Pickens Wind Farm Plan on Hold

T. Boone Pickens, the Texas oil billionaire, will delay or reduce his plans for the world’s biggest wind farm. Pickens announced the 4,000-megawatt Texas project — big enough to power 1 million homes — last year. Construction was supposed to begin in 2010 and finish by 2014, at a cost of $10 billion to $12 billion. But Pickens now acknowledges that he will “put off” or “scale back” the project because of the global credit crunch and because natural gas prices have plummeted, making wind power less competitive. The Mesa Power wind farm, which would be built on 400,000 acres across the Texas Panhandle, is part of Pickens’ sweeping 10-year energy plan for America, which he claims would end the country’s dependence on foreign oil; even before global financial markets collapsed this fall, some skeptics were raising questions about the plan’s feasibility.