It was about five weeks ago that Texas Oilman T. Boone Pickens hit Capitol Hill with his message that it's time to invest in renewable energy sources.  Today, he's back before a Senate committee, ready again to talk up his windfarm plans.

Pickens was blunt last month when asked how the US can get out of the current oil crisis, telling lamwakers, "We can't just drill our way out of this."

Instead, Pickens now touts the idea of massive wind farms in the central US, using that energy to generate electricity for millions of homes.

In his mind, that would replace the energy generated by natural gas - 22% of all electrical power in the US is created that way.

Pickens argues that natural gas should be used in the transportation sector, for buses, trucks and cars.  The more natural gas used there, the less oil that's needed in terms of imports.

In the end, it may take someone like Pickens, a larger than life character, to champion something like a rush to wind farms.

If it was someone like Al Gore, that person is too easily brushed off as being part of the Environmental Left, ridiculed as someone who wants you to grow switchgrass in the backyard and then cut it and burn it in your expensive furnace in the basement.

But Pickens can use his new found reticence on oil to see if he can gin up government support for new transmission lines that would be needed to get the power from wind farms to the cities of America.

And along the way, he would probably make a few dollars. 

Pickens has been doing a lot of public relations work for his plan in recent weeks.  He's no greenhorn when it comes to this kind of stuff.

Whether he can really add any momentum to renewable fuels efforts in Congress remains unclear, simply because these ideas for the most part are favored by Democrats more than Republicans.