I like Mr Pickens he is a no BS kind of guy who genuinely acts on what he thinks is right. I can just picture the environmental wackos and the trust fund elitists just savaging him for this with their usual hysterical caterwauling. Not that he cares. but you know there will be the usual knee jerk reactionary type responses. this time, though, I don't think it will work. People are fed up with how congress has behaved as the entire energy policy mess has only made things worse to the point to where it isn't going to go away on its own. That energy bill was the worst joke of legislation I've seen in many years because it solved nothing and created multiple problems. Don't let anyone kid you, Alcohol is a TERRIBLE motor fuel and is a net energy NEGATIVE. By forcing us to use alcohols in our fuel we not only jacked up the prices of fuel AND food, but created a really really crappy fuel to run our vehicles. Another think that came out of that hideous bill that noone is talking about is why the price of diesel is so high. In the same bill, they mandated that diesel fuel must have a sulphur content of no more than 15 ppm down from the previous 500 ppm. What this did was force refiners to change their refining methods to where it is much more expensive to refine. the real irony is that home heating oil and off road diesel still can contain 500 ppm which means that they still burn the same amount of “evil” pollutants. Since our commerce runs on diesel, this makes transporting all of our goods, that much more expensive. thanks Congress!

As long as he's putting his money where his mouth is, then best of luck to his project. The problem with wind power is that you still need the fossil fuel-fired power plants continuing to operate, ready to take up the slack when the wind isn't providing enough force to turn the blades at high enough speed to maximize their power. And how many people will welcome acre upon acre of windwills across the landscape? And of course there's the bird faction in the environmental movement that'll oppose such massive farms in areas of bird migration. If he can surmount all these obstacles as well as provide an economically competitive alternative then perhaps he can engineer a paradigm shift. Only time will tell.

On the other hand, Steve Milloy over at JunkScience.com throws some cold water on the media blitz for wind power and raises the possibility that this is more about helping to keep alive taxpayer subsidies to wind generated power facilities:

http://junkscience.com/ByTheJunkman/20080710.html