Green Leaf Report

Fast Company and BusinessWeek are currently running opposing articles on T. Boone Pickens and his wind/water plans for North Texas. The Fast Company article addresses his plans for a $10B wind farm in the panhandle and mentions the water project as almost an afterthought, while the BusinessWeek article talks about the $100M Pickens’ has already spent on his $3B water project and calls the wind power plans an afterthought:

“The wind is meant to sweeten the deal,” says Representative Chisum. “The big money for Pickens is in the water.”

My primary discomfort with both deals is that Pickens’ discusses the wind and water projects as necessary to meet future demand increases for a city like Dallas.  I don’t want to support an already wasteful city with more sources on top of the currently wasted energy and water.  I want those wind turbines in the panhandle to start supporting Dallas so we can remove some of our dependency on coal.  We’re already warned not to go outside most summer days in Dallas because the air quality is so bad; if this wind farm can help, it’s a good idea.  If we still cannot go outside but have more energy available, well, so what.

The water deal is the flip side of the sustainability argument.  I’ve written about the Texas “Rules of Capture” before, and I still find it distasteful.  Removing nonrenewable groundwater from an arid part of the state and shipping it into Dallas to support big city water usage just feels to me like giving a pile of endangered animal burgers to a 500 pound man because he says he’s still hungry.  Enough.  Yesterday morning I passed two flooded streets on my short commute to work.  It wasn’t raining, those two different streets were flooded by broken sprinkler heads.  We need to work on stopping the waste before depleting a nonrenewable feature of the state.

For both the wind and water projects, adding more supply to an already wasteful city isn’t the optimal solution.  I like a two pronged approach for the wind project: reduce consumption in Dallas while bringing renewable resources online.  For the water, I’m afraid too much of the valuable resource will end up in our storm drains.  Either way that Texas decides on the projects, this should be quite a debate.