, utility officials in the Lone Star State gave preliminary approval Thursday to a $4.9 billion plan to build new transmission lines to carry wind-generated electricity from gusty West Texas to urban areas like Dallas.

Texas is already the national leader in wind power, generating about 5,000 megawatts. But wind-energy advocates say the lack of transmission lines has kept a lot of that power from being put to use and has hindered the building of more turbines.

Most of Texas' wind-energy production is in petroleum-producing West Texas, where nearly 4,000 wind turbines tower over oil pump jacks and capture the breeze that blows across the flat and largely barren landscape. The new plan would not directly build a slew of new turbines, but would add transmission lines capable of moving about 18,000 megawatts. One expert said that is enough to power more than 4 million Texas homes.

Supporters predict the plan will spur new wind power projects, create jobs, reduce pollution and lower energy costs. Texans pay some of the highest electric rates in the country, in part because of congested transmission lines.

Texas electric customers will bear the cost of construction over the next several years, paying about $3 or $4 more per month on their bills, according to Tom Smith, state director of the consumer group Public Citizen. But he predicted that increase would easily be offset by lower energy prices.

Environmentalists and landowners have launched protests against wind turbines from Cape Cod in Massachusetts to Idaho and Texas' South Padre Island, complaining that wind turbines spoil the view and threaten migrating birds.

The conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation said companies that build wind and solar farms should bear more of the cost of the new lines, and it warned that those power sources cannot be expected to consistently produce abundant energy.

The wind energy industry has benefited from the support of billionaire oilman T. Boone Pickens, who is planning to build the world's largest wind farm on about 200,000 acres in the Texas Panhandle. When completed, Pickens' 2,700 turbines will be capable of producing enough electricity to power 1.3 million homes.

Pickens has become an evangelist for wind power as a way to break the nation's dependence on foreign oil, launching an advertising blitz in which he warned: "I've been an oilman all my life, but this is one emergency we can't drill our way out of."

The Pickens Plan is a major energy policy proposal announced July 8, 2008 by American businessman T. Boone Pickens, Jr.

Pickens said the plan could cut the amount the country spends annually on foreign oil from $700 billion to $400 billion." He proposed the following steps: Using the United States' wind corridor, private industry will fund the installation of thousands of wind turbines in the wind belt, generating enough power to provide 20 percent or more of the country's electricity supply. Again funded by the private sector, electric power transmission lines will be built, connecting these wind power generating sites with power plants providing energy to the population centers in the Midwest, South and Western regions of the country. With the energy from wind now available to operate power plants serving the large population centers in key areas of the country, the natural gas that was historically utilized to fuel these power plants can be redirected and used to replace imported gasoline and diesel as a fuel for thousands of vehicles in the transportation system.

   At a time when the Bush Administration "Manchurian" candidate John McCain is advocating environmentally hazardous off shore oil drilling, so called "clean coal" technology and nuclear energy, the private utility company in Texas and the billionaire oilman T. Boone Pickens are "runnin' in the wind" for the advancement of the genuinely clean energy source of wind power. Because Texas already has the wind turbines in place, utilities officials in Texas have committed themselves to building grids and power lines to take the energy from those wind turbines to  major Texas urban areas. What is amazing about this effort is that it is a project of the free market with no "Big government" subsidies or intervention. As I see it,this is what good old "American ingenuity" can accomplish using the constitutional civil liberties and responsibilities of private citizens within the minimal regulations of the constitutional "limited government". Wind Power Rocks!

tags: wind power  t boone pickens  john mccain  clean energy  business  politics  takebackamerica  us  alternative energy  free market  limited government  

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