The Pickens Plan is an energy policy proposal announced July 8, 2008, by American businessman T. Boone Pickens. Pickens wanted to reduce American dependence on imported oil by investing approximately $US1 trillion in new wind turbine farms for power generation, which he believed would allow the natural gas used for power generation to be shifted to fuel trucks and other heavy vehicles with Compressed natural gas. Pickens stated that his plan could reduce by $300 billion (43%) the amount the country spends annually on foreign oil.
Proposal The main proposals of the plan are:
Private industry would fund and install thousands of wind turbines in the Great Plains, which Pickens refers to as the potential "wind corridor" of the United States due to favorable wind resources and geographic location. Pickens estimates that these turbines could generate enough power to provide 20 percent or more of the country's electricity supply. Government would pay for electric power transmission lines to connect the turbine farms to the power grid. They would provide energy to the Midwest, South and Western regions of the country. With wind energy providing a large portion of the nation's electricity, the natural gas that is currently used to fuel power plants would be used instead as a fuel for thousands of vehicles. To increase efficiency, the Plan puts an emphasis on natural gas-burning fleets of trucks and buses. Thus, the demand for petroleum products made from imported oil would be reduced.
Timetable Pickens thought his plan that would provide 22% of electricity from wind power and the conversion for vehicles from gasoline to gas could be accomplished in less than 10 years with the right leadership. However, according to Chuck McGowin, senior project manager at the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit organization funded by the electric power industry, the timetable was too tight. Dave Hamilton, director for global warming and energy projects at the Sierra Club agreed: "That is extremely aggressive .. But it's in the right direction. It's a good thing we have an oilman saying we can't drill our way out of this problem." Former U.S. vice president Al Gore, who had spent recent years informing people about global warming, opined that all electricity generation should be completely fossil-fuel free in the next 10 years.
Wind power status and potential
Wind power had been experiencing exponential growth in the United States for several years when Pickens announced his plan. Wind power in Texas grew very rapidly, 2400% from 1999 to 2007. In another large state, California, wind generation increased by 48% in the same period. The cost of wind power generation has decreased by about 80% over the last 20 years because of technological advances and is now cost-competitive with other energy sources. Wind-generated electricity can be produced at 5 to 6 cents per kWh. A yardstick used to determine locations with high potential wind energy production is referred to as Wind Power Density (WPD). It is a calculation relating to the effective force of the wind at a particular location, frequently expressed in terms of the elevation above ground level over a period of time. It takes into account wind velocity and mass. Color coded maps are frequently prepared for a particular area described, for example, as "Mean Annual Power Density at 50 Meters." The results of the above calculation are entered into an index developed by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and referred to as "NREL CLASS." The larger the WPD calculation, the higher it is rated by class. The Pickens Plan called for increasing the installed wind power capacity by at least a factor of ten from its 2008 level by 2018. This would tap only a small fraction of total U.S. wind power potential, which is estimated to be as much as 16 times more than the year-2005 electricity demand in the United States.
Technical issues
Power generation and transmission lines
Pickens says that his plan could generate enough wind power to provide 22 percent of the country's electricity. The Institute for Energy Research (IER), an organization that is funded by the oil industry, disagrees. The IER claims that Pickens' plan relies on government subsidies and that producing large amounts of wind power is not a viable option. Instead, the IER advocates "less government for more abundant and affordable energy." Pickens acknowledges that natural gas would still be required for peak electricity demand and additional infrastructure would be needed to distribute the wind energy across the country. New transmission lines, worth $64 billion to $128 billion, would be needed to carry the power from the wind turbines to the cities. Pickens testified before the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee and said the government should begin building transmission lines for wind-generated power in the same way that President Eisenhower did by declaring an emergency to build the interstate highway system in the 1950s and 1960s. As an alternative, Pickens proposed that the government should provide the right of way on private land and extend tax credits so the private sector can build the lines. Kenneth Medlock III, an energy fellow at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy and a critic of Pickens' Plan, said "A lot of what he's trying to do is add value to a stranded asset." Despite the recession, Denver oil man Philip Anschutz is moving forward with the construction of a wind farm in southern Wyoming and a 900-mile (1,400 km) transmission line to Phoenix, Las Vegas and Southern California.
Intermittency
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