NOW MORE THAN EVER, the winds of change are blowing. In the Middle East and North Africa, the upending of long-entrenched authoritarian regimes has laid bare just how much the United States relies on relationships of convenience with faraway countries whose political and social fabrics we scarcely understand. The need to free ourselves from an overwhelming dependence on energy resources outside our borders and beyond our control has never been more apparent. The OPEC oil embargo of 1973 stirred a new awareness of the need to wean ourselves off foreign oil, but all too soon that clarion call was muffled by a more dominant message: petroleum was there for the taking, even if it threatened to draw us into one war after another in the Middle East.
On the home front, the opening of the western coal frontier and the exploitation of new natural gas reserves have given us the sense that we can fuel our electricity needs by burning through vast quantities of carbon, with little regard for the environmental consequences. Even though we are the world leader in per-capita greenhouse gas emissions, we have consistently balked at joining the Kyoto Protocol and other international efforts to avert global warming. The cost to our industries and consumers would be too high, our political and industrial leaders have insisted. Unfortunately, the same metric has not been applied to the fortune that we have spent over the past decade fighting ill-defined wars in the Middle East—more than a trillion dollars and counting.1
The Fukushima reactor disaster in March 2011 put us on renewed notice about the perils of nuclear energy just as the United States was considering a new wave of power plant construction. Instead of buffering Japan’s bitter memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the world’s pursuit of civilian nuclear power has brought ever-greater numbers of nations to a roulette table where the stakes are impossibly high. We have begun to learn the hard way that rare events do happen—at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima, and who knows where next.
If wind energy looked promising in the first decade of this new millennium, it looks essential as we begin making our way through the second. Wind is no panacea, but the problems it poses are within our ability to address responsibly, and the scale of its potential contribution to our energy economy is staggering. By the end of 2012, we should have upwards of 50 gigawatts of installed capacity at wind farms scattered across most of our fifty states. That will get us a sixth of the way to the Department of Energy’s goal of supplying a fifth of our power from wind by 2030, and at least start us down the path to FERC chairman Jon Wellinghoff’s longer-term vision of having wind provide half of America’s electricity. Happily, we have barely scratched the surface of the 11,000 gigawatts of wind power available to us on land. Equally wide open are the prospects for developing our wind energy resources at sea. Cape Wind, likely to become the nation’s first offshore wind farm, has survived the obstacles thrown in its way and should be operational in a few years’ time. That project will provide less than a half-gigawatt of installed wind power, leaving about 4,000 gigawatts of offshore wind resources for future development—far more electricity than America could conceivably need in the foreseeable future.
Even with our superabundance of available wind, it would be naive to believe that wind energy alone could free America from its reliance on fossil and nuclear fuels. Wind’s variability requires balancing our wind-generated power with other technologies that are not constrained by intermittency. Realistically, fossil fuels like coal and gas, despite their drawbacks, will need to play a role in finding that balance during the next few decades. At the same time, we must make an all-out effort to develop a range of renewable technologies that can complement land-based wind power while doing less damage to the environment than fossil or nuclear fuels. Tidal and geothermal power, deepwater wind, carefully selected crop-derived fuels that have a net energy benefit and don’t compete with our food production, and bio-gas drawn from sewage treatment, landfills, and livestock waste are among the options. Solar energy, intermittent like wind but with differently timed peaks and troughs, can further contribute to a balanced power supply, especially if its price becomes more competitive with other generation sources. The way forward will involve an integration of multiple technologies, with full recognition of the trade-offs involved with each.
