News & Views

Wind power will allow us to purchase $300 billion less in foreign oil every year. That's the upshot of an amazing plan presented by T. Boone Pickens. The plan, known as "The Pickens Plan," may really be the salvation for our ever growing dependence on foreign oil. He has found a way for us to replace oil imports with wind!

According to Pickens, we now import about 70% of the oil we use in the United States. This figure is nearly triple the percentage we were importing in 1970. But the real kicker is that the foreign oil costs us a whopping $700 billion a year! That's money taken straight out of our pockets and sent overseas.

Pickens is working to help us stop sending so much of our own money to foreign interests, while creating more jobs, saving us money on fuel costs, and reducing our environmental impact. To accomplish this, Pickens wants us to utilize our wind power. What is odd about his enthusiasm for wind power, is that Pickens made his fortune in oil.

You may wonder how building wind farms will reduce our dependence on foreign oil and reduce transportation costs. Oil is used primarily for transportation, while wind is used to generate electricity. You may be thinking, "he's pushing electric cars."  You would be wrong. If he's not suggesting we drive electric cars, then how are we going to make transportation costs cheaper at the same time? Oil is going up in price. How does all of this fit together?

This is where the genius of his plan really becomes evident. Pickens says we should use wind power to replace natural gas for generating electricity and then use that extra natural gas to power our transportation. This is one of those ideas that is so simple it's brilliant. It makes one wonder why nobody thought of this before. There are already 8 million natural gas vehicles on the road, so we know it works well as a transportation fuel. But can we really reduce that $700 billion number by using natural gas?  And if so, by how much?

Currently, we generate 22% of our electricity using natural gas. If we were to generate that 22% using wind power, we could apply all of that natural gas toward transportation. According to Pickens that would reduce our oil imports by 38%, to the tune of around $300 billion.

So the next question becomes, "can we generate enough electricity to replace the natural gas?" The Department of Energy released the results of a study last April which seem to verify that it is indeed possible. Take a look at the Department of Energy wind map, and you will notice that the United States has more land area with usable levels of wind than anyone else in the world. Best of all, we have a huge "wind corridor" running straight down the middle of the rural portions of our nation, which will make for easier east-west distribution of the electricity.

The location of the "wind corridor" also means we'll be utilizing lots of wide open fields surrounding small communities that have been hit hard by changes in agriculture over the past few decades. Putting wind farms on all of that land will not only generate the electricity we need, but it will revitalize those ravaged rural communities. Farm owners will have an additional source of income by becoming wind generation sites.

There are other benefits from the Pickens plan, too. Additional jobs will be created from the manufacture, operation, and maintenance of the wind generation facilities and equipment. A larger percentage of the nation's vehicles will burn natural gas, which burns much cleaner than gasoline, with fewer emissions. The Honda Civic GX Natural Gas Vehicle pictured is the cleanest internal-combustion vehicle in the world, according to the EPA. Further, natural gas is cheaper than gasoline, which will save us all money. Plus, I personally feel better knowing we wouldn't be handing as much of our cash over to nations that despise us and our way of life.

One of the things I like most about the Pickens plan is that it can be implemented fairly quickly. I saw Senate hearings where numbers were tossed around about costs and timetable. It was stated that this plan could be fully implemented within 10 years at a cost of about $17 billion per year of private industry investment. Compare that cost with the (constantly rising) $700 billion per year we are already handing to other nations to purchase oil, and it seems trivial. Put another way, spending $17 billion per year for 10 years could save us $300 billion a year forever. That's less than half the amount we are spending each year on the war in Iraq!

At this point, I can't see any logical reason why both Presidential candidates and all of Congress shouldn't be jumping up and down to implement this plan. In fact, I don't see why we need to wait for private industry to make that $17 billion per year investment. This should be an infrastructure expenditure like the national highway system or the Hoover dam.

In a nutshell, we should just do it! If we need to, bring the troops home and put THEM to work helping to build it. If we as Americans pull together to make a change, it can happen much faster. Let's put some pressure on our elected officials to make this happen quickly. The quicker it happens, the quicker we can stop pumping our own cash into the hands of other countries.

Labels: Congress, Environment