Pickens tilts for windmills

Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens is a surprising convert to alternative energy and an unlikely wind-power proselytizer, but he is ramping up his campaign to cure the nation’s energy dependence in the face of skeptics who say the effort is too ambitious.

Worried by the massive transfer of wealth to foreign and often unfriendly nations, the Texan last July proposed the Pickens Plan, a rapid national move to wind energy, with a decade’s detour to natural gas, which would serve as a clean “bridge fuel” until we reached the promised land of wind power.

He has been using his considerable influence and money from five decades in the oil industry to persuade Congress to pass legislation encouraging natural gas use, with ranking members in both chambers supporting him.

“Every time you lower that $500 billion we spend on oil, it’s good,” Mr. Pickens said. “People tell me we need to spend more on infrastructure. The infrastructure will come. We’re making that big bill cheaper. Do that, and you create jobs. ”

As he canvasses the country for support, Mr. Pickens has talked more about job creation since last fall’s financial meltdown. The 81-year-old runs quickly through his plan’s other pillars: creating incentives to use natural gas, developing natural gas as a bridge fuel, obtaining up to 22 percent of U.S. energy from wind, and improving the electrical grid.

However, critics say Mr. Pickens’ plans are more of a utopia than a promised land: desirable, eventually necessary, but too much, too soon.

“This [Obama] administration told us to throw fistfuls of dollars at an inefficient energy source with no [profit] margin,” said Stephen Schork, a commodities trader in Philadelphia. “And the dollars will be gone, and energy prices will go back to the stratosphere.”

Mr. Schork said that he is excited about natural gas but that too quick a move to alternative energy “will leave us tilting at windmills.”

“Whether wind or solar is economically viable remains to be seen,” Mr. Schork said. “I wasn’t a believer in the Bush administration’s ethanol push, but all options were open. This administration just seems against oil and gas.”

Blowing in the wind

Mr. Pickens is having trouble installing the transmission lines he needs to carry the power from his wind-farm complex in West Texas after a court denied him eminent domain to string the power lines across residential property.

“It’s been a transmission problem,” Mr. Pickens said. “The transmission lines we thought we’d have won’t be up till 2013.”

Mr. Pickens said he doesn’t “have a garage big enough” to store the turbine blades due to arrive at the site in 2013, meaning it makes economic sense to go ahead with the projects and hope for better luck with the power lines later.

The American Wind Energy Association (AWEA), an interest group in the District, gave the nation’s wind-energy developments a grade of B overall for 2008, but a C- for transmission-capacity growth. If wind-energy producers can’t get the power to markets, power companies can’t use it, and enthusiasm for new projects will fade.

Christine Real de Azua, spokeswoman for the AWEA, said the United States needs to develop a better interstate system of transmission lines.

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