A couple of articles about T. Boone Pickens, the man behind the Pickens Plan in the green media yesterday:

• Earth2Tech is asking about the reported loss from Pickens’ natural gas company, Clean Energy Fuels. A little unfair in the headline perhaps since the company has improved relative to the same quarter last year, and is showing increased revenues too.
• Energy Power Alternatives asks “T Boone Pickens - Visionary Or Profiteer?” Looking at the details of the plan, they seem to be concluding that the main component of the plan is the switch to natural gas for automotive use. It goes on to say that the wind energy component, which at best would supply 20% of the needs of the US, is included to “make his proposal politically more attractive.”

Interesting to see that neither of the articles have anything to say about his water project in Texas, and the controversy surrounding that project and the motives for the wind energy being to make it simpler for him to run a pipeline for his water project that we reported on a while back.

A number of people are questioning the reasons behind the Pickens Plan. The Zaproot video (right) is the first time I’ve seen it claimed that the plan is really nothing more than an attempt to green wash a business plan that is pretty unfriendly to the environment, and has been met with quite a bit of resistance.

The claim Zaproot is making is that the real reason Pickens is pushing his wind farm plan is to cover up the environmental damage that Mesa Water, one of his companies, would cause by draining the ground water from 200,000 acres of land in Roberts County, Texas and piping it to western Texas.

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Katie Fehrenbacher at Earth2Tech has commented on an article in Sunday’s NY Times looking at the differences in two plans for getting off the addiction to oil. We think we have a better plan than either of them, inspired in part by both of them. Let’s look at the two plans first…

First up is Shai Agassi’s Project Better Place, which is trying to solve the problem by means of pure electric cars with exchangeable battery packs for range extension. Basically, for typical daily driving you run off the battery which you recharge at night. When you need to drive further, you can pull into a battery changing station and they’ll swap out your flat battery for a newly charged pack. Even better, the car is free (in the same way that your cell phone is free, when you sign a two year contract). Just pay a monthly contract that is similar to the monthly fuel bill you’re paying and they’ll lend you the car for free.

The Pickens Plan on the other hand is promoting the use of natural gas for vehicle power, and wind power for electricity. Natural gas solves the range problem in pretty much the same way as gasoline does today - you pull into a gas station and simply refill. CNG is already in use for vehicles in the US, so this is a well known technology; many taxis servicing the airport here in San Francisco are already CNG fueled, as are some of the buses and even some garbage trucks.

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In the first six months of 2008 the USA generated more electricity from wind power than any other country in the world. The previous number 1, Germany, still has more capacity (around 23,000 MW compared to 18,000 MW), but the winds were stronger here in the US it seems allowing the US to actually generate more power.

In terms of percentage of power generated by wind turbines though, the US is still a long way behind other countries at the top of the wind power table. Germany generates 7% of its electricity from wind power, Denmark 20%. The USA comes in with just over 1%.

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