Pickens' Energy Plan

My plan calls for taking the energy generated by wind and using it to replace a significant percentage of the natural gas that is now being used to fuel our power plants. Today, natural gas accounts for about 22% of our electricity generation in the U.S. We can use new wind capacity to free up the natural gas for use as a transportation fuel. That would displace more than one-third of our foreign oil imports. Natural gas is the only domestic energy of size that can be used to replace oil used for transportation, and it is abundant in the U.S. It is cheap and it is clean. With eight million natural-gas-powered vehicles on the road world-wide, the technology already exists to rapidly build out fleets of trucks, buses and even cars using natural gas as a fuel. Of these eight million vehicles, the U.S. has a paltry 150,000 right now. We can and should do so much more to build our fleet of natural-gas-powered vehicles.

I applaud T. Boone's vision and leadership, but even though wind is free and natural gas is much cheaper than oil, there are other economic realities that I think are being ignored. The natural gas infrastructure needs to move to liquified natural gas, which represents a huge capital investment. And for even 10 million U.S. households to replace their current cars with nat gas vehicles represents about $1-2 trillion, much of which could go to foreign car manufacturers.

The variable (operating, transmission, and maintenance) costs of wind generated power are actually comparable to current conventional generation. The cap ex for new wind infrastructure presents a significant cost.