Oct. 20--More than a year after introducing a grand scenario for reshaping America's energy infrastructure and breaking the proverbial addiction to oil, Texas oil billionaire T. Boone Pickens is still trying to get the rest of us to see what he sees. And he thinks he is making progress.

First, he said more than 1.6 million people had signed up on his Web site to join the New Energy Army. Second, he is being invited as a speaker, at $125,000 per appearance, to talk about his singular focus, the Pickens Plan. He said he has done 26 town meetings, and received standing ovations at 23 of them.

"I think I'm getting the attention of the people," he said from Dallas in a phone interview last week.

On July 8, 2008, Mr. Pickens unveiled the Pickens Plan, described in a news release as "a sweeping, innovating plan to address the national energy dependence crisis."

But in fact it was less of a plan than an outline:

1. Build thousands of wind turbines between Texas and Canada to exploit the Midwestern corridor that many in the wind industry call "the Saudi Arabia of wind."

2. Build new transmission lines to get the power generated by those turbines to power plants for population centers in the Midwest, South and West.

3. Redirect natural gas that is now being used for power plants to use in transportation, replacing imported gasoline and diesel fuel.

When the plan was announced, much of the response focused on the sheer irony of a man who made his fortune in oil advocating for a massive deployment of wind energy. Now, when asked about the apparent disconnect, he says, "It's not about me; it's all about America."

The plan was noteworthy not only because of its audacious scale, but also because Mr. Pickens said it could happen in 10 years.

He still does. But now, the third stage may wind up being the first.

When he announced the plan, Mr. Pickens made a point of saying that the first two steps were to be accomplished by private enterprise, without public money. Indeed, he intended to jump-start the process by developing the world's largest wind farm. The Pampa Wind Project, located in the Texas panhandle, would deploy hundreds of turbines to generate 4,000 megawatts of electricity, enough to power a million homes.

But then the credit crunch hit, and the financing that Mr. Pickens' hedge fund, BP Capital Management, would have needed to build both turbines and transmission lines never materialized.

A year after announcing his plan, Mr. Pickens announced that he was putting Pampa on hold.

Meanwhile, the push for natural gas has gained momentum in Congress.

In April, U.S. Rep.