KEY POINTS:
Everything is bigger in Texas, even the wind turbines.
They stand twice as high as the Statue of Liberty, with blades as wide as the wings on a jumbo jet. Each one can earn hundreds of dollars every year for landowners, a whole wind farm can generate hundreds of thousands of dollars. It's hardly a surprise then that new turbines are popping at a rate of three to four a day.
Texas and oil go together like hound dogs and huntin', as the saying goes, but the black stuff that made George Bush and many other oil men rich is now running out and something else is needed to keep the lights on. From sneering at the country's green movement, pragmatic Texans have suddenly embraced wind power as the answer to their prayers.
Once known as America's oil patch, Texas now calls itself the nation's wind-power capital. Big Oil is turning into Big Wind.
For Sweetwater, known for its annual spring rattlesnake round-up, the wind-power bonanza produces enough energy to power a large city. Today you can drive for 240 kilometres either side of it without losing sight of a wind turbine.
Sweetwater is also home to T Boone Pickens, 80, a legendary Texas oil wild-catter, corporate raider, philanthropist and Republican hit man, whose personal worth has reached US$2.7 billion.
From the prairie town of Holdenville, Oklahoma, his father made his fortune gambling on oil leases. As a child, Pickens had a paper round, which is where he says he learnt the aggressive approach to work that would make him infamous on Wall Street in the 1980s. He started oil company Mesa Petroleum in 1956, with US$2500, turning it into one of the most feared companies in the US.
A hate figure of the liberal left, many blame him for Bush's do-nothing legacy on the environment. Although he lives smack in the middle of one of the windiest places in America, as recently as 2005 he dismissed the idea of wind energy out of hand: "I was in wind energy for a minute ... I hate it. And when I got to looking at those damn things I said, I don't want to be a part of putting that on the horizon. We took a loss and got out of it and I'm glad I did."
Spool forward three years to find a country on the verge of a nervous breakdown with oil heading towards US$200 a barrel. Americans do not worry much about global warming, but they care a lot about filling up their gas-guzzling pick-up 4WDs and worry more and more about how they are going to get to work and back.
Over the coming months Pickens is spending enough to ensure that his face will be seen on American television screens as much as either John McCain's and Barack Obama's as he bankrolls what he says is the most expensive public policy advertising campaign ever.
Environmentalists are cheering wildly, but the Pickens Plan has little to do with their worries about the catastrophic dangers of global warming. Pickens has a plan that everyone can get their heads around: he simply wants to end America's addiction to imported oil and use the country's abundant wind power and natural gas resources to keep the country rolling.
Windy as Sweetwater is, there are places further north in the Great Plains which are more suitable for wind farming. Some 400 kilometres away, Pickens is building what is described as the world's largest wind farm.
He has pumped US$2 billion into the project so far, buying nearly 700 wind turbines from General Electric (GE) and he will spend another US$10 billion on the project before it starts generating electricity sometime in 2011.
America's big environmental organisations have become huge supporters of the Pickens Plan. "I will be in the front row of the chorus cheering him on," said Carl Pope, executive director of the environmental group, the Sierra Club.
As a lifelong Republican, Pickens says he will vote for McCain. But he is staying at arms length from McCain's campaign, to avoid having his plan dismissed as so much campaign rhetoric.
"This has to be a bipartisan effort," he says.
On a recent tour of his Mesa Vista Ranch for journalists, Pickens gave a tour of his spread, with its 11 kilometres of lakes and artificial streams.
And as he led his guests from room to room in his vast mansion, his main preoccupation was turning out the lights.
CHANGING TACK
* Wind provides only about 1 per cent of America's electricity. By 2020 that figure is expected to rise to 15 per cent or higher.
* GE alone is expected to sell US$6 billion-worth of turbines this year in America.
* A farmer who gives up a quarter of an acre to a wind farm can now earn US$10,000 a year from it - some 3 per cent of the value of the electricity it produces. If he planted corn for ethanol he would earn US$300.
- INDEPENDENT
