The attacks on T. Boone Pickens' plans -- everything from his integrity and self-interest to his quixotic nature -- just make no sense whatsoever. They hold no water at all. They are just wrong-headed. The people against him, the ones that call him a dreamer, are the ones who have done no homework and are deeply cynical. And if they don't keep their mouths shut, we will forever be addicted to foreign oil.
While much of what he has been saying is that wind power can be substituted for a lot of other power sources, the fundament of his plan is to get autos to be using natural gas. Put aside his interests -- believe me, he cares about them, but only so far as he has been the investor in alternative energy for years and thinks it can be profitable -- Pickens' true motivation is that the technology for what he wants to have happen is occurring right now. In fact, he reminds me of the visionaries at Intel (INTC - commentary - Cramer's Take) who saw that the power of a mainframe IBM (IBM - commentary - Cramer's Take) computer could be put in the size of a pen -- a legendary presentation by Intel founder Robert Noyce that was widely scoffed at but all came true.
Let's review the alleged pie-in-the-sky elements of Pickens' plan. First, wind power, which is clean and efficient and able to be integrated to the grid much more easily than the critics say -- ask Quanta (PWR - commentary - Cramer's Take), which does it -- and can be used in far more than just Texas. We are blessed with windy areas that have no use otherwise, and you can build cheap towers, turbines and blades without much opposition. That's the opposite of the now darling technology -- nuclear -- which really has no hope in this country because of siting difficulties and NIMBY. We have the technology, we have the raw ingredients, we have the abilities, we could take wind to 20% of our power by 2030, as the Department of Energy says, but we could cut 10 years from that with subsidies.
Jim Cramer Blog Nat Gas Loss Is The Market's Gain 8/6/2008 9:14 AM EDT Consumer goods and defensive stocks are benefitting from the drop, and that's playable.
Jim Cramer Blog Horton Doesn't Get It 8/6/2008 7:22 AM EDT And they should be punished for trying an end run on taxpayers.
Jim Cramer Blog Quants and the Machines 8/5/2008 5:04 PM EDT This year their models are telling them to beat up ag and commodities.
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