America spends roughly $350 billion a year overseas on energy purchases, prices at the pump are nearly at their inflation-adjusted peaks from the 1970s, and there are calls from grass-roots organizations and former Vice President Gore to wean ourselves off of oil as an energy source.
With oil a finite commodity, and the demand for energy increasing, the economic viability of alternative energy sources is improving. In broad strokes, there are four alternatives: nuclear, solar, coal, and hydroelectric. Of these alternatives, nuclear is tangled up in a regulatory nightmare, at least in the US. France and Japan generate more than 80% of their electricity from nuclear plants that were designed in the US and yet are illegal to operate here. Coal-fired plants, meanwhile, are coming under greater scrutiny due to their carbon emissions. Solar power still has a terrible up-front cost for most of the country, and we've pretty much turned every viable hydroelectric site in the US into a power plant already.
That leaves wind power, and the viability of wind power is such that it's the only renewable energy source getting serious investment from utility companies. There is a Department of Energy study that indicates that it's technically feasible for the United States to generate 20% of its electricity from wind energy. The market for small-turbine wind generation — i.e., turbines suitable for putting next to a home or a small business — is growing rapidly, and the number of wind-turbine manufacturers continues to grow.
While there's considerable media advocacy for wind power, there is also the usual “not-in-my-back-yard” attitude. There are plenty of families fighting zoning restrictions and neighborhood associations trying to prevent those families from putting a wind-power solution near their homes. Wind-power turbines suitable for domestic use generally cost $6 to $13 per megawatt of generation capacity, which translates into a $12,000-to-$25,000 investment into a given home. Even if the system covers all the electrical needs of the residence, and there are net metering regulations in place, at an average price of 7 cents per kilowatt hour for electricity in the US, it takes a lot of hours of wind production for that wind turbine to pay for itself in a purely economic sense. Solar panels, though less expensive to install, tend to be less reliable in performance, and are even worse in their payback ratios.
There are, meanwhile, some storm clouds on the horizon. The first is that the Department of Energy report doesn't actually talk about the technical issues. Wind power, much like ground-based solar energy, is a distributed power method. It's not feasible, in most parts of the country, to make a giant wind farm that can replace a 100-megawatt power plant. Wind power, like solar power, tends to be a burst power source, and there is opposition to it in urban areas, where wind turbines are blamed for killing birds. In order to get wind power from remote locations, high-tension power lines (preferably direct-current, high-voltage lines) would need to be strung. This, in addition to the cost of the turbines and towers, makes for a high up-front cost, and one that many utility companies are a bit reluctant to take on.
The primary region of the United States suitable for wind-power generation is the eastern slope of the Rockies to where the Great Plains move down to the Mississippi river. This wind corridor extends from Montana down to Texas and has accessible, steady, high-velocity wind in southeasterly patterns. It's this wind corridor that oil billionaire T. Boone Pickens is betting on as he invests his own money in making wind-power generation plants, and it has the advantage of being a sparsely populated part of the country as demographics have shifted since the 1950s. There are a lot of small towns in the area that have been slowly dying off as farming and agriculture have gotten more automated, and wind power promises to revitalize them.
All in all, it's estimated that an aggressive wind-power generation program could generate between 300,000 to 600,000 jobs, with roughly 30% of them tied directly to power generation; the rest would be manufacturing jobs and contracting jobs to build the facilities.
In spite of what its advocates say, however, wind power is far from being a panacea. It's still difficult to convince most Americans that an electric car with a 120-mile range would cover their needs, and there is very little out there that works as well as gasoline in terms of energy stored per unit volume. Because of this, wind power may not appreciably dent the amount of oil the country consumes, at least not without the entire country moving to electric vehicles (or to electrically driven trains for large cargo transportation).
Even so, with oil at over $100 per barrel, there are plenty of economic niches for wind power to fill, and the market for it is strong. Whether it'll produce all the jobs promised is open to debate, but ultimately the market for wind power is here, and it's likely to stay.
