Solomonia: Green West

Saturday, September 13, 2008

T. Boone Pickens can't read his lines. Squinting at his teleprompter, he is posing in front of a mile-long ribbon of wind turbines, churning against an endless Texas sky. Pickens is in Sweetwater, a town of 12,000 that bills itself as the nation's wind-energy capital, to shoot a commercial urging Americans to put themselves on a new energy diet: cutting out imported oil--which costs $700 billion a year--in favor of domestically produced sources such as wind and natural gas. "Our dependence on foreign oil means that we are buying from our enemies," he drawls into the camera, veering from the script. At this, the director walks onto the set, frowning his disapproval. "Don't want me to say 'enemies', huh?" Pickens deadpans as he drops his head in mock shame and scuffs his cowboy boot in the dirt. "How 'bout 'Some friends and a few a--holes?' That better?"

With that kind of blunt talk--and an estimated $3 billion fortune to back it up with action--Pickens, who last made headlines for funding the Swift Boat attack ads against John Kerry in 2004, has put himself back in the spotlight in time for the 2008 presidential election. It's an audacious act of rebranding: the flamboyant 80-year-old oilman and onetime corporate raider reborn as green wildcatter and the Web's first senior blog star. Since it was launched a month ago, www.pickensplan.com has cracked the top-1,000 list of most heavily trafficked sites worldwide, according to the Internet marketing firm Quantcast.

If you haven't yet heard of the Pickens Plan, then you've no doubt been on vacation: he has flooded TV and radio with thousands of ads urging viewers to log on to his Web site and demand that Washington overhaul the country's energy infrastructure. "The American people know something is wrong as far as energy is concerned," he tells NEWSWEEK. "They don't think they are being told the truth."

Just don't mistake Pickens for a tree-hugger...

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[Speaking of Green places, I've received requests from Flickr viewers for more information about solar power in Israel after they saw this picture.]

Posted by Mary Madigan at 11:23 AM on Saturday, Sep 13, 2008 | Comments (6)
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6 Comments

#1 Charles Barton | September 13, 2008 12:20 PM

Pickens acknowledges that with out government subsidies he would not be interested in the wind business. Wind is far less reliable than nuclear reactors as a electrical source.

#2 Mary | September 13, 2008 12:32 PM

From the article:

Pickens favors drilling offshore and in Alaska, and more nuclear power if it will mean importing less oil. "I'm pro-everything,"

Wind and nuclear are both useful options.

#3 Eddie | September 13, 2008 1:04 PM

You can not rely on wind turbines to directly supply power to communities due to the variabilities of the wind.

What can be done is use electricity generated by variable wind (or tidal water flow or solar) turbine driven generators to break water down to hydrogen and oxygen, collect and compress these gases and use them as fuels to power fossil fuel powered electric generators.

#4 Cynic | September 14, 2008 1:36 AM

With regard to solar power in Israel, that picture shows the solar water heaters which during the summer months, basically from June to September, when all hot water needs are generated by the sun and one does not need any carbon fuel generated energy for heating. Makes for a nice saving on electricity usage.
In winter by raising the water even a few degrees higher from cold to slightly warm saves on kilowatts.

Nappy-headed Ho' replied to comment from Eddie | September 18, 2008 2:18 AM

#3 Eddie:

You can not rely on wind turbines to directly supply power to communities due to the variabilities of the wind

A bigger problem is that you have to build transmission lines from the sparsely populated, rural areas where the wind farms are to the urban areas where the electricity is consumed, and that's proving to be very difficult because of objections from the green BANANAs.

(Put a NIMBY on steroids and you get a BANANA: Build Absolutely Nothing Anwhere Near Anything.)

If you can't build transmission lines, you can probably forget about the expensive pipelines for hydrogen and oxygen. Is it economical -- both financially and from the perspective of wanting an net gain in energy, not a net loss -- to store the energy in chemical form, compress the gases into liquids and transport the fuel by train or truck?

#6 Jackson Gordon | January 15, 2010 12:56 AM

Thanks. some great infomation here keep up the good work . I cannot really leave a more constructive comment as i'm abit out of my depth, but i will be checking back here for further updates.