Wind Power: The Missing Link to Bush's Energy Plan

The eagerly awaited Bush energy plan released on May 17, 2001, disappointed many people because it largely overlooked the potential contribution of raising energy efficiency. It also overlooked the enormous potential of wind power, which is likely to add more to U.S. generating capacity over the next 20 years than coal.

In short, the authors of the plan appear to be out of touch with what is happening in the world energy economy, fashioning an energy plan more appropriate for the early twentieth century rather than the early twenty-first century. They emphasized the role of coal, but world coal use peaked in 1996 and has declined some 11 percent since then as countries have turned away from this climate-disrupting fuel. Even China, which rivals the United States as a coal burning country, has reduced its coal use by 24 percent since 1996.

Meanwhile, world wind power use has multiplied nearly fourfold over the last five years, a growth rate matched only by the computer industry. In the United States, the American Wind Energy Association projects a staggering 60 percent growth in wind-generating capacity this year.

Wind power was once confined to California, but during the last three years, wind farms coming online in Minnesota, Iowa, Texas, Colorado, Wyoming, Oregon, and Pennsylvania have boosted U.S. capacity by half from 1,680 megawatts to 2,550 megawatts. The 1,500 or more megawatts to be added this year will be located in a dozen states. A 300-megawatt wind farm under construction on the Oregon/Washington border is currently the world's largest.

But this is only the beginning. The Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) indicated in February that it wanted to buy 1,000 megawatts of wind-generating capacity and requested proposals. Much to its surprise, it received enough to build 2,600 megawatts of capacity in five states, with the potential of expanding these sites to over 4,000 megawatts. BPA, which may accept most of these proposals, expects to have at least one site online by the end of this year.

A 3,000-megawatt wind farm in the early planning stages in South Dakota, near the Iowa border, is 10 times the size of the Oregon/Washington wind farm. Named Rolling Thunder, this project, initiated by Dehlsen Associates and drawing on the leadership of Jim Dehlsen, a wind energy pioneer in California, is designed to feed power to the midwestern region around Chicago. This proposed project is not only large by wind power standards, it is one of the largest energy projects of any kind in the world today. Advances in wind turbine technology, drawing heavily from the aerospace industry, have lowered the cost of wind power from 38 cents per kilowatt hour in the early 1980s to 3 to 6 cents today depending on the wind site. Wind, now competitive with fossil fuels, is already cheaper in some locations than oil or gas-fired power. With major corporations, such as ABB, Shell International, and Enron plowing resources into this field, further cost cuts are in prospect.

Wind is a vast, worldwide source of energy. The U.S. Great Plains are the Saudi Arabia of wind power. Three wind-rich U.S. states-North Dakota, Kansas, and Texas-have enough harnessable wind to meet national electricity needs. China can double its existing generating capacity from wind alone. Densely populated Western Europe can supply all of its electricity needs from offshore wind power.

Today Denmark, the world leader in wind turbine technology and manufacture, is getting 15 percent of its electricity from wind power. For Schleswig-Holstein, the northernmost state of Germany, it is 19 percent and, for some parts of the state, 75 percent. Spain's industrial state of Navarra, starting from scratch six years ago, now gets 24 percent of its electricity from wind.