We hitched up the T. Boone Express and went into Charlotte, North Carolina to speak to a meeting of the editors of American City Business Journals. There are 41 of these newspapers which are completely focused on local and regional business stories.
I wanted to talk to them about the Pickens Plan because they will understand that the Plan is the path to economic growth.
I spent some time on the story of Sweetwater, Texas to demonstrate just how big an economic impact a wind farm can have on a community. Sweetwater, remember, went from under 10,000 people to over 12,000 when the wind farms came in to build and maintain the turbines, the transmission lines and equipment, and provide stores and services to 2,000 new people. A quarter of the jobs in Sweetwater are connected to the wind farms.
If you duplicate that 50 or 100 times up through the wind corridor – which is not a far-fetched number – you can be looking at about 135,000 local jobs connected to wind energy.
Add to that the engineering, design, manufacturing, and shipping jobs for the turbines and the design, construction and maintenance of the grid to move the energy east and west and the Department of Energy says the total number of jobs could end up being as high as 3.5 million.
That’s an economic impact that should be getting everyone’s attention.
On the natural gas I reminded them that the price of a barrel of oil has very little impact on the percentage of oil we are importing. While the outgo of American dollars is down from the days when oil was just short of $150 per barrel, we are still on a pace to send $350 billion overseas and our imports are still at about 70 percent of what we use every day.
Those two numbers: $350 billion and 70 percent represent the economic, and national security issues we need to address in the first 100 days of the new Administration.
As you know, because you are a member of the New Energy Army, the Pickens Plan works if we do both the wind part and the natural gas part. We have to do them both and we have to get started now.
— Boone
