In my favorite story of the week so far…anybody wanna buy a wind turbine?

Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens has “delayed” his plans for a massive wind farm after ordering over 600 wind turbines from GE at a total cost of over $2 billion.

Pickens claimed that the primary source of his failure was that the electric infrastructure, aka “the grid” just wasn’t ready. But the real reason is clearly his inability to raise the $2 billion in funding he was looking for.

Private investors care about profits. Government doesn’t, because they can spend an infinite amount of your money. So what does it mean when an extremely successful energy investor fails to convince others to fund a project but the House of Representatives passes a bill to fund that same type of project with your money?

You know what it means. It means Al Gore has invested in that project. It means that environmental radicals are threatening not to support Democrats unless the draconian anti-economy bill passes. It means your cost of electricity and your tax bill are both going to increase to make Al Gore and the environmentalists happy.

My bet is that this “delay” turns into a permanent cancellation unless the Waxman-Markey cap-and-tax bill passes the Senate (which I believe it won’t.) Even then, Pickens won’t get private funding unless you are subsidizing wind with your tax dollars because wind is about the least efficient form of energy out there.

Pickens tried to sell this, including in pathetic TV ads, as a way to break free of independence on foreign oil. That’s like saying you are going to get independence from your furnace through heating your home by lighting dollar bills on fire in your living room. If we want independence from foreign oil, there are two things we need to do: Drill for more of our own and build two or three dozen nuclear power plants.

I want Pickens to fail almost as much as I want Obama and Algore to fail. They are all vampires out to fool the public into cutting our own economic throats so they and their friends can drink our economic life-blood.