Regardless of the impending catastrophe of climate change, regardless of the high price of gasoline and regardless of the fact that in wind power lies one of the greatest and cheapest sources of power ever made available to mankind, there are still those who cry loudly, “Oh, we love wind power. We just don’t want it in our back yard.” A governor of a state that fouls its land with the scabs of coal mines, recently said he didn’t want those ugly things (windmills) along the top of his mountains.
The black ugliness of coal-mine-destroyed-mountains is preferable to this man to the clean, white beauty of windmills against the blue sky, turning out power silently with the eternal wind. In yet another state, laced and criss-crossed with high tension power lines, tar treated poles, wires and junction boxes, the residents prefer those to the silent beauty of the windmills. What is our problem here? Are we so rooted in the past that we cannot see the wide-open vista to the future?
The United States is the laggard in the world of renewable energy. Three of the top producers of wind power in the world, Denmark, Germany and Spain, are investing heavily in expansion of corporate use of wind power. Steady winds make offshore locations ideal for wind, and in Europe offshore operations power thousands of homes and businesses. In a newly released Strategic Research Agenda, the European Wind Energy Technology platform presents a vision of future power source in which more than a quarter of the EU’s electricity could be provided by wind in 2030.
According to that same SRA, wind energy could cover twelve to fourteen per cent of the EU’s electricity consumption by 2020, with a total installed capacity of 180 GW. This could increase to twenty-two to twenty-eight per cent of consumption and 300 GW in 2030.
It appears that the NIMBY syndrome does not exist in advanced-thinking Europe. They are making full use of this cleanest and least costly of all renewable energy sources. For more information on European advances in windpower go to http://www.ewea.org.
