A year ago today, T. Boone Pickens, founder and chairman of BP Capital Management and oil tycoon, revealed his Pickens Plan, which called for wind farms to replace natural-gas power plants, freeing the natural gas for powering cars and trucks, all in an effort to reduce imports of oil (and probably to find new markets for domestic natural gas). In support of that plan, Pickens signed a deal for 667 wind turbines for an enormous 4,000-megawatt wind farm to be built in the Texas Panhandle.

Now that plan is in shambles. Bad credit markets and a lack of transmission lines for the wind turbines have led him to scrap the panhandle project, at least for now, he confirmed today. But he still has to do something with all of those turbines he's ordered. "I'm committed to 667 wind turbines and I am going to find projects for them," he said in a statement.

During the past year, he's also backed off some from his plan to switch to natural-gas cars, which has been widely criticized as impractical, focusing instead on pushing for a fleet of natural-gas tractor trailers.

Lack of transmission is turning out to be a major impediment for wind farms. For example, most of the applications for 67,000 megawatts of wind farms in the Midwest are stuck waiting in line because of a lack of grid connections. (See "Lifeline for Renewable Power.")

The good news is that the United States has plenty of natural gas, according to a new report described in the New York Times. The bad news is that the carbon-emissions targets in the energy bill working its way through the United States House of Representatives didn't take this into account.

According to the report, there's 35 percent more accessible natural gas in the ground than previously thought, in large part because new technologies have made it possible to get at more of the gas. This tech has led to a boom in natural-gas supplies, and that seems to be why oil and gas tycoon T. Boone Pickens has been talking up using natural gas for powering vehicles: he could be looking for a new market for all of this gas to keep prices from plummeting in the future.

The fact that there's a lot of natural gas is good for reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Natural gas produces about half of the carbon emissions of coal when used to make electricity. Switching to natural gas could provide a relatively cheap way to meet emissions targets, especially in the near term. And that's a great thing. Except for this: natural gas can't take us all the way to an 80 percent emissions-reduction target, which is where scientists say we should be by 2050, if not sooner. Some experts are concerned that natural gas will allow utilities and others to put off investments in research and development needed to meet the stricter emissions goals.

There are a couple of potential solutions. One is to mandate more use of renewable energy, but economists argue that such mandates are expensive: it's better to let a market sort out which technologies to use. Another potential solution is to make the early-emissions targets in the bill more challenging, pushing investment, but this could be politically tricky. There are a lot of uncertainties about this natural gas; some experts warn that we shouldn't count on it. The best solution is probably increased federal funding for research, especially basic research into things like the physics of excitons in solar-cell materials. Then even if companies fail to plan ahead, the breakthroughs that they need to meet later targets could be ready for them.

A recent study published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology suggests that plug-in hybrids can reduce emissions not only from tailpipes, but also from the smokestacks of power plants.

Plug-in hybrids have larger battery packs than do conventional hybrids and can be recharged by plugging them in, allowing them to rely far more on electric power than do conventional hybrids. While this can substantially reduce gasoline consumption and vehicle emissions, plugging the cars in will increase demand for electricity, which could lead to more harmful emissions from power plants.

The new study, which was conducted by researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), concludes just the opposite: in some parts of the country, the added demand for electricity from plug-in hybrids could actually decrease harmful emissions. "We were surprised by the results," says Paul Denholm, the NREL researcher who led the study.

The researchers looked at two scenarios, both involving smart charging systems. In the first, utilities had the ability to control when plug-in hybrids are charged, but within certain parameters are set up to make sure that the cars are charged up when drivers want them. For example, a car could be plugged in overnight with the expectation that in the morning it will be ready for driving. Since the batteries recharge in less than eight hours, they don't have to be actively charging the whole time. In the second scenario, the smart chargers also had the ability to take charge from the cars and deliver it back to the grid--a technology called vehicle-to-grid technology, or V2G.

In the first scenario, control over when the cars charged reduced the amount of smoke forming nitrogen oxides. Here's an explanation of how this works, which Denholm calls a "gross simplification" but says still conveys the basic idea. Electricity comes from two basic types of power plants: base load plants, which are the more efficient, and peaking plants, which supply bursts of power when they're needed, but are less efficient and produce more nitrogen oxides. Base load plants need to keep running at a steady pace. If grid operators aren't sure that there will be enough demand for power to keep the plants running at an optimal pace, they'll shut down some of these plants and instead use dirtier peaking power plants. If the operators know that they have a lot of plug-in hybrids waiting to draw power, which is a big source of demand that they can control, they can leave the base load plants running. If demand dips, they simply tell the cars to start charging to bring it up again. The end result is that there are fewer dirty power plants running, so that even though power demand is higher, there's less pollution.

In the second scenario, grid operators have even more control. This allows them to rely less on inefficient power plants, causing a dip in carbon-dioxide emissions from power plants as well.

The study comes with one big caveat. It's specifically for Texas, where base load power comes largely from natural gas, a fuel that emits relatively little carbon dioxide compared with other fossil fuels. In places that use coal for base load power plants, Denholm doesn't expect to see lower pollution levels.