It was meant to kick-start one of the most unlikely and ambitious transformations you could think of - weaning America off its addiction to oil - but it has been stymied by the double whammy of plunging fuel prices and the financial slowdown. For what would be the world's biggest wind farm, climate change has been trumped by the credit crunch.

It is a heavy blow for the plans of T Boone Pickens, a billionaire oilman- turned-green energy activist, who has delayed the construction of his wind farm, which was to have stretched out across the Texas Panhandle.

“With natural gas prices where they are, you can't kick off a wind project, you're not economical,” he told a news conference in Arizona. Moreover, with the banking crisis showing little sign of easing, financing the scheme was becoming more difficult.

Mr Pickens, who made his fortune by producing and betting on the price of crude, has poured millions of dollars this year into promoting his “Pickens Plan”, a set of proposals designed to switch America away from oil and towards the use of wind energy to generate electricity and domestically produced natural gas for transport fuel. He has dubbed the United States the “Saudi Arabia of wind” and envisages a sea of giant turbines stretching from Texas through the heart of the country to the Canadian border, what he calls “a wind corridor”. His proposed $10 billion Pampa Wind Project was meant to be merely the beginning, slated to include - eventually - thousands of turbines generating 4,000 megawatts of electricity, or enough to supply electricity to 1.3 million homes.

Jay Rosser, of Mesa Power, the company leading the project, said that Mr Pickens remained committed to it. “The capital markets are problematic for everyone, and we are keeping an eye on them,” Mr Rosser said. “The capital markets may lead us to slow down a bit, but we are still going forward with our wind business.”

The first phase of the Pampa scheme had been due to start producing power in 2011; it is not clear how far this start date will be pushed back.

Oil imports account for nearly 70 per cent of America's total consumption, up from 24 per cent in 1970. The Pickens Plan, however, envisages wind farms generating 20 per cent of the country's electricity. This would displace most of the natural gas that is used to generate power at present, which could be used to power vehicles, thus reducing oil imports. Mr Pickens argues that America could achieve complete energy independence within ten years at a cost of around $1.2 trillion by adopting this strategy.

He also believes that it would support the US economy by creating new green-collar jobs and industries and providing a new income stream for farmers who agree to place wind turbines on their land.

“We are going to have to do something different in America,” Mr Pickens said this summer. “You can't keep paying out $600 billion a year for oil.”

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