Does Amazon's wind farm hint it might build its 2nd headquarters in Texas?

Fuel Fix:
Sleek white wind turbines, 25 stories tall, rise from the plains of West Texas in Big Spring. Texas is one of the windiest states in the nation and the Panhandle and West Texas are the state's windiest regions. Photo: CAROLYN MARY BAUMAN, STF / KRT

Standing on top of a massive wind turbine, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos christened the online juggernaut's new Texas wind farm.

Bezos broke a bottle of sparkling wine over a turbine at the 253-megawatt Amazon Wind Farm Texas west of Abilene in Scurry County and Seattle-based Amazon posted videos on Twitter and Instagram.

The Texas wind farm is Amazon's largest renewable energy project to date, and it's built and operated by Chicago's Lincoln Clean Energy. One megawatt typically powers 200 homes on a hot Texas day.

The wind farm, which is announced last year, features more than 100 wind turbines designed to help power Amazon's Texas' facilities and much more. The electricity will feed into the overall state grid.

Texas is by far the nation's leader in wind power. In fact, wind provides well more than 15 percent of the state's electricity.

As for the wind farm, the project costs were not released, but Lincoln has described the cost of a 200-megawatt Texas wind farm at about $300 million.

Amazon already has announced smaller wind and solar farms in Indiana, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia.
...
If Amazon did choose Texas for a second headquarters I suspect that the Dallas-Fort Worth area would be a favored site.  It presents a central location to the US and has the transportation infrastructure such n operation would want.   The energy savings to Amazon with a facility in Texas would probably offset the tax benefits other ares are throwing at the deal.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t
Read more

Bin Laden's concern about Zarqawi's remains

James Robbins: ... Bin Laden suggests that President Bush should allow Zarqawi’s body to be returned to his family in Jordan, but this is a matter that is up to the Jordanian government, which so far has not shown much interest in facilitating a homecoming. Bin Laden mocks King Abdullah II, calling him a Coalition minion, and asking “w hat scares you about Abu Musab after he’s dead? You know that his funeral, if allowed to happen, would be a huge funeral showing the extent of sympathy with the mujahedin.” A large crowd would definitely turn out, though most people would be on hand to demonstrate their anger and disgust. Last November’s hotel bombings in Amman , masterminded by Zarqawi, are still fresh in people’s memory, and mentioning them to Jordanians has the same visceral impact as memory of the 9/11 attacks does here. Jordan has adopted a zero-tolerance policy towards those who choose to mourn the country’s least favorite son, and four opposition members of parliament who paid con
Read more