Pickens is building the largest wind farm in the world, 4,000 Megawatts worth, in the panhandle of Texas. He'll be nearly doubling wind farm capacity in Texas. All of this is passing strange because other current wind farm projects in Texas have been called off because they are financially infeasible.

The Texas energy market is mostly deregulated, allowing retail providers, transmission systems and power generation to make market decisions to supply the needs of Texans. For the most part it appears to have worked well--Texas generally has a comfortable energy reserve because it has managed to attract investment to the state. What people should know though is that energy is produced in a hierarchy of cheap to are-you-kidding.

Coal and nuclear plans are expensive to build, but designed to run continuously and at low cost. They are inevitably the backbone of every state's energy production system. Next comes natural gas and alternative energy plants that provide power for peak needs beyond what the backbone plants produce. These plants can turn their power generation capacity on and off, but run comparatively less efficiently than coal or nuclear. Who gets the call to run is a key element in understanding T. Boone Picken's ad blitz.

For all the Democrats talk of wind and solar, these are still inefficient and unreliable sources of power, in spite of decades of development. If they could be better, they would be, but progress has its limitations. Its hard for them to even compete with natural gas plants, which very often improve their overall efficiency by selling steam to nearby industrial plants like refineries or other types of process industries. The plants sell the product of burning natural gas twice--once for electricity, and a second time for heat. They are also built in close proximity to major energy consumers, so the transmission loss is minimized.

All this puts wind and solar at the periphery of the energy economy--the 7-11s of energy production--when you need an energy-twinky right now and don't mind paying through the nose for it.

A six billion dollar investment in what is essentially a spot market makes no sense at all, much less a one trillion dollar investment for a national system of wind farms. It only works if wind energy is no longer low man on the totem pole, if you change the rules of the game. You have to distort the market to put it to the head of the queue. Pickens is quite explicit about this in his ad--free up natural gas resources to run vehicles. For that, he needs to transform wind energy from an economic concern, to a religious one--saving the planet. People will make sacrifices in the name of religion, meaning of course that they will willing pay more for energy than they should.

If Pickens can create the ground swell of public support for his plan, he can effectively steamroll his business rivals and their political assets. Oppose the Pickens plan and you're a dirty-dealing, no-good planet killer.

Pickens intends to get even richer the old fashioned way--he's going to steal it from the pockets of the little guy and dare them to complain about it.