Who Should be Buying a Wind Turbine?
Recognizing the serious environmental and health threats from fossil-fueled power plants, and acknowledging the possibility of apocalyptic disaster at any nuclear power plant, the American public, finally, has begun exploring the feasibility and practicality of drawing electric power from the wind and is now ready to buy a wind turbine.
Rural America has relied on wind power for decades. Even after the government completed rural electrification in 1964, far-flung communities continued generating much of their own power from hybrid diesel/wind systems. And the windmill remains a fixture on most American farms-not because it represents a cute and quaint testimonial to times past, but because it makes perfect economic sense. Many large farms connected to the grid only as back-up for their own more ambitious wind turbine installations. Most American farmers and small manufacturers recognize the wisdom of buying wind turbines instead of paying for electricity. Soon, owners and operators of large industrial and office complexes ought to see considerable financial advantage in buying wind turbines, too.
Cities and suburbs have failed to keep pace with advances in alternative energy, because they came of age in the sixties when everyone believed fossil fuel would last until nuclear power satisfied all our electrical needs. Now, as eagerness for wind and solar power drives engineers and planners, preliminary studies suggest just about every North American community has geographic and weather conditions conducive to hybrid wind and solar power installations. Yet we still can use our fingers to count the number of communities seriously considering investment in wind turbines.
Some wind power statistics deceive: The United States, for example, currently ranks second among modern industrialized nations in wind power generation. Only Germany produces more electricity from wind power. Cause for celebration many Americans may imagine. Except wind farms produce less than 1% of America’s total electricity. Thanks to reasonably successful wind power initiatives in California and throughout New England, commercial wind farms will push that number above 1% by 2010, driving the United States to #1 among the world’s wind energy producers. But 99% of the country will continue relying on old technology, suffering the consequences of greenhouse gases for the sake of considerably lower electric utility costs.
Although it would be nice if each American homeowner could buy and install his own little household power plant, setting himself free from the grid, the physics of wind power just do not work that way. Geography, topography, climate, and housing density allow well over 90% of American homeowners to buy wind turbines just barely big enough to power their blenders or waffle irons-nothing more. For most American homes, a single small wind generator has approximately the same value as a yard gnome.
Looking at the nation’s twenty-first century energy needs, America must abjure its love of rugged individualism and embrace community enterprise. No individual homeowner ever ought to buy a wind turbine. Every community should buy fields full of wind turbines.
Only a community cooperative, municipal corporation or public-private partnership should buy a wind turbine. And when a community invests in wind energy, it should buy and build as aggressively and ambitiously as apparently crazy visionaries recommend, because wind power benefits from economies of size and scale. Bigger always is better; more and mightier always work better than just a few little ones. Although the biggest and best industrial wind turbines cost more than $1 million each, the more generators a community buys and installs, the more quickly they pay for themselves; and the higher the towers soar, the more electricity each wind turbine generates.
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