they are, well, pretty in the abstract, and in person, kind of impressive, form follows function, and they are somehow calming, and like a wind chime, cooling, and they are popping up in large installations it seems just about everywhere (except for the coast of California, but for once I will try not to be grumpy)..the biggest onshore I can find is 5 Gigawatts of potential in north west China, and another in the North Sea might hit 9 Gigawatts.
I can name a few spots I have seen them in my travels. The old famous Farms were the highways east of San Francisco and LA, on 580 and I-10, Altamont and San Gorgonio Pass respectively (the latter also the home of the giant dinosaurs at the truck stop in Pee Wee's Big Adventure, which I know is more important to you than anything that follows). These installations are somehow a vestige of the first Obama administration, known to many as the Carter Administration (or maybe the third Wilson Administration perhaps..), since it was the environmental movement of the 70's that laid the seeds of today's progress, but they lay dormant in some ways for years as we kind of cleaned up many a mess from our wild industrial times before we could step it up to move forward as we are now.
Recently I drove with a friend to Mammouth Ski Area from the West Coast Hipster Capitol of Silver Lake, and made my buddy pull his Subaru over to and swing his skinny jeans out of the car to check this wind farm out, on a 'Long Cut' that helped us avoid Palmdale and Lancaster and check out more of I-5 and the countryside. The light blinking in the night kind of provided a fascinating modern spectacle.. no California Road Trip for a Gen X'er complete without some gaping at the weird combo of man made and natural that is The Golden State, and it turns out this is the second largest one in the US.. Tenchapi Pass. One Gigawatt of Potential, Marty McFly, one million American Households, and it was a spinning that night!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alta_Wind_Energy_Center
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjCRUvX2D0E
I've now seen them from Gaspe Penninsula to near Fairbanks (Alaska has had for a while a collection of like three windmills in a little place called Delta Junction, and a handful of native villages to supplant Diesel generators when possible, but they finally had two Major Utility Farms go online in the last few months, one on an island off of Anchorage, and another south of Fairbanks, near Healy) down to California and then a few in the Midwest, that are easiest to find on an FAA Sectional (Aviation Map) because they show up as a huge collection of flight hazards, like a multi square mile antennae farm. Somehow Illinois has taken a jump into wind, and Indiana is following suit.
The South East isn't known for it's wind, but Texas is, and Texas, under T Boone Pickins, has gone big as well. Did you expect anything less from Texas?
Here is a list of the Big ones.. it appears China is building one 5 Gigawatts.. well, I guess it is to be encouraged.. as much as it gets my goat to put nationalism aside..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_onshore_wind_farms
Potential seems to be growing at the speed of Planck's Constant.
Wind is the closest to competitive of the Green Energy Sources, usually measured in Price per Kilowatt Hour (how much it costs to build and maintain an energy source compared to the energy it produces), which is kind of the power industry standard, since it is how they bill.. It seems to come in around ten cents per KWH, a little under, but with subsidies can compete with hydro (which I will call pseudo green due to the environmental consequences of Dam Building) at sometimes as low as 4 cents a KWH, Coal and Natural Gas which might be around 6 cents per KWH. The wind industry was about to board up and close shop when it was anticipated that Romney would win re-election, but it looks like they are good for another 4 years as from the Inauguration speech to even the back rooms of the Fiscal Cliff debate, the Administration seems to be earnestly keeping these green incentives on the table. There are permitted projects in places like North West Indiana, Marshall County, that will likely go through now, and in Mexico the bread company that makes Bimbo, Gamesa, essentially North America's Largest Bakery, has decided to offset it's carbon footprint by financing a 90mw Farm in Oxaca. A company called Gamesa,not to be confused with the Mexican Cookie Manufacturer of the same name, but given the Bimbo story, I did, is planning Wind Farm near Tecate, perhaps the most charming border town in Mexico right now (and a good place to have your teeth fixed. To explain to me why Tecate had not gone the way of Juarez or Tijuana, the dentist told me that the border actually closes at like 10pm, which kept Tecate from being a party town).
But I have failed to mention offshore. The fight over Cape Wind, the wind farm near Nantucket, settled at the federal level over the strong protests of Nantucket's many Billionaire Residents like one of the Koch Brothers, was kind of a landmark fight, but it was won by the utility installing the wind farm, or so I thought.. it appears Save our Sound might have yet filed another injunction:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Wind
http://www.capewind.org/index.php
http://www.saveoursound.org/
http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/kkennedy/the_cape_wind_offshore_wind_fa.html
Unfortunately the fight has tied the project up for now some 12 years, so that nothing has actually happened yet physically as far as I can tell except for constructing a new office. That project pales in Megawatt-age compared to this that I just discovered on Googles Blog:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/15/business/energy-environment/an-offshore-wind-power-line-moves-ahead.html?_r=0
http://atlanticwindconnection.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_Wind_Connection
This is an Ambitious project! Looks like the kind of thing that eventually ends up in the last scene of a James Bond movie
And that's just America... Europe appears to be the leader for now in offshore, but Nantucket and now Atlantic promise to be Bigger, perhaps holding the record for a while.. Go Jersey!
If I could voice just one reservation, that as much as I don't want to be a wind power naysayer, the legitimacy of the bird kill possibilities aside (although habitat loss and global warming have and promise to kill a lot more), there is something beautiful about the sea not being defined, that other than navigation or a GPS, it is a space without reference, and the idea of offshore wind farms does somehow spoil that fantasy, gives it a checker board of definition, but I guess to save the sea, we must take away some of it's mystery..
On with wind power!
http://energy.gov/articles/wind-farm-growth-through-years#buttn
http://www.windpoweringamerica.gov/wind_installed_capacity.asp
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