Cross posted from Scaling Green. 

This past week, MSNBC reported that oil billionaire T. Boone Pickens, author of the“Pickens Plan” – to switch America heavily into natural gas and wind power, plus energy efficiency and solar, primarily for national security and economic reasons – is dropping the wind component from the plan. According to the MSNBC report, Pickens will now “focus primarily on his other big business interest: natural gas.”

This is the same T. Boone Pickens who ran expensive TV ads about how America’s goal should be to produce “20% of electricity from wind power in 10 years,” and who traveled around the country saying things like: 1) “We have a beautiful wind corridor from Texas to Canada. And we have an equally beautiful solar corridor from Texas to California;” and 2) “We’re blessed with some of the best wind and solar resources in the world. The Department of Energy estimates that we can produce 22% of our country’s electrical energy needs just by utilizing the wind resource in the Great Plains. And actually, if you wanted to go beyond 22 percent, you could go to 40, 60, 80, whatever you want, because that resource is unlimited.”