The T. Boone Pickens Plan - What Is It?

Back on the 8th of July this year, there was a pretty big announcement by a good ol’ boy we all know as T. Boone Pickens, which stated that he had a master plan to help reduce our dependence on foreign oil by utilizing something we have plenty of here at home – wind. It wasn’t a huge surprise, but the enthusiasm and hope it brings for many of us is exciting enough to make us want to pay attention.

Here are the two key strategies of the T. Boone Pickens Plan:

1. Invest approximately 1 trillion dollars to build a massive wind turbine farm to use for power generation.

2. Take the natural gas that was being used for power generation before the wind farm took over, and shift it towards fueling automobiles.

Mr. Pickens, the good Oklahoma boy that he is, is predicting that if “The Plan” goes live and operational, that we’ll cut down the annual oil spend from $700 billion to $400 billion dollars – staggering numbers. Think of what our country could do with an extra $300 billion?

As taken from Wikipedia, here is his three step plan to get things going:

1.  Using the United States’ wind corridor, private industry will fund the installation of thousands of wind turbines in the wind belt, generating enough power to provide 20 percent or more of the country’s electricity supply.

2.  Again funded by the private sector, electric power transmission lines will be built, connecting these wind power generating sites with the power grid, providing energy to the population centers in the Midwest, South and Western regions of the country.

3.  With the energy from wind now available to serve the large population centers in key areas of the country, the natural gas that was historically used to fuel natural gas-fired power plants can be redirected and used as a fuel for private cars and thousands of vehicles in the transportation system. This reduces the need for imported gasoline and diesel fuels.

As you might have recently seen on TV or online, Pickens has shown that he’s pretty dead on serious about getting this underway. As a matter of fact, sources say that he plans on spending upwards of $58 million on his media campaign to promote the Pickens Plan. He’ll be leveraging newspapers, TV, Myspace, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and everything in between to get the word out.

Of course, there are some critics, and they’re making sure word gets out about what they think the Pickens Plan will do to us. Rob Bradley of the Institute for Energy Research took and in-depth look at the plan, and reported that, “The Pickens plan relies on special government mandates and subsidies to pick the pockets of American taxpayers and ratepayers”. Also, Bradley isn’t a huge fan of wind power after he was quoted saying “Wind power is inefficient, unreliable, expensive, and a burden to the electricity grid. Natural gas vehicles are a niche product at best. As such, this plan is Robin Hood in reverse: taking from average Americans to subsidize wealthy political entrepreneurs. Finally, the Pickens Plan misdirects the public and policymakers from real solutions: less government for more abundant and affordable energy”.

So what do you think? Is this just a plan for Mr. Pickens to get even richer than he already is? After all, he’s ranked right now as the 117th richest man in America, with roughly 3 billion in the bank. Maybe this windy plan is an ingenious strategy to bump that number down a few dozen notches? Only time will tell, and due to the nature and sheer size of the project, unfortunately we won’t know for a couple years down the road at least.