When a small industry grows as fast as wind power, its landmark achievements whip by like a turbine blade. You get headlines blaring out hallmarks like “US Wind Capacity Doubles” and “Colorado Utility Gets Record 57% of Its Power from Wind” and “Iowa Now 20% Wind-Powered!” And those are from just the last couple years alone.So here’s another one: “U.S. wind power now equals 11 nuke plants”. Yeah, nuke plants. Scary, unwieldy, public-terrifying, too-powerful nuke plants. And 11 of them are even bigger than it might seem at first glance—it means that wind power now boasts an installed capacity of 50,000 megawatts, or 50 gigawatts. That’s enough to power 13 million homes. And indeed, it means that the total amount of wind power being generated in the United States is roughly twice what it was just four years ago.Which is incredible. To put that in perspective, our nation has 104 running nuclear power plants, and the first one opened 54 years ago. In less than a decade of serious wind turbine installation, in the face of often-hostile political opposition, we’re already producing more than 1/10th the power that nuke plants do—and the vast majority of that buildup has taken place in the last 5 years alone. Check out this graph, compiled from data from the American Wind Energy Association:It reveals that if we were to continue installing wind power at the same rate that we’ve been doing so over the last four years, wind could overtake nuclear power in less than two decades. And here’s a graph depicting the increasing amount of electricity that wind generates (U.S. demand averages 10.63 billion kilowatt hours a day, or about 10 terawatt hours):
One more. This is wind power’s average growth rate over a five-year period:
As you can see, it’s up and up and up, and fast. Way faster than any other power source—though solar and natural gas are gaining ground, too.11 nuke plants. Imagine those reactor cores, imagine that kind of power. Then spread it out across the nation’s hillsides in the form of whirring steely giants. Of course, it’s not nuclear power we most urgently need to supplant. It’s coal. Climate change-quickening coal. And this boom in wind is indeed occurring concurrently with a drop in coal power, which is losing ground to cheaper, cleaner natural gas.Both trends need to continue, if we hope to transition to clean energy sometime before the Southwest gets consumed by a permanent dust bowl. As such, it’s worth noting that the biggest driver of the wind boom has been a particular tax break, the Production Tax Credit (PTC), that has allowed wind manufacturers to compete with the vast, entrenched fossil fuel giants that preside over our nation’s grid. But the PTC is set to expire, and conservatives are keen to see it do so; Romney has said that he’ll let it go not-so-quietly into the night if he becomes president.Obviously, that would be a colossal mistake. The investment in wind is clearly paying huge dividends (and ‘creating jobs!’, the two most-loved words in politispeak). It’s helping to steer us towards at least a semi-sane energy future. So, to those ideological warriors who oppose wind power on the grounds that it seems liberalish or indicative of big government (and who simultaneously defend Big Oil’s epic federal handouts, of course), I have a simple message: Wind works, assholes.
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