[Assam] Energy PLAN forUSA :Proposed Solution by Pickens

[mc mahant]

Details of the dilemma. The US, he says, is conducting the greatest transfer of wealth overseas in world history. For America, that's $700 billion a year mainly into Middle Eastern hands. (Here in Europe, we are enriching Russians and Norwegians, too, as we pursue largely the same policy.). "What Govt gives-Govt takes Back"
Mr. Pickens' overview starts in Nixon's day as he draws out a graph familiar to many. Then, 24% of US oil requirements were met by imports. By the first Gulf War in 1991, that figure was 42%. Today, it's almost 70%
 
. This situation is something that the 80-yr-old describes as a bunch of fools without a plan: "You're better off with a fool with a plan, than a genius without one," he recently told a morning TV host.
Mr. Pickens has a pie chart to round off that hockey stick curve he'd just drawn.
In power generation, where half comes from coal, natural gas accounts for 22% of US electricity supply. "This is what I want to go to work on," he says.
 
Proposed solution. To do so, he proposes harnessing a wind corridor so long and powerful that it makes the US the Saudi Arabia of renewable energy. >From north to south of the center of the continent, he shows a corridor colored orange to point out the largest unbroken wind resource in the world.
His plan would harness the wind power to displace the 22% pie slice of natural gas used in power generation and shift it into transport fuels.
In June, the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources heard out Mr. Pickens on his calls for a joined-up national transmission system to distribute renewable energy. A Wall Street Journal reporter snagged the choice quote: "If we take the natural gas we're using for electrical generation and move it to transportation," he told the committee, "we can replace 38% of our foreign oil imports. And that, sports fans, is a real number."
In fact, he says, it could reduce the bill for imported oil by $300 billion each year. The transmission system under discussion would be capable of moving 200,000 MW of wind and solar thermal energy for an investment of about $70 billion.
Compressed natural gas (CNG) in vehicles, while still exotic in the US, has grown rapidly in number over the past three years. Three million vehicles, many of them manufactured by US companies, have been added to a CNG vehicle fleet of five million vehicles. But while General Motors makes 19 vehicle platforms here in Europe and elsewhere for natural gas, at home, it makes only one. There are just 142,000 natural gas vehicles in the US. Having advocated a switch to natural gas vehicles since 1988, Mr. Pickens says that a short-sighted focus on avoiding up-front investment has left the country blind-sided.
"The way we've operated, it's almost like 'send us the oil, never mind the price,' and now we're in the trap, we're caught, ... and these $700 billion a year will bring this country to its knees," he told the Senate committee.
 
Other options? To deal with the annual oil bill before it cripples the economy, the only rapid solution is renewable energy, he says. "Nuclear is just going to take too long... we think that if you called this an emergency, which I believe it is, we could achieve this plan in 10 years."
Mr. Pickens has made his start. In Pampa, Texas, he has already purchased a substantial number of the turbines that will power a 4,000-MW wind park—the world's largest. He says that wind is already competitive with cleaned-up coal and that in the near future solar thermal energy will make a similar breakthrough as wind in the US Southwest.
His message will find its critics. There will be those in our own industry who raise their hands at the infrastructure costs of compressing natural gas for road fuel. There will be those calling for natural gas to be used first to curtail carbon-intensive coal generation.
There may be a grander design, but plans that work must find their way into people's hearts and minds. A hasty critic might easily miss a hand of genius in this man's plan. It combines a call to slash an energy import bill that scandalizes America with an ambitious vision to do something amazing in a time scale you can touch and feel.
It puts investment and manufacturing jobs into the heart of the US, while reducing dependence on regions that Americans and Europeans increasingly resent fighting over.
Not insignificantly, it uses one of the best campaign Websites, www.pickensplan.com, I've seen.  HP 
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