Hooray for T. Boone Pickens on wind power. I wish there were more like him.
Pickens is espousing a renewable energy plan as if he were JFK announcing plans for a manned moon shot in June, 1961.Oil baron Pickens wants to take advantage of the “wind corridor” from Canada to West Texas. The first part of “The Pickens Plan” is a 5,000 mega watt wind, coal and natural gas generating station in Pampa, Texas just northeast of Amarillo. Coal and natural gas would back up the wind turbines during slack times.
We need a thousand more billionaires like Pickens who take seriously the need to get off oil. Certainly the government has been pathetically negligent (save Jimmy Carter) in the near half decade we’ve known our oil supplies would be constrained. Pickens was quoted in a CNN.com story today as saying $600 billion in annual oil imports is the single biggest threat to the U.S. economy. Do ya think? Just look at what the stock market has reacted to for the past month.
Of course, this is the same Pickens who wants to aggressively sell water from Ogallala Aquifer in the Texas panhandle through his company Mesa Water.
Almost every automaker has had to 'pick a side' when it comes to alternative fuel options and ways to divest from a reliance on gasoline. Fiat is looking to back compressed natural gas or liquid propane as an interim solution.
Plastic may not be the most beloved of materials to the more environmentally minded, but Plasti 2012 aimed to mold a different opinion of the material in people's minds.
The rare earth element market has become steadily more rational, and new sources coming online will continue to reduce costs. Still, it is unlikely that prices will drop to their former lows.
Against a backdrop of mounting product complexity and a need to keep a lid on development costs, companies are recognizing a need to make simulation a more integral part of the design process. In response, vendors in the CAD world are building out CAE functionality as part of their CAD suites while simulation vendors are building tighter integrations to leading CAD tools. Keith Meintjes, Ph.D., Practice Manager, Simulation and Analysis at CIMdata, Inc., joins Design News CAD Editor Beth Stackpole in this radio program to explore the new face of integrated CAD and CAE, how companies are benefitting from this tighter partnership between platforms, and how integrating CAE earlier in the development cycle pays off in optimized product designs.
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