T Boone Pickens Will Build World’s Largest Wind Power Facility
April 19th, 2008Imagine my shock.
Via: Guardian:
T Boone Pickens is famous for thinking big. He founded his Texan oil company, Mesa Petroleum, in 1956 with just $2,500 (£1,200) in the bank. After a string of audacious takeovers he turned it into an independent empire that challenged the big oil companies, and today he is worth $3bn.
Now this straight-talking Southerner is launching the biggest and most audacious project of his career. This month he will make the first down payment on 500 wind turbines at a cost of $2m each. The order is the first material step towards his goal of building the world’s largest wind farm.
Over the next four years he intends to erect 2,700 turbines across 200,000 acres of the Texan panhandle. The scheme is five times bigger than the world’s current record-holding wind farm and when finished will supply 4,000 megawatts of electricity – enough to power about one million homes.
It’s not just the breathtaking scale of the scheme that is striking, though at a total cost of $10bn it impresses even Pickens himself: “It’s pretty mind boggling,” he says. The fact that Pickens, a tycoon who made his fortune in oil, has turned his attention to wind power is an indication of how the tectonic plates are moving. Until recently wind was seen as marginal and alternative; now it is being eyed by Wall Street.
“Don’t get the idea that I’ve turned green,” Pickens tells the Guardian in the Dallas offices of his new venture Mesa Power. “My business is making money, and I think this is going to make a lot of money.”
