Forget Wind. Pickens Turns Focus to Gas. By Clifford Krauss, NYTimes, January 14, 2010. "T. Boone Pickens spent much of the last two years, and $62 million of his fortune, on an advertising and public relations offensive in which he tried to persuade Americans to embrace his Pickens Plan. It called for a vast expansion of wind energy to displace natural gas, freeing the natural gas for use in vehicles, thus displacing foreign oil... now Mr. Pickens is turning up the volume, and changing his pitch with some extra alarm bells... His aides hope that a stronger message, focused on national security, will be effective after the attempted Christmas Day airliner bombing and other terrorist actions...
"In the old version of the plan, Mr. Pickens called on the country to build thousands of wind turbines from Texas to Canada and install transmission lines to deliver the new power to cities across the country. Now, he is playing down wind because he says it has become almost impossible to finance a wind project, largely because cheap gas has made wind power less competitive. His focus is now almost entirely on gas. He wants the president to convert the entire federal automobile fleet to natural gas. Then he wants Congress to give large tax credits to companies that use natural gas vehicles, and filling stations that install the necessary equipment. By Mr. Pickens's estimate, just fueling a small percentage of the country's trucks and buses with gas could displace as much as 8% of oil imports within seven years."
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