Making wind a major American electricity provider will also require us to build a green-power superhighway worthy of the name. A new level of collaboration across state boundaries will be needed to plan these routes, and new mechanisms will have to be established to ensure that national energy priorities are given appropriate weight in decisions about new transmission lines. Beyond making sure that wind-generated power can be tapped where it is strongest and delivered to areas of greatest demand, sophisticated “smart grid” management tools and new power storage technologies will have to be developed to translate the wind’s natural variability into an assured, continuous flow of power that perfectly matches consumer demand. The options abound, from flywheels and pumped hydro storage reservoirs to plug-in electric cars and industrial-scale batteries. All present timely opportunities to a U.S. technology sector that is looking for ways to make American industry more responsive to twenty-first-century needs.
To harness the wind’s potential, we will need to sustain a level of federal support that places wind energy at least on a par with other new power plant investments. The U.S. government’s stimulus program, with its flexible menu of federal production and investment tax credits convertible to treasury grants, has helped even out the playing field for wind energy in recent years. These programs were critical to averting a devastating setback to wind manufacturers and wind farm developers when the recession hit the industry hardest in 2010. 2 Continuing a program of wind energy tax credits will be a vital counterpoint to the subsidies, overt and hidden, that our government has long bestowed upon the fossil fuel and nuclear power industries.
Just as we dare not pin our hopes for wind on the elimination of government subsidies for fossil fuels and nuclear energy, we would be foolish to chart a course that depended on congressional passage of a federal tax on carbon emissions. More clearly within reach is a federal standard akin to the renewable electricity standards that have already been adopted by more than thirty states, requiring utilities to provide a minimum percentage of their power from renewable energy. Yet this approach, too, has proven vulnerable to lobbying attacks by the fossil fuel and nuclear industries. President Obama’s commitment to wind, so persuasively articulated during his early days in office, yielded all too quickly to a more ambiguous embrace of “clean energy” that risks diverting us from renewable energy investments and sending us down a path toward “clean coal” and even “carbon-free nuclear energy,” overlooking the horrendous hazards to health, safety, and the environment posed by each.
Even as our political leaders waffle on renewable energy’s role in shaping our national energy portfolio, many of our states continue to press forward with policies that significantly advance wind and other renewable technology investments. With renewable electricity standards adopted by nearly two-thirds of our states, the momentum will continue to build. Texas, the nation’s oil king, now generates nearly 10 percent of its electricity from wind. In Oregon, 15 percent of the power supply is already based on wind. California now draws nearly 20 percent of its electricity from renewable sources, and it is charting a course toward 33 percent reliance on wind and other renewables by 2020.
Leading proponents of renewable energy development in those and other states notably cut across party lines. Not only did Texas governor George W. Bush preside over the adoption of the state’s first renewable electricity standard, but both Jerry Brown, California’s current Democratic governor, and his Republican predecessor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, have carried the renewable energy banner with pride and determination. In November 2010, when the Koch brothers and other fossil fuel industry leaders bankrolled a referendum campaign to neutralize the renewable electricity standard and other elements of California’s greenhouse gas agenda, one of the state’s most vigorous defenders was George Shultz, Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state and Richard Nixon’s first budget director. Recalling the American car industry’s shortsighted folly in opposing tighter air emission standards back in 1990, this lifelong conservative Republican observed: “There is a long history here of the pessimists underestimating what American ingenuity can do.”3
The opportunities for ingenuity in developing America’s wind energy potential abound. In my travels researching this book, I have witnessed this promise in the determined efforts of turbine manufacturer Clipper Wind. I have seen Rust Belt companies like Timken seize upon wind energy as its next big strategic bet. I have admired the pluck of family-run businesses like Cardinal Fastener as they carve out new niche markets. And I have been awed by the creativity of inventors and innovators who are racing to create a smarter grid.
But wind energy isn’t just about innovation. It’s about sound investment and careful planning by a growing corps of U.S. entrepreneurs. It’s about creating a new generation of jobs in a renewable energy economy, from assembling turbines on the factory line to building and operating them in the field. It’s about making America more energy-independent in an increasingly chaotic world. And it’s about bringing much-needed stability to our unsettled global climate. With strong collaboration between government and the private sector, wind can truly become the heartland’s new harvest.