Pickens Harnesses Power of Net to Advocate for Wind Power
CHRIS O'BRIEN, Columnist - Mercury News
My first surprise was that legendary oil man T. Boone Pickens is advocating a radical wind power plan to reduce the country's dependence on foreign oil.
But the bigger surprise came when I learned that Pickens is using a savvy, Web 2.0 campaign to build grass-roots support for his agenda.
After all, the 80-year-old Oklahoman seems like a character from a bygone age, someone more myth than man.
From his humble entrepreneurial beginnings as a newspaper delivery boy, Pickens founded one of the largest independent oil companies in the United States and later built a financial empire that made him a central figure in the 1980s takeover mania. He's a staunch conservative and Republican backer whom Forbes ranks as the 117th richest person in the country.
Humble, he is not. According to his Web site: "The breadth of T. Boone Pickens' career is staggering."
But as he strides into my office, it's clear he's not here to revel in the past. Instead, he wants to solve the U.S. energy crisis, proposing an ambitious plan that calls for a massive investment in wind power.
To galvanize support for the "Pickens Plan," he's turned to the power of social networking and social media designed to build a grass-roots army of supporters to put pressure on whoever is elected president this fall.
And when it comes to harnessing the power of the Internet, Pickens seems to have taken a page right out of Sen. Barack Obama's campaign playbook.
it out for yourself at www.pickensplan.com. The site includes a viral, embeddable video that features Pickens diagraming his plan on a whiteboard. There's the YouTube channel where Pickens keeps a video blog of himself answering questions submitted by the public.
And his site includes a social-networking feature built on the Ning.com. platform that lets anyone join, create a profile and talk to the other 87,000-plus members. Ning.com. is the company founded by Marc Andreessen.
You can also become Pickens' friend on Facebook. And yeah, you can keep track of "PickensPlan" on Twitter, which already has more than 1,000 followers.
When I ask him how this site and this campaign came about, he notes that his campaign's $58 million budget "will buy you a lot of savvy. I have a lot of very sophisticated people working for me."
Got it. By the time I talked to Pickens on Monday, he was exhausted from a barnstorming tour across the Bay Area that took him to newspaper editorial boards and tech firms like Cisco Systems and Google. He jokingly asked if he could stretch out on the floor and take a nap.
But once the conversation turns to the Pickens Plan, he quickly becomes energized, leaning his lanky frame forward in a chair. As he explains the details, he grabs a pen and paper to sketch a pie chart, scribble notes, and make lists.
Not a PowerPoint presentation in site, thank goodness.
Pickens is motivated by what he sees as a looming economic and national security crisis. With the cost of gas exploding, the country can't afford to continue importing 70 percent of its petroleum. Especially when that resource comes from less than friendly countries.
So here's his plan in a nutshell. Take the domestically produced natural gas being burned to generate electricity in power plants and instead use it to power new fleets of trucks and government-owned vehicles. Then, build massive wind farms in the Midwest to generate at least 22 percent of the electricity used in homes and offices. Pickens calculates this would save the United States $300 billion annually on buying foreign oil.
What does Pickens want the next president to do? He'll need to extend the federal Production Tax Credit, which provides incentives for renewable energy. The power transmission grid would need to be seriously overhauled to carry energy from the center of the country to the coasts.
A word of caution. Pickens does have some financial stake in all of this. In 1997, he founded a company now called Clean Energy that provides natural gas to vehicles that use it as fuel. And recently, Pickens purchased 667 wind turbines from General Electric to construct a massive wind farm in central Texas.
But when asked about this, Pickens waves off such concerns: "I don't need to make any more money."
The official campaign has been running about three weeks, and also includes television commercials. But it's the social-media aspect that Pickens is counting on to carry his campaign over the top.
While Pickens knows he has access and influence (he's discussed his plan directly with President Bush), he also believes that using the Internet to build a mass movement will be more persuasive than going the typical route of hiring a squad of K Street lobbyists.
"I think the American people are going to demand we do something different," Pickens said. "The next president won't be able to ignore this."
If he's right, this may turn out to be the birth of Lobbying 2.0.