. Boone Pickens, the legendary oilman, has abandoned his plan to build the world’s largest wind farm, according to a report in The Dallas Morning News that was confirmed by a spokesman for Mr. Pickens.
The report states that Mr. Pickens will instead build a handful of smaller wind farms around the Midwest. Possible locations include Wisconsin, Oklahoma and Kansas and Texas.
The Texas Panhandle was to be the site of the original wind farm.
Mr. Pickens has said in the past that he had to delay his wind plans due to the financing difficulties that have hit wind farms across the country in the last nine months, along with a fall-off in natural gas prices.
The latest scaling back, according to the Dallas paper, is due to transmission constraints. Texas plans to build about $5 billion worth of transmission lines to help carry the wind from the western part of the state, but they will not go where Mr. Pickens had hoped. Originally, he had even planned to build his own transmission lines.
Meanwhile, Mr. Pickens has embarked on a round of media appearances to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the launch of his energy plan, which promotes natural gas as a fuel for cars – as well as greater use of wind energy in electricity generation – as a method of getting the nation off of foreign oil.
In an early-morning appearance on Squawk Box, a CNBC show, Mr. Pickens said that while the climate bill was “extremely important and all,” he was still focused on getting the nation off foreign oil.
“The security issue doesn’t go away,” he said.
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