Touted relentlessly last year on TV during the election season, a major windmill farm planned by billionaire oilman T. Boone Pickens has been scrapped.

The Dallas Morning News reported that rather than build a massive windmill farm in the Texas panhandle Pickens will build smaller ones in Wisconsin, Oklahoma, and Kansas.

The move is the latest retrenchment in alternative energy plans for the oil industry. BP last week announced it is dropping its "beyond petroleum" campaign and discarding unprofitable solar panel investments in favor of money-making oil drilling plans.

Pickens had earlier indicated he was running into financing difficulties for a big windmill farm. There are technical problems, too. According to the Dallas newspaper, engineers discovered problems in transmitting the energy generated at remote wind farms to populated suburbs and cities. Texas had planned to build $5 billion in transmission lines, but these lines didn’t meet with Pickens' approval.

Though his energy proposal has failed miserably, Pickens has taken to accepting media requests for interviews again. He is being critical of President Obama's plans to "cap and trade" carbon emissions, which has fared poorly in Europe where it was implemented a number of years ago. During an appearance on CNBC, Pickens said Obama has done nothing to wean the U.S. off foreign oil, which the oilman thinks leaves the country vulnerable in terms of national security.

Other critics, like Nicholas Loris and Ben Lieberman, of the Heritage Foundation, said in a web memo that cap and trade will raise energy prices as well as unemployment.