When the media or wind adovcates talk about wind energy they write things like, “Billionaire oilman T. Boone Pickens is sinking billions of dollars into a new wind farm in Texas. It is likely to become the biggest in the world, producing enough power for the equivalent of 1.3 million homes.”

Wrong, unless you only want your lights in those houses on 30% of the time. Wind cannot power the equivalent of 1.3 million homes because you can’t plan when the wind will blow with the degree of accuracy needed. As a result, when you build a 4 gigawatt wind energy plant, like Pickens wants to, you have to build at least 3.2 gigawatts of backup generation for the wind turbines. That backup power will most likely be natural gas, much of which will be imported.

Here’s more silliness:

Pickens: The Department of Energy came out with a study in April of ’07 that said we could generate 20 percent of our electricity from wind. And the wind power is — you know, it’s clean, it’s renewable. It’s — you know, it’s everything you want. And it’s a stable supply of energy.

Wrong. Wind is not everything you want because wind is not a stable supply of energy.  The truth about wind is this–you can only produce electricity from wind when the wind is blowing (and not blowing too hard). That’s about 30% of the time. Electricity that only works 30% of the time is not “everything you want.” As an investor seeking to scam Texas ratepayers–who will be forces to buy your expensive electricty it is everything you want, but as a consumer who wants the electricity to work whenever you flip a switch, it is not “everything you want.”

Pickens ends the story with this piece of nonsense, ” But we are going to have to do something different in America. You can’t keep paying out $600 billion a year for oil.” Uh, okay. But electricity and oil have very little to do with each other. Only about 2% of the electricity in the US is generated from petroleum. That’s it. 98% of the electricity in America does not come from petroleum, so talking about how we pay $600 billion a year for oil when talking about wind makes little sense (unless you are talking about electric cars, but that don’t current exist).

There could be some decent reasons to build wind but from all appearances T. Boone Pickens just wants to scam ratepayers. I may be cynical, but he hasn’t made a case that he understands the downsides to wind energy.