Why T. Boone Pickens Could Be the Best Hope for Wind Energy

The Texas oilman’s ‘green conversion’ is all about business

All of a sudden, everyone seems to be talking about wind energy. Sleek, gray wind turbines, rising hundreds of feet into the sky, rotate in steady, clockwise loops in television ads that pop up almost hourly. Both presidential candidates have heartily endorsed wind power. Even oil giants like Shell and Chevron are on board. Yet this spring, when the Department of Energy looked at wind power, it found huge hurdles, particularly the question of how to send electricity from the blustery Midwest to the big coastal cities.

The logistical and technological challenges remain, so why the new gust of interest? Four-dollar-a-gallon gas and concerns about oil, for starters. But the emergence of a Texas oilman and 1980s corporate raider as a national spokes-man for wind energy is transforming the playing field. T. Boone Pickens isn’t offering any new technological solutions, but his endorsement is the most emphatic signal that wind energy has moved beyond the realm of the green lobby. It has gone mainstream, led by a titan of business with decades of oil experience. Returning to the national spotlight at the age of 80, Pickens is everywhere these days, traipsing across cable news shows and before congressional hearings. Moving beyond his reputation as a Republican partisan who funded the controversial swift boat ads attacking John Kerry in 2004, he has personally pitched his “Pickens Plan” to both Barack Obama and John McCain. And he is starring in his own TV ads, touting his plan to wean America off oil. Pickens wants 20 percent of U.S. electricity to come from wind power in 10 years, in the process helping to free up natural gas to become the country’s main transportation fuel.

U.S. News & World Report