HOUSTON — Plans for the world’s largest wind farm in the Texas Panhandle have been scrapped, energy baron T. Boone Pickens said Tuesday, and he’s looking for a home for 687 giant wind turbines.
Pickens has already ordered the turbines, which can stand 400 feet tall — taller than most 30-story buildings.
“When I start receiving those turbines . . . my garage won’t hold them,” the legendary Texas oilman said. “They’ve got to go someplace.”
Pickens’ company, Mesa Power, ordered the turbines from General Electric — a $2 billion investment — a little more than a year ago. Pickens said he has leases on about 200,000 acres in Texas that were planned for the project, and he might place some of the turbines there, but he’s also looking for smaller wind projects to participate in.
In Texas, the problem lies in getting power from the proposed site in the Panhandle to a distribution system, Pickens told The Associated Press in New York. He had hoped to build his own transmission lines but said there were technical problems.
Wind power is a big part of the “Pickens Plan,” announced a year ago today. Pickens has spent $60 million crisscrossing the country and buying advertising in an effort to reduce the nation’s reliance on foreign oil.
“It doesn’t mean that wind is dead,” said Pickens, who runs Dallas-based energy investment fund BP Capital. “It just means we got a little bit too quick off the blocks.”
Pickens had hoped to complete the four-phase project in 2014 and eventually have 4,000 megawatts of capacity, enough to power more than 1 million homes. The total cost was expected to approach $12 billion.
Renewable energy provides a small fraction of electricity used today, but the wind and solar sectors are the fastest-growing in the U.S. In 2008, the U.S. became the world’s leading provider of wind power.
