• Earth2Tech is asking about the reported loss from Pickens’ natural gas company, Clean Energy Fuels. A little unfair in the headline perhaps since the company has improved relative to the same quarter last year, and is showing increased revenues too.
• Energy Power Alternatives asks “T Boone Pickens – Visionary Or Profiteer?” Looking at the details of the plan, they seem to be concluding that the main component of the plan is the switch to natural gas for automotive use. It goes on to say that the wind energy component, which at best would supply 20% of the needs of the US, is included to “make his proposal politically more attractive.”

Interesting to see that neither of the articles have anything to say about his water project in Texas, and the controversy surrounding that project and the motives for the wind energy being to make it simpler for him to run a pipeline for his water project that we reported on a while back.

A number of people are questioning the reasons behind the Pickens Plan. The Zaproot video (right) is the first time I’ve seen it claimed that the plan is really nothing more than an attempt to green wash a business plan that is pretty unfriendly to the environment, and has been met with quite a bit of resistance.

The claim Zaproot is making is that the real reason Pickens is pushing his wind farm plan is to cover up the environmental damage that Mesa Water, one of his companies, would cause by draining the ground water from 200,000 acres of land in Roberts County, Texas and piping it to western Texas.

Eminent Domain
The story goes something like this:

First, Pickens’ company, Mesa Water, buys up water rights to the largest aquifer in the US. But not everybody is that into the plan and some refuse to sell to him. To get around this, with help from some friendly politicians, he sets up a water district allowing him to use eminent domain to force the sale of the land he can’t get. Unfortunately for Pickens, even that didn’t work – there was still a lot of resistance to the plan.

Here’s where it gets interesting. According to the folks at Zaproot, the next thing Pickens does is put forward an amendment to a Texas bill that would allow the building of a pipeline alongside a power transmission line. And then we hear about the plan that will free the US from its dependency on oil. How? By creating a massive wind farm, starting in the very same area that his pipeline needs to pass through.

Green or Not?
So, is the Pickens plan a true attempt to get the US using more renewable energy, or is it just a ruse to get away with the creation of a water pipeline that would probably have dire consequences for the environment? At least Pickens has worked out that oil is not the way forward. Problem is that he might not really believe in wind power either.

The plan to use more wind power in the US is certainly good; hopefully nobody will fall for the trick of pairing it with a very eco-unfriendly water pipeline (that said, there’s so much of that in US politics that I’d be surprised if it didn’t happen).

As I mentioned in my previous post about the Pickens Plan, I think there are some good ideas in there, but it is not the best that could be achieved. And this doubt about the motives for the wind farm make me even more convinced that we need to come up with a better plan; one that is not subject to doubts about its motives.

[Via CleanTechnica]

First up is Shai Agassi’s Project Better Place, which is trying to solve the problem by means of pure electric cars with exchangeable battery packs for range extension. Basically, for typical daily driving you run off the battery which you recharge at night. When you need to drive further, you can pull into a battery changing station and they’ll swap out your flat battery for a newly charged pack. Even better, the car is free (in the same way that your cell phone is free, when you sign a two year contract). Just pay a monthly contract that is similar to the monthly fuel bill you’re paying and they’ll lend you the car for free.

The Pickens Plan on the other hand is promoting the use of natural gas for vehicle power, and wind power for electricity. Natural gas solves the range problem in pretty much the same way as gasoline does today – you pull into a gas station and simply refill. CNG is already in use for vehicles in the US, so this is a well known technology; many taxis servicing the airport here in San Francisco are already CNG fueled, as are some of the buses and even some garbage trucks.

Convincing Pickens
Katie’s question ended up being “Agassi, can you convince Pickens that electric vehicles are a better plan?” While she lauds Pickens for his wind farm work, and wanting to kick the oil habit, she feels that electricity is a better option for vehicular power long term.

Here at Vertography we’d love to be able to drive an electric car (a Tesla roadster would be great, hint, hint), but we’re also somewhat pragmatic. They’re great for short journeys like our daily commute, but it doesn’t help when I want to visit my favourite aquarium down in Monterey as the batteries just don’t last long enough.

Extending Range
Agassi’s scheme for changing the batteries on the fly as a range extension mechanism seems to be a little too out there for us. We’re not talking swapping a few AA batteries here; electric car batteries are large, complex and expensive systems in their own right. I’m not convinced that this is really the solution for extending the range of vehicles, especially not in a country the size of the US where it would take a massive investment in infrastructure, not to mention the little detail that each battery station needs to keep a number of charged batteries in stock at all times for this to be practical. This plan would be analogous to swapping your empty gas tank for a full one when you stop at the gas station, rather than just refilling it.

The Pickens Plan is very much a plan for the US (the main motivation seems to be to keep the $700M spent each year on foreign oil in the US), so it is perhaps not surprising that his strategy for solving the range problem is natural gas. The infrastructure might not be there today, but at least it is similar to the existing gasoline infrastructure in concept. And it doesn’t require fuel tanks to be swapped – you just refill them, the same as you do today with gasoline.

The Vertography Plan
We don’t think that Agassi should be convincing Pickens to switch to electric vehicles. We also don’t think that Pickens is right to go with pure CNG cars. Instead, we’d like to propose that both men are partially right. The Vertography Plan proposes producing a CNG plugin serial hybrid?

Plugin hybrids have the advantage of keeping those short journeys on battery power, and charging points in parking lots at offices and shopping malls can top up the battery for the journey home too. Using CNG to power a small in-car generator means that when the battery does run down, the car can switch on the CNG generator and keep running (as well as charging the battery).

Why not use the CNG to power the car directly? Well, using the CNG to power a generator means that the engine can be smaller, and can be set to run at the optimum operating speed for efficiency. There’s also no need for gearboxes, clutches etc, and no need to handle the transfer from electric transmission to CNG. While we love the Tesla, we do think that for the US market where people frequently drive further than today’s battery packs allow, a serial hybrid might be the best choice, and why not CNG instead of gasoline? Or how about a bio-diesel version too?

In terms of percentage of power generated by wind turbines though, the US is still a long way behind other countries at the top of the wind power table. Germany generates 7% of its electricity from wind power, Denmark 20%. The USA comes in with just over 1%.

Pickens Plan
Wind power plays a major part in the T. Boone Pickens plan for removing the US dependency on foreign oil. Pickens is the founder and chairman of BP Capital Management, and has spent his whole life working in the oil industry. Now though he says:

America is in a hole and it’s getting deeper every day. We import 70% of our oil at a cost of $700 billion a year – four times the annual cost of the Iraq war.

I’ve been an oil man all my life, but this is one emergency we can’t drill our way out of. But if we create a new renewable energy network, we can break our addiction to foreign oil.

And he has a plan to break that addiction, part of which includes increasing wind power generation from today’s 1% number up to as much as 20% (which the US Department of Energy believes is possible).

[Via GreenBlog]