Has anyone estimated what all this would cost?

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Permalink Reply by neil cox on August 3, 2008 at 7:03am

We can't expect T. Boone Pickens to know everything about everything. It is up to us to figure out some of the details such as total cost and best wind turbine design. Accually, it doesn't matter much, as waiting a year to pick better details may mean most of the USA population is dead, so we don't need to complete the transition away from oil. Time's awasting. So we make some errors. That is normal. The only people who make no mistakes are people who do nothing. To get 10,000 big wind turbines installed by 2018, we need to build a bunch of wind turbine factories, quick. Like the liberty ships in world war two, some turbines will be less than optimum.
The total cost is depressing, but almost anything is better than a handful of USA survivers bowing toward Mecca 5 times per day. Several other avowed enemies may get us in our weakened condition. Perhaps the world will come to our aid after the total colapse of our ecconomy, as a result of paying twelve trillion dollars for foreign oil by 2018. Twelve trillion is a resonable estimate if we keep doing what we were doing before T. Boone Pickens got us fired up.
The big GE wind turbines have a good reputation for reliability and safety. T. Boone has ordered 750 of them from GE. Does any one know how many GE expects to deliver in 2009? GE = General Electric Corporation. Likely most of them will be manufactured overseas.
!0,000 wind turbines averaging 5 megawatts each = 50 gigawatts max rating. They may average 30 gigawatts, enough for the 3 largest cities in the USA, so we will need more than 10,000 and/or lots of other forms of alternative energy. We are likely doomed unless we act quickly and decisively. Neil

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