Breakthrough

By Frank Laird, Breakthrough Senior Fellow

I kept wanting to title this blog "Hell freezes over . . ." Seeing T. Boone Pickens on TV promoting wind energy and implicitly criticizing the current administration was more than a little disorienting, not to mention quite a bit of fun. But it also has important implications for promoting a clean energy system.

The Pickens plan proposes using wind to help reduce U.S. dependence on imported oil. At first glance, this seems unlikely to work, since wind produces electricity and the United States uses very little oil to produce electricity. The Pickens plan squares this circle by calling for another change: promoting cars that use natural gas instead of gasoline. The rapid expansion of wind power could displace natural gas electricity generation, which then frees up natural gas to use in transportation, which reduces the need for oil and so dependence on imported oil.

The obvious problem with this plan is finding ways to put large number of natural-gas powered cars on the road and create the accompanying fueling infrastructure. Whether or not the Pickens plan will work, we shouldn't miss the larger point: Pickens's announcement shows how large the potential political coalition is for an innovation policy focused on making clean energy cheap.

For those of us who have watched the energy scene for many years, it's hard to overstate how shocking it is to see T. Boone Pickens promoting wind power. And his promotion of wind is concrete; he's putting the largest windfarm in the world near Sweetwater, Texas. Pickens is the classic conservative, hard-nosed, Texas oil man, right out of central casting. He has been an outspoken opponent of almost anything associated with liberal politics or environmentalism. He was a funder of the infamous Swiftboat ads in the 2004 presidential campaign. If people like him can get excited about clean energy, the potential coalition for clean energy is much bigger than I had imagined.

Michael and Ted have been promoting an innovation-based energy policy precisely because it could break the old political stalemates and mobilize a new coalition that could put in place a vastly larger, long-term set of policies to make clean energy a reality. I thought they were right and had already seen people like the hip Silicon Valley venture capitalists, and even some folks from the fossil fuel industry, getting interested in renewable energy. But I never thought I'd see the like of T. Boone Pickens putting up a website that extolled the virtues of renewables. Odd bedfellows sometimes make for difficult coalitions, and I have no doubt there will be many bumps in the road to a sustainable energy system. But the Pickens plan tells me that the coalition we need could extend very far beyond the usual suspects. This could be quite a ride.