A Fatal Flaw

If T. Boone Pickens can’t make wind power an economic reality, who can?

The famed oil tycoon announced last year that he wanted to build in Texas one of the world’s biggest wind farms.

Under his PickensPlan, he initially signed on to buy more than 600 turbines that would be able to generate up to 1,000 megawatts; the ultimate goal was to quadruple that figure.

But his plan hit a few snags. First, he announced in November that he was having trouble lining up financing. Something kind of global credit crunch was to blame, he said.

But the real hurdle was more fundamental: Pickens said last week he was pulling the plug on the whole project because of a lack of transmission lines that would carry the power from the windswept plains of Texas, where he planned to install the turbines, to the cities, where it’s needed. The power lines aren’t there, nobody is stepping up to build them, and with Pickens having trouble with financing, he couldn’t cover them himself.

We’ve touched on this concept before, and it’s a bit distressing that such an ambitious project would fail because of such a fundamental flaw.

So what does this say about the future of wind power? I guess that it’s still out there, in the future.