Ups and Downs of Wind Power
A recent episode of NPR’s All Things Considered walks through the debate within the environmental community regarding wind power. It seems greens are torn between the chance for renewable, pollution free power and the inevitable footprint of windmills blighting scenic and remote areas of ridgelines and coastlines.
The debate will go on, but apparently so will the march of new wind projects with the US approaching 10 Gigawatts of wind generation capacity.
posted by Andrew @ 3:17 PM
1 Comments:
Actually, the U.S. has just passed 10 GW of wind installed!
The use of wind energy in the U.S. today is five times what it was in 1998, and has grown by an average of 29% annually during the last five years.
Altogether, U.S. wind resources are enough to provide several times our current electricity use, although other sources (or storage) would still be needed because of the variability of the wind.
The key ingredient for wind's continued expansion? Continuing the federal wind energy production tax credit (PTC), which reduces a wind farm owner's tax payments by 1.9 cents for each kilowatt-hour of electricity the wind farm generates during the first 10 years of its operation. The PTC is currently scheduled to expire at the end of 2007. If the credit is extended for several years, we will see much greater use of this clean energy resource.
Regards,
Thomas O. Gray
American Wind Energy Association
www.awea.org
www.ifnotwind.org
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