The simple fact of the matter is that there are basic science breakthroughs in battery technology being made monthly, that will not hit the market for at least a few years, and that are significant enough that they will render anything we could build today, at any cost, completely obsolete in short order.

In other words, the more EVs you build with today’s battery technology, the more EVs (or at least batteries, the current generation of which are a nightmare to dispose of) we’ll have to replace three or five years down the line, which is a fraction of the useful life of, in particular, a fleet vehicle.

I think where Pickens got it right is that he anticipated that the availability of renewable energy in the form of electricity would grow more quickly than the demand for that energy. It’s true that EVs will eventually consume all the electricity we can generate, but unless we do something stupid, like try to force the mass adoption of version 0.9 of the mainstream electric car, the electricity is going to come available long before the cars that will use it.

Pickens’s solution is rather obvious once it’s put in front of you, and as long as you take it for the bridge that it is. Rather than powering not yet existing EVs, all that new renewable electricity could instead be used to displace one of the current most commonly use sources of energy for electricity generation in the US, NG. And since NG is clean, domestically produced, and able to be burned by mature engine designs that are easily integrated into any standard automobile, it seems like a no-brainer to try to use that surplus NG to displace dirty, mostly foreign produced oil in the transportation sector.

I can think of only one reason to reconsider the Pickens plan, and that is the slowdown in the growth of clean and renewable electricity that will necessarily result from the recession and the pretty sharp shift away from nuclear power on the part of the Obama administration. If we have to wait for wind, solar, and other non-nuclear renewable sources, then it is likely that mainstream EVs will hit the market before the clean electricity to power them, eliminating the need for the bridge.

Pickens has maintained from the get-go that natural gas is a bridge fuel to battery/hydrogen or some other non-carbon technology as a transportation fuel, but we’re not there yet.