Oil mogul and corporate raider T. Boone Pickens launched an energy plan and social-networking campaign on Tuesday that calls for replacing Middle Eastern oil with Midwestern wind.It looks like a good idea. I would like to see someone follow up on it with a solar plan for the southern states, to form an alternative energy T (well, an inverted T).
The so-called Pickens Plan would exploit the country's "wind corridor" from the Canadian border to West Texas to produce 20 percent of the country's electricity.
Transmission lines would be built to transport the power to places in the U.S. where the demand is. The natural gas, now used to fuel power plants, would instead be used as a transportation fuel, which burns cleaner than gasoline and is domestic.
He proposed that the private sector finance the investment, which would result in a one-third reduction, equal to $230 billion, in the U.S.' yearly payments to foreign countries.
Florida, nicknamed The Sunshine State, has a significant number of sunny days. Only the Southwest has more.
As the Sunshine State, Florida is uniquely situated to exploit cheap (practically free), clean, renewable solar power. In fact, so is most of the South. Only the Southwestern United States is better situated to most effectively utilize solar power.I'm not a scientist, but it just seems to be another idea for reducing our dependency on oil. If we can produce microchips the size of a pinhead, that hold tons of information, why can't we design smaller, more efficient solar panels, that could capture and store energy for use in at least our southern states. Thus helping to reduce our overall dependency on foreign oil. Not to mention the jobs created in this country.
What do you think?
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