We fired up the T. Boone Express and headed on up to Bismarck, North Dakota to participate in Sen. Byron Dorgan’s (D-ND) annual Great Plains Energy Expo. Senator Dorgan is a very important man in this whole deal. He has been involved in alternative energy idea for a long time. And he’s a senior member of the Senate Energy Committee.
When we got into Bismarck, we found out that Sen. Dorgan was putting out a press release which had this headline:
DORGAN WILL INTRODUCE THE PICKENS ENERGY PLAN CALLING FOR BUILDING AN INTERSTATE TRANSMISSION GRID AND A LARGE EXPANSION OF WIND AND SOLAR ENERGY
That’s pretty big news in Pickens Plan world. When a member of the Majority Party in the Senate is a member of the committee that has jurisdiction introduces a bill which contains a lot of what you’ve been asking for … that’s pretty big news.
You can read the whole press release HERE
We did a press conference to begin things. Sen. Dorgan stood with me and answered questions about the whole deal.
He said that North Dakota is n
umber one in wind energy and understands how important it is to build out a 21st century electricity grid to move power from the Great Plains to the East and West Coasts.
He compared the government helping to establish a national grid with Eisenhower calling for a national – interstate – highway system. Sen. Dorgan said there were people who didn’t understand why the system had to go through small towns in places like North Dakota, where not many people live.
“What they didn’t understand,” Sen. Dorgan said, “was that putting the interstate highway through North Dakota connected New York with Seattle.”
Same thing with a new grid system. It’s not to get the wind or solar energy between Sweetwater, Texas and Shreveport, Louisiana. It’s to get energy from Sweetwater to Los Angeles, or Chicago, or Baltimore.
After that we did a roundtable with a group of business folks over lunch, and then headed into the big hall at the Bismarck Convention Center for what wasn’t an official Pickens Plan Town Hall, but looked and felt like a Pickens Plan Town Hall.
They told us there would be about 600 people at the Expo, but they set the hall up with about 1,200 chairs and they looked like they were pretty much all filled.
Having an ally like Sen. Byron Dorgan is very important to us. I appreciate him being a leader in the energy field and I really appreciate him introducing the Pickens Plan as part of his Energy Plan legislation in the United States Senate.
— Boone