Everyone's favorite name in clean tech, T. Boone Pickens, has a plan to make the United States less dependent on foreign oil, and he's taking his case to the people, a la fellow Texan, Ross Perot.
The plan is simple (too simple?): replace natural gas power plants with wind farms to generate electricity and use thew newly freed-up our natural gas to power our cars, weaning the country off foreign oil.
And if Pickens just so happens to have a stake in the world's largest wind farm in Texas and happens to benefit from America's new energy security, then all the better.
Congress hasn't exactly jumped all over the idea, so he's put together some slick TV ads and a social media campaign, to push his plan. Unlike Perot, who actually ran for President, Pickens merely wants to make sure the next President is hip to his program.
"Building new wind generation facilities and better utilizing our natural gas resources can replace more than one-third of our foreign oil imports in 10
years. But it will take leadership," the Pickens Plan website warns.
There are a couple of hitches in Pickens plan. First, wind is a grid engineer's nightmare. As the Wall Street Journal Environmental Capital blog has noted, wind is intermittent, which is tough on the grid, and middle American wind farms will need new transmission lines built from them to where people actually use the power.
But even assuming those issues work out, hitching our nation's collective transportation wagon to natural gas could put pressure on farmers and food prices. As we detailed a few weeks ago, the first step in making nitrogen fertilizer is to cook natural gas at high pressure with more natural gas. Fertilizer prices have doubled. Ammonia, an intermediate step between gas and fertilizer, has tripled in price. If Pickens' plan succeeds in capturing attention from the people who make decisions, could we end up in yet another food versus fuel bind?
Image: T. Boone Pickens, courtesy of boonepickens.com
See Also:
DOE Report Says More Wind Than Coal Planned for US Grid
DOE Report: Wind Could Power 20 Percent of US Grid by 2030
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