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Last week, Pickens stopped by The Times to discuss his push to wean the U.S. off foreign oil by dramatically ramping up development of its infrastructure for wind and natural gas. Below is a partial transcript. T. Boone Pickens: We are now importing oil that costs us $700 billion a year. That's four and a half times what the Iraq war costs. Nobody running for president even speaks about this. Yet they talk a lot about the Iraq war. When you look at it, the world oil supply is about 85 million barrels of oil a day. And demand is about 86-plus million barrels a day.

I'll get my excuses in first and then move on to Kaka later. I have increased my carbon footprint by flying to the low-carb World Future Energy Summit in Abu Dhabi concluding it was not realistic to meet 10,000-plus delegates and visitors via video-link from Blighty. A conference exploring alternative power and clean technology developments like this one is usually most valuable for what people say privately rather the public spiel from the platform.

The world needs a "revolution" in science and technology to solve global warming, says Energy Secretary Steven Chu. Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, made the remarks in today's New York Times. The article was short on specifics, but Chu, former director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, said Nobel-level breakthroughs were needed in electric batteries, solar power and crops that could be turned into fuel. "Science and technology can generate much better choices," Chu, a long-time proponent of alternative energy development, told the newspaper. "It has, consistently, over hundreds and hundreds of years." Among the points he made:

At the recently held EWEC 2009 wind energy conference and exhibition most exhibitors agreed that while there has been a substantial business slowdown due to problems linked to obtaining wind project financing, an upturn in demand during the second half of 2009 is beginning to play out, at least in the U.S. Other exhibitors, on the other hand, were a bit more cautious pointing out that substantial numbers of unsold turbines from framework contracts failing to secure project finance are now floating on the wind market. Most interesting from a wind technology point of view is the V112-3.0MW switch away from a compact V90-3.0MW integrated gearbox and main bearing assembly to a 3-point gearbox support. The application of a permanent magnet (PM) type generator with full converter system in the V112-3.0MW is new for Vestas but not for the wind industry. New Technology Trends In what many wind industry insiders consider a major development trend, French aerospace companies EADS Astrium & EADS Composite Aquitaine announced their formal entrance into the wind industry. The French companies offer the wind industry advanced composite materials engineering, manufacturing and related know-how as well as rotor-blade manufacturing capacity.

Offshore areas along the U.S. coastline hold great potential for wind energy development as the resources are located near the nation's highest areas of electricity demand - coastal metropolitan centers, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar said last week. "Yes, we can build a clean energy future, but it will require American energy, American ingenuity and American courage to tackle our dependence on foreign oil and the growing perils of climate change." -- U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar "More than three-fourths of the nation's electricity demand comes from coastal states and the wind potential off the coasts of the lower 48 states actually exceeds our entire U.S. electricity demand," Salazar told a summit meeting of 25X'25 America's Energy Future, a group working to lower America's carbon emissions.

In addition to the its 5M wind turbine series that is currently in production, REpower now has the most powerful wind turbine in the world in its portfolio. Development of the REpower 6M turbine series will be unveiled at the Hanover Trade Fair this week. REpower said that the rated electrical power of the units is 6.15 megawatts (MW).