Modern life is powered by electricity.  We are reminded of this fact each time we experience a power failure.  Nearly all our activities and comforts depend either directly or indirectly on the availability of electricity.  Last year in the wake of a particularly intense hurricane season some residents in Southern Florida experienced an especially unpleasant reminder of just how dependent we have become on electricity.  It seems that many of these communities are situated below sea level and their sewage treatment plants are located on higher ground.  Large electric pumps are used to pump wastewater up to the treatment plants.  As power failures lingered the back up systems began to fail.  Soon resident were waking up to toilets overflowing and filling their homes with raw sewage.

Most of our capacity to produce hydroelectric power has already been tapped – there are few locations remaining where we can build new dams without damaging ecosystems or communities.  There are so many roadblocks to building nuclear power plants that it is almost impossible to find new sites where they can be located.  This leaves us with plants that burn fossil fuels to generate electricity.   At the moment nearly 70% of the electrical capacity in the US is generated from fossil fuel burning facilities.  This means that most of the capacity to generate electricity US is dependent on fuel sources that are becoming less available and more expensive.  When an economy is dependent on having access to plentiful and inexpensive electric power to maintain productivity is seems less than wise to have the production of that power dependent on an unreliable (over the long-term) fuel source.

It seems clear that prudent planning requires an investment in alternative methods of generating electricity.  Ideally we would plan and develop power plants that do not depend on outside fuel sources and have the least amount of environmental impact.  Designs that can be built quickly and inexpensively would help us to increase capacity in concert with demand and without a drain on the economy.  Fortunately, there are new technologies that offer the promise of reliable and inexpensive electricity that can be brought online fairly quickly and inexpensively.

Wind turbine electrical generators offer a solution to these needs and are already producing impressive results in communities all over the world.  “Wind Farms” are fairly inexpensive to build compared to fossil fuel burning plants, nuclear or hydroelectric plants, and can be built in a fraction of the time.  While wind farms are not completely free of environmental impact (birds can be killed if they fly into a moving turbine) that impact is fractional compared with the big three conventional designs mentioned above.

Most of the resistance to building more wind farms centers around two core issues:  1. residents object to the visual intrusion of a large wind turbine between their home and any view they may have, and 2. Many people believe that wind turbines are so inefficient that most communities would have to have turbines wall-to-wall before enough capacity could be generated to make much of a difference.

Modern wind turbines are very efficient and powerful.  The main problem with integrating them into existing electrical grids is that they can generate too much power and blow out the components that make up the grid.  This problem is can be solved by installing regulators between the wind farms and the grid, and using batteries to store the excess capacity.

It is also not necessary to destroy scenic views to build wind farms.  Wind farms can be built any place that has a steady supply of wind.  There are many places in our environment where the wind is steady and there is little residential development.  Providing substantial electrical capacity from wind turbines does not take up nearly as much room as one might think.  A recent study concluded that a wind farm approximately 100 square miles would provide enough electricity to power all of the homes in the US.  While 100 square miles sounds like a lot of space if one were to view a location of this size from above it would appear to be a tiny dot in an area as big as East Texas or the Mojave Desert in California.

Wind turbine power stations are being built all over the world and are already serving many population centers with reliable, cost effective and environmentally friendly electrical power.  The annual growth rate for wind power generation is over 30%, enough to attract the attention of big business.  New investors in wind power include Goldman Sachs, global energy developer AES, Siemens in Germany and General Electric.  Wind power is not only good for big business – small landowners can also benefit.  A farmer can earn an extra $5,000 a year per turbine located on his property.