T. Boone Pickens

California voters have roundly rejected a $5 billion alternative energy proposal that was largely a front for the natural gas interests of Texas billionaire T. Boone Pickens.

It's amazing what you can pick up sitting up at the right luncheon table in New York. The herb-crusted halibut and fingerling potatoes had just hit our plates and we were waiting for Boone Pickens to give the keynote at Chadbourne & Parke's Green Business Summit II at the New York Hilton.

Pickens was the big draw thanks to tens of millions of dollars he's been pouring into a campaign promoting -- what else -- the Pickens Plan. It's his grand energy plan and it goes like this:

1. Build lots of wind farms to generate electricity.
2. Then stop using natural gas to generate electricity.
3. Use that natural gas to power vehicles instead.
4. Get off foreign oil.

It's green. It's energy independent. And it's all-American. Too bad, as you'll see below, it's a dumb way to go about solving energy problems and it will never happen. There are cheaper and more efficient ways to go -- only they don't enrich Pickens.

To prove his green bona fides and sell his plan to the public, Pickens announced he was building the biggest wind farm in the world in Texas. (And we fell for it. Not only once, but twice.) The Pampa Wind Project, as it's called, plans to erect 2700 wind turbines across tens of thousands of barren acres in the Panhandle to feed 1 million homes 170 miles away. Mesa Power, the company Pickens created to run the project, announced back in May that it had placed a $2 billion order for 667 wind turbines with GE. Terms were not disclosed. Still he earned the very public support of Carl Pope, head of the Sierra Club, and lunch with Al Gore (burger and fries).

So it was pretty surprising when the neighbor to my right, a guy who specializes in the sale of distressed assets -- let's call him Tim McGillicuddy -- started talking about Pickens selling off his wind turbines. We had spent a good part of the morning listening to a panel deliver bad news about how the credit crunch and plummeting oil prices are slamming renewable energy projects. Maybe Pickens had his own bad news to share about Pampa?

"You think that's what he's going to talk about?"

"Goodness, no," Tim said.

"Oh. Then you're just speculating?"

"Nope. I heard it from a banker friend of mine who was in the room when Pickens' people made the offer."

Poor Tim didn't know he was sitting next to a blogger. I was wearing a suit.

It does our heart good to see an oil tycoon spend his money to tell the truth. There’s too little of that today. But T. Boone Pickens, the Texas oil billionaire, is investing $58 million on a television ad campaign (Youtube) to explain that we can’t drill our way out of the current energy crisis.

Instead, he says, we should build wind farms from Texas to North Dakota, and install the transmission lines necessary to move the power to where we need it. That will liberate natural gas from its most common current use – generating electricity – and allow us to use it to power our vehicles, Pickens says.

He’s right about the wind part and wrong about the best use of natural gas.

Eighty-year-old Dallas oil man T. Boone Pickens has just delivered an ambitious, Texas-sized energy plan to the whole of America, in which he claims that wind could supply 20 percent of the nation's power within 10 years.

The proposal went live today at www.pickensplan.com.

You may recall that the nation's own Department of Energy proposed that same target -- in double the time.

So what's the Pickens secret? First, generate enough wind power so that America no longer needs natural gas for its power needs. And then use that natural gas to power a full one-third of the US vehicle fleet.

Sierra Club’s Carl Pope has discussed the plan with T. Boone himself. Pope's take?

To put it plainly, T. Boone Pickens is out to save America.

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