The Pickens Plan would have made sense 40 years ago, but we now have cheap 21st century computer power to better control the electric grids and charge electric vehicle batteries with wasted power. The electric companies are already installing "smartMETERs" that communicate your electric usage to their billing computers which can also signal these meters to shut off your power for non payment. This can all be done without human intervention.

American Electric Power (AEP), has already begun to modify its distribution grid to create the "smartGrid" as part of its "gridSMART" project. "Our gridSMARTS initiative seeks to put consumers in control of electricity usage by giving them the information about when energy is at peak demand, and when there is excess capacity in the system – and enabling them to adjust their usage accordingly."

Sweet sorghum is a much better ethanol feed stock than corn or switchgrass cellulose. Sweet sorghum has been grown in the US midwest for over a hundred years, originally for molasses as a substitute for cane sugar. It can produce almost as much sugar as cane and it grows well anywhere that corn can be grown. In fact, it requires less water, fertilizer, pesticides, and human attention than corn and can be grown profitably where corn cannot.

The same machinery used to produce alcohols from sugar cane can be used with sweet sorghum. Its waste material after juice extraction can be used in the same way as sugar cane waste. Cattle like to eat the waste cellulose and it can also be used to produce more ethanol, etc. Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) and VeraSun Energy (VSE) do not have to go to Brazil to start producing ethanol from sugar cane. Instead, they should talk to farmers about producing sweet sorghum instead of corn. In India, ethanol is already being produced from sweet sorghum. The CEOs running U.S. companies may think that they needed a few million Indian immigrants to handle their Y2K disaster, but surely our farmers can still grow sweet sorghum.