Chinese to Build $17.6 Billion Wind Farm and Pickens to Scale Down His


China will soon begin construction of a $17.6 billion (120-billion yuan) wind project in Gansu province. For Reuters story, click here. According to the report, released by the Xinhua the official news agency of China,
[t]he project, also called "the Three Gorges Dam on the land" could be China's biggest wind power station, with an installed capacity of 20 GigaWatts (GW) by 2020.
The project has the ability to support an installed capacity of 40 GW.

According to the Wall Street Journal’s Keith Johnson, the Chinese plan at this wind farm to have 5 GWs ready in 2010 and the entire 20 GW online by 2020. For WSJ story, click here. The story goes on to compare this to T. Boone Picken’s wind farm in west Texas.
T. Boone Pickens’ massive but stalled Texas wind farm aims for 4 gigawatts. And there’s more: China has another half-dozen mammoth wind farms in the works, each on a similar scale.
And when comparing the costs of the Chinese project to Mr. Pickens,
[e]ither way, when you crunch the numbers, China’s new clean-energy poster child looks stunningly cheap: less than $1 million per megawatt. That’s three times cheaper than Mr. Pickens’ proposed U.S. wind farm.
Speaking of Mr. Pickens, he announced Monday July 6, 2009 that his plan to build the world’s largest wind farm in Pampa Texas is off due to a lack of the needed transmission lines. For Dallas Morning News story, click here. Mr. Pickens is shifting his focus to five or six smaller wind farms in the Midwest and possibly Texas. Prior to some setback with the large site in Pampa, Mr. Pickens had already ordered the turbines necessary that will be delivered in the first quarter of 2011 and he needs locations to put them. He and his company are currently looking at
six sites, including places in Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Kansas and Texas. He aims to build three or four wind farms with around 150 turbines each.
Posted: 07/07/09