by ELIZABETH SOUDER / The Dallas Morning News
esouder@dallasnews.com
Monday, July 6, 2009
T. Boone Pickens' plan to build the world's largest wind farm is off.
Instead, Pickens said he will build five or six smaller wind farms, in the Midwest and possibly Texas, though he hasn't settled on locations.
Last year, Pickens announced that he would build a 1,000-megawatt wind farm in Pampa, Texas. The problem a lack of a transmission line to bring the juice to population centers, Pickens said in an interview last week.
"I don't think the first place we build, though, is where we thought we would because we don't have the transmission," he said.
Remember that idea he had to build his own transmission line? "It was a little more complicated than we thought," he said.
In May 2008, Pickens announced that his company, Mesa Power LP, would order 687 wind turbines, or 1,000 megawatts of capacity, from GE for about $2 billion. By 2014, he expected to expand the Panhandle wind farm to 4,000 megawatts.
That's a massive amount of wind power. One nuclear power reactor is typically about 1,000 megawatts of capacity. Most wind farms offer only a few hundred megawatts.
Shortly after announcing the plan, Pickens ran into roadblocks. Natural gas prices took a dive, bringing electricity prices down with them, and making it difficult to finance a new wind farm.
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