From The Cities… To The Fields… And Back Again
In the waning days of the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Rural Electrification Act (REA) of 1936 into law, heralding a new era of growth and prosperity for the U.S. heartland.
You see, while electricity was generally available in cities and towns, it was nearly unheard of on farms, ranches and other rural areas. But the REA brought electric power to these sparsely populated Midwest farms and ranches.
Today, we’ve got the opposite situation.
President Obama is hoping that rural areas in the Midwest will return the favor by providing much needed wind-generated power to densely populated cities and towns on both the east and west coast.
Trouble is, the wind turbines that produce such power are huge and not well suited to heavily populated areas. They’re a better fit in the vast, open plains of the nation’s heartland, where the wind almost never stops blowing.
Here’s why wind power is still going to be the driving force that changes the way we use energy – and one of the biggest obstacles it currently has for getting us to where we need to be…
Gale-Force Growth
2008 was a banner year for the wind power industry. Previous installation records were smashed, with over 8,500 megawatts (MW) of new generating power installed in the U.S. alone. That’s enough to light over two million homes.
In fact, wind power installations represented 42% of all the new power generation capacity added in 2008. And the 44 million tons of carbon emissions avoided in the process equates to taking seven million cars and trucks off the roads.
As a result of the current recession, wind energy installation for 2009 will be somewhat muted compared to last year – about 5,000 MW expected to be installed. But despite the downturn, the industry is still in expansion mode.
And for the U.S., that bodes well, since a lot of the components are engineered and "made in the USA" – components that now make up about 50% of the average system, up from 30% in 2005.
And like any other burgeoning sector, when business is booming, companies expand and hire people.
