,
10 tweets,
5 min read
Read on Twitter
My latest for @bopinion @BloombergNEF looks at how long-term forecasts confound even people expert in rapid technological change. It's also an obituary, of sorts, for a legend: T. Boone Pickens bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
T. Boone - a legendary oilman, corporate raider (as they said in the 80s, though really he was more like today's shareholder activist), and billionaire energy trader - had a plan for U.S. energy. bloomberg.com/opinion/articl… 
The Pickens Plan got some things right; more interesting is what even this visionary missed. He nailed it with wind power; didn't quite foresee how abundant gas would be; didn't foresee ultra-abundant U.S. oil bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
In 2008, as Pickens noted, half of America’s electricity supply came from coal, a share that has since fallen to 27%. In the Pickens Plan, wind and nuclear power were expected to displace gas-fired power, so that gas could be shifted into transportation. bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
Solar energy and electric vehicles were not even mentioned. Now, both natural gas and wind have become alternatives to coal, while the biggest disruption for oil has been new technology in the oil business itself. bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
Still though, he didn't time it quite right on wind
There's a useful new @wef paper that helps us think about the Pickens Plan with a decade's remove: energy changes are a tension between the huge and gradual, and the small and rapid www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_the_s…
Here's that tension, laid out in the authors' words: www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_the_s…
As I review the Pickens Plan now, the parts of it that were prescient, AND the parts of today's energy landscape that it missed, are both the product of the 'rapid' transition narrative bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
Pickens was also an avid Twitter user to the very end. Seven years ago, the recording artist Drake tweeted that “The first million is the hardest.”
Pickens, who had made and lost far larger amounts many times over, had this response bloomberg.com/opinion/articl… /end
Pickens, who had made and lost far larger amounts many times over, had this response bloomberg.com/opinion/articl… /end
