Oil Billionaire T. Boone Pickens Turns To Wind

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For those of you not fortunate enough to know who T. Boone Pickens is, let me give you a brief rundown: he's an egomaniac, oilman, and owns a hedge fund named BP Capital Management. He's worth 3 billion dollars, and has given 230 million-plus to the athletic department of Oklahoma State University since 2005. He also gave 3 million dollars to "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth," the stars of the 2004 presidential campaign. Suffice to say, I think he's a bad, bad, man. And yet, even he knows that oil isn't going to hold on forever: he just spent 2 billion dollars to start a wind farm in Texas.

Just how much wind power will 2 billion dollars buy you? 667 turbines from GE will eventually produce 1,000 megawatts of electricity, capable of powering 300,000 American homes. To provide a frame of reference, that's the size of present-day New Orleans, Tampa, or St. Louis. This however, is just a drop in the ocean-- Mesa Power, the company through which T. Boone (T-Bone?) Pickens is running the project, has established this as just the first stage of four, with an eventual generating capacity of 4,000 megawatts.

Known as the Pampa Wind Project, the wind farm will be in the Texas panhandle, and will be superior to an oil field in a vast number of ways, but one, especially that matters most to Pickens: "You find an oil field, it peaks and starts declining, and you've got to find another one to replace it. With wind there's no deadline curve."

[WSJ][Reuters]

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