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Winds of change
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Sat, 17 May 2008 15:04:41 -0700
At a meeting of stae regulators I attended, they talked about the enviromental issues that this technology causes . They nclude serious noise issues, hazards to birds and bats and lots of NBM (not by me) protests. Dave ________________________________________ From: Robert J. Berger [rberger () ibd com] Sent: Saturday, May 17, 2008 3:22 AM To: Dewayne Hendricks; David Farber Subject: Winds of change Winds of change The U.S. can greatly boost clean wind power for 2 cents a day. Now all we need is a president who won't blow the chance. By Joseph Romm http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/05/17/wind_power/ May 17, 2008 | A stunning new report just issued by the Bush administration finds that for under 2 cents a day per household, Americans could get 300 gigawatts of wind by 2030. That would: • Reduce carbon dioxide emissions from electricity generation by 25 percent in 2030. • Reduce natural gas use by 11 percent. • Reduce cumulative water consumption associated with electricity generation by 4 trillion gallons by 2030. • Support roughly 500,000 jobs in the U.S. The report doesn't mention that this would require adopting policies the Bush administration opposes. But that's what elections are for. Wind power is coming of age. In 2007, some 20,000 megawatts of wind were installed globally, enough to power 6 million homes. Sadly, most wind power manufacturers are no longer American, thanks to decades of funding cuts by conservatives. Still, new wind is poised to be a bigger contributor to U.S. (and global) electricity generation than new nuclear power in the coming decades. As I have written earlier, concentrated solar power could be an even bigger power source, and it can even share power lines with wind. That means we can realistically envision an electric grid built around renewables: electricity with no greenhouse gas emissions, no fuel cost (and no future price volatility) and no radioactive waste. But while it is poised to happen, and other governments are working hard to claim market share, America will need a bold president to ensure leadership in these major job-creating industries of the 21st century. Like solar thermal, wind energy has a long history. More than 2,000 years ago, simple windmills were used in China to pump water and in Persia and the Middle East to grind grain. Merchants and returning veterans of the Crusades introduced windmills to Europe in the 11th century, where first the Dutch and then the English improved the design. By the 18th century, more than 10,000 windmills operated in the Netherlands, where they were used to grind grain, pump water and saw wood. Ultimately the mills were replaced by steam engines because they could not compete with the low cost, convenience and reliability of fossil fuels. In America, windmills were widely used in the West by the end of the 1800s, providing water for irrigation and electricity for isolated farmers. While wind has not been able to compete with large central-station electric power plants for most of this century, it began to see a resurgence in the 1970s because of the energy crises and government support. Those wind turbines, however, were crude derivatives from airplane propellers and were noisy and inefficient. Over the past quarter-century, significant aerodynamic improvements in blade design have largely solved both problems and brought down the cost of electricity from wind power by 10 percent a year (until recently). Wind energy can now be captured efficiently over a broad range of wind speeds and direction. Turbines, now placed where the wind is constant, have been scaled up from 35 kilowatt models of the early 1980s to 2 megawatts (2,000 kilowatts). Better weather forecasting and computer modeling allow much more confident predictions of wind availability 24 hours ahead of time. With major government investments in wind in the 1970s, the U.S. was poised to be a dominant player in what was clearly going to be one of the biggest job-creating industries of the next 100 years. As late as the mid 1980s, we had over 85 percent of the world's global installed capacity, and U.S. companies possessed the most critical knowledge about how to develop wind farms cost-effectively. President Reagan cut the renewable energy budget more than 80 percent after he took office, and eliminated the wind investment tax credit in 1986. His administration saw wind power, clean energy and energy conservation as "Jimmy Carter" strategies, and, like most conservatives, Reagan opposed government-led programs to promote alternative energy. This was pretty much the death of most of the U.S. wind industry. <snip> ------------------------------------------- Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/ Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
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- Winds of change David Farber (May 17)