Pickens shelves West Texas pipe project for wind-power vision

An infamous project with a famous backer will affect less property than first thought under plans to be presented to state regulators within the month.

Billionaire alternative power proponent T. Boone Pickens abandoned a partnership between projects piping water and power from West Texas to focus on delivering electricity from a gigantic wind farm under development.

Pickens had proposed a 250-mile transmission line and pipeline route joining resources in the Panhandle to customers in North Texas. The $1.3 billion project would have, at full capacity, delivered five times Lubbock’s annual water consumption and power to between 1 million to 1.2 million homes.

The Roberts County Freshwater Supply District, a tiny government dominated by Pickens employees, would have provided eminent domain powers if landowners refused to negotiate along any chosen route for the lines.

Officials with the company said last week they have indefinitely suspended the joint project to focus on electric transmission.

“The freshwater supply district is out of the picture now,” project spokesman Steve Zarangue said. “Mesa Power and the freshwater supply district are no longer in play, as far as what’s being done now.”

Mesa plans instead to pursue a more than $300 million, 170-mile power line route from its wind farm to equipment in Oklaunion through the state utility commission.

The project will now require a narrower path, without the water line, and it needs approval from Texas public utility commissioners. The current preferred route would affect 300 landowners, down from the original estimated 650, Zarangue said.

Mesa BP Capital spokesman Jay Rosser said the decision had nothing to do with a U.S. Department of Justice decision that basically killed changes to state law that allowed the creation of the freshwater district board.

Legislators roundly approved last session a bill that allowed landowners, rather than registered voter residents, of a freshwater district to serve on a board. The federal department determined over the summer that the legislation could disenfranchise voters and effectively nullified the law.

The district will continue to exist and need to appoint new board members, but it was not clear when that would happen, general counsel Monty Humble said.

“One of these days I suppose somebody will think about it,” Humble said. “It’s somewhat down toward the bottom of my list of things to do.”

The new Mesa Transmission would instead focus on a line that could immediately deliver 1,000 megawatts of wind power to the rest of the state when the first phase of Pickens wind turbines comes online in 2011, Rosser said.

The project proposes to ultimately transmit half of its power alone and use power lines to be developed later throughout the Panhandle to move the rest.

Documents proposing the new transmission line could be filed with utility commissioners within weeks.

“We fully realize and appreciate the impact this project will have, from an economic standpoint, in the Texas Panhandle, and we are going to move forward as expeditiously as we can to make it happen,” Rosser said.

By Elliott Blackburn | AVALANCHE-JOURNAL

lubbockonline.com

21 September 2008

Tags: Wind power, Wind energy

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