T. Boone Pickens likes odds for his energy plan | Business | Chron.com - Houston Chronicle

The plan, which he has spent $50 million to promote, calls for meeting more than 20 percent of the country’s electric needs through wind power and redirecting the nation’s abundant natural gas reserves away from power generation and into fueling cars and trucks.

This would require spending about $1 trillion on building thousands of wind power turbines from the Texas Panhandle to North Dakota and another $200 billion to run transmission lines to major cities. Billions more would be spent helping owners of large vehicle fleets buy natural gas-fueled vehicles.

Pickens has much to gain from his proposal. He’s planning a huge wind farm in North Texas and has large holdings in natural gas as well as investments in firms that convert large vehicles to run on the fuel. But at 80 years old, he says it’s not just about the money.
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Pickens said little about his wind plans Tuesday night, focusing more on natural gas. He called the U.S. natural gas resources ranging from the Barnett Shale formation in Texas to the Haynesville in Louisiana and East Texas to the Marcellus in Appalachia as “the most unbelievable opportunity.”

He said later the omission of his wind plan wasn’t because the economic downturn has slowed his plans to purchase thousands of wind turbines from GE.

“I forgot it,” he said sheepishly afterward. “I did forget to get into wind. But the wind is going to happen. Obama’s going to go with wind.”

Pickens said he has already paid GE about $150  million for wind turbines set to be delivered in 2011 and has dropped plans to hook up the project to the grid with his own transmission lines, hoping instead to tie into the more than $4 billion in projects approved by the Texas Public Utility Commission.