T. Boone Pickens is flooding the media with his wind farm/natural gas scheme to combat a host of imaginary demons including foreign oil and wealth transfers. Pickens’ cover story is a plan to convert 20 percent of electricity production in the U.S. from natural gas to wind and then to use that sidelined natural gas to power automobiles.

Initially Pickens says a 4,000-megawatt wind farm will be built in Texas and, presto, we’re on our way to environmental bliss.

Well, it seems this plan has more than one angle and the details are interesting indeed. But before we get to what Pickens is really up to, lets look briefly at the cover story.

At 4,000 megawatts, you would have quite a dynamo of power generation if it weren’t for the fact that this is wind power. Wind farmers, as a very observant person noted, are more dependent on subsidies than wind. In this case, taxpayers will transfer 1.9 cents per Kilowatt-Hour (kWh) in subsidy payments for every kWh T. Boone manages to generate. A little quick math gives you 4,000 megawatts times 17 percent (wind is only 17 percent efficient) leaving you with 680 megawatts, on average, of continual production. That times 1.9 cents per kWh is $113 million a year. Maybe T. Boone is not an environmentalist after all.

But all is not well in subsidy land. Congress did not renew subsidies for so-called renewable energy in the 2007 Energy bill. However, when you see who one of T Boone’s partners is perhaps that concern can be dismissed.

But I digress. Wind power does little to relieve dependency on fossil fuels because you cannot guarantee that the wind will blow. And blow pretty hard too, as turbines are net electricity users at low revolutions.

With no guarantee of adequate production from wind, you must have normal power plants on standby at all times. This is known as "spinning reserve." The problem with that is most generators are huge, taking eight hours to spin up and another eight hours to spin down and go offline. While they may not be running at full power, they will nonetheless be running in the background 24 hours a day. When you factor in the fact that the wind doesn’t blow when its hot – a time of peak energy demand – then wind power is reduced to somewhat of a novelty.

So what is T Boone up to? Well it seems our Texas billionaire has been busy indeed.

Pickens recently acquired 200,000 acres of groundwater rights in Roberts County, Texas. That location puts him over the Ogallala Aquifer. He plans to tap into the aquifer and sell water, via pipeline, to large Texas towns very far from Roberts County.

Of course to build a pipeline you need right of ways but how does a private individual pry land or right of ways from property owners who either don’t want to sell or want an arm and a leg for the rights?

Enter the friendly Texas legislature. Seems the brain trust in Austin passed a law allowing residents of an eight-acre parcel in Roberts County to vote to form their own municipal water district, complete with eminent domain powers. The two residents, Pickens wife and Pickens’ ranch manager, voted unanimously in favor of the district. The remaining board of the new district is made up of Pickens’ employees who are non-resident owners.

Now, with eminent domain power, land can be taken at marginal prices against a landowner’s will. How to finance all this? Well Pickens’ district was allowed to sell $2.2 million in tax-free, taxpayer guaranteed bonds for his water line.

Of course there was a similar problem with the wind farm … nobody lives anywhere near the location where it will be built. They will need very expensive transmission lines and right of ways to get the power to population centers.

Enter the legislative brain trust in Austin once more who approved $4.9 billion for wind farm transmission lines. No one said it was for Pickens but who else would it be for? They also passed legislation allowing renewable energy producers to team up with a water district and use the water district’s eminent domain power for transmission lines.

People are laying odds as to whether T. Boone is playing the wind angle for the water or the water angle for the wind. I suspect he’s playing it both ways for the money.

But as they say on the TV commercial for cheap products that never work like they’re advertised … "But wait! There’s more!

Halfway across the country Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi made a sizable stock purchase of CLNE, a clean energy company, at its initial public offering in 2007. The IPO was not advertised but somehow Pelosi knew about it.

A scant year later, California voters are facing Proposition 10, known as the California Renewable Energy and Clean Alternative Fuel Act. The measure would commit $5 billion of California bonded money "to promote natural gas as a cleaner alternative for automobile and truck fuel," according to the Los Angeles Times.

The primary U.S. company in that business is CLNE, formerly known as Pickens Fuel. The company was named after its birthing investor, T Boone Pickens. CLNE has spent $3.6 million promoting passage of Proposition 10.

Needless to say environmentalists and rational thinking individuals are beginning to suspect all these dots are connected and they don’t like what they see.

Editorial writers in California are pointing out that the language in the proposition primarily benefits Pickens’ interests and are nothing more than a cash grab. They also note that California rebates for alternative fuel vehicles are mandated even if the vehicle is immediately transferred out of state.

Back in Texas, environmentalists, who really want to love a wind farmer, are drawing the line on private water sales. No one is coming forward to buy into the project and the publicity keeps getting worse and worse,

Pickens is fighting back. He has befriended the national president of the Sierra Club and the two travel together frequently on Pickens’ jet, promoting the virtue of wind farming natural gas and all that rings joyous in subsidy land.