Flex-fuel fan Gal Luft is in the L.A. Times picking a bone with T. Boone Pickens’ plan for wind-derived electricity and natural gas transport fuel:

Pickens’ assertion that increased use of wind power would displace natural gas is based on wishful thinking. Our energy system is not a Lego game — one piece can’t replace another at whim. Even if 78 other billionaires were willing to follow Pickens’ footsteps and build a 4,000-megawatt wind farm — that’s the number needed to displace the current electricity production from natural gas — there’s no way to guarantee that natural gas would be the only energy source that would be displaced by all those turbines. Why not coal, or solar? Furthermore, implementation of the Pickens plan might actually tie more natural gas to the power sector. Wind is an intermittent source of power — the wind doesn’t blow 24 hours a day, seven days a week — and until and unless our electricity grid has sufficient power storage capacity, utilities counting on wind need to have backup power plants that can be powered up to fill in the gaps when the wind does not blow. This back-up power is today generally provided with natural gas. Pickens also claims that a shift from oil to natural gas would strengthen U.S. national security. But contrary to Pickens’ proclamations, in relation to its need, the U.S. is not rich in natural gas. Just as with oil, the U.S. consumes 23% of the world’s natural gas but it only has 3% of the world’s reserves. Its reserve-to-production ratio is less than 10 years. At last month’s Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing (in which both Pickens and I testified), he invoked a recent Deutsche Bank study, “From Shale to Shining Shale,” which claims that there are massive reserves of gas shale in the U.S. Just like oil shale, such unconventional energy sources hold great promise. But their recovery costs are still high, and their existence has not been able to suppress the rising price of either oil or natural gas. A shift to natural gas could even weaken U.S. national security: More than 60% of the world’s reserves are concentrated in five countries — Russia, Iran, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — countries that are already engaged in discussions on the establishment of an OPEC-like natural-gas cartel. Shifting from dependence on one authoritarian regime’s energy source to another’s is like jumping from the frying pan to the fire. It’s also the best gift the U.S. can give Iran at a time when it should be working to weaken Tehran economically.