Silicon Valley's Khosla not keen on Pickens plan

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Vinod Khosla, a longtime Silicon Valley proponent of green energy, sees billionaire T. Boone Pickens' plan to wean the United States from oil by converting cars to natural gas as a no-go.

Oilman Pickens has put together an alternative energy plan that includes massive buildouts of wind farms from Texas up through the middle of the continental United States and would turn the country's gasoline-guzzling auto fleet to natural gas, a fuel that is plentiful domestically and cleaner as well.

"Running cars on natural gas is a dead-end street," Khoslsa said at the Reuters Global Environment Summit in San Francisco, adding that the reduction in carbon dioxide, the chief greenhouse gas seen warming the planet, would not be enough -- only about 20 percent or so.

"We make all this infrastructure change, and it doesn't let us get to 40 percent or 60 percent or 80 percent. You want technologies that get to 20 percent and then keep on going, and that's where the Pickens natural-gas cars fail."

Khosla, a venture capitalist known for his early interest in alternative energy technology, argued that Pickens' focus on wind power was good, but not enough, since wind could only provide about 20 percent of U.S. electricity. "What about the remaining 80 percent?" he asked at the Reuters Global Environment Summit in San Francisco.

Khosla said Pickens' focus on building new transmission lines was very important, because it cuts the barrier to new technologies competing with coal.

Desert solar farms and windmills in barren wind-swept mesas frequently are far from transmission lines that carry electricity to densely populated towns and cities, for instance.

"Transmission lines in the Pickens plan are a good idea. getting more wind on, I'm all for."

(For summit blog: summitnotebook.reuters.com/)

(Reporting by Peter Henderson, editing by Gary Hill)