Global Warming Examiner

How You Can Invest in the Pickens Plan

The key to Pickens' plan is what our nation does with coal. If we continue to build coal-fired power plants (with all the carbon emissions) then the lower cost of electricity will not support the building of wind farms. If we restrict or prohibit new coal-fired power plants then long term marginal electric costs will be based on the cost of natural gas-fired power plants. In this scenario, wind power is cost effective and will displace natural gas as Pickens envisions. That will free up natural gas for other uses like displacing more expensive petroleum to power our automobiles.

I don't believe many more coal-fired plants will be built because environmentalists have been successful in challenging them on economic grounds:
Global Warming will cause restrictions on future carbon emissions so coal plant operators may not be able to recover their capital costs over the long operating life of these plants. If built the shareholders will loose money because the public utility commissions that regulate these plants will not allow the cost to be passed to the consumers and without that guarantee the utility companies will not build the plants.

Natural Gas fired electric production costs have now become the base cost for electric production in this country.

(Clean coal has too much carbon emissions and sequestering coal plant emissions has not be shown to work yet and may never work at an acceptable cost for large scale plants.)