PICKENS WIND POWER PLAN STALLS: "We got a little bit too quick off the blocks"

SHOOT: The problem is an energy and a financial crisis at the same time means you quite suddenly find you've run out of options. In other words, you discover, too late, that there's no money for alternatives. This realisation will begin to sink in as our choices grow fewer and our troubles multiply even further.

clipped from news.yahoo.com "When I start receiving those turbines, I've got to ... like I said, my garage won't hold them," the legendary Texas oilman said. "They've got to go someplace." In Texas, the problem lies in getting power from the proposed site in the Panhandle to a distribution system, Pickens said in an interview with The Associated Press in New York. He'd hoped to build his own transmission lines but he said there were technical problems. "It doesn't mean that wind is dead," said Pickens, who runs the Dallas-based energy investment fund BP Capital. "It just means we got a little bit too quick off the blocks." Pickens announced in 2007 plans to install the turbines in parts of four Texas Panhandle counties. He had hoped to complete the four-phase project in 2014 and eventually have 4,000 megawatts of capacity, enough to power more than one million homes. The total cost was expected to approach $12 billion. In 2008, the U.S. became the world's leading provider of wind power.