Wind is bigger than most people give it credit for. It’s still oft regarded, especially by conservative hardliners, as the persistent but unviable detritus from a long-ago hippie daydream. It’s not.
Wind works, and the sector is booming. I reported last week that the installed power capacity in the United States had hit a major new milestone: 50,000 megawatts, or 50 gigawatts. That’s the equivalent output of 11 nuclear power plants—and wind turbines don’t, like, pose the hazard of melting down and irradiating the surrounding community.
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Nonetheless, the wind industry is still too young to compete with the fossil fuel behemoths that have run the energy game for the last century or so. So, despite reaching grid parity (the point where utilities can buy power produced by wind just as cheaply as it can from fossil fuel plants) with coal in some regions, for the most part, wind is still slightly more expensive. So, the industry relies upon a federal tax break (the PTC) to stay competitive. Those aforementioned incredulous conservative hardliners, however, want to shut that down—they’re working to make sure the credit expires at the end of the year.
But the data shows that this is a colossally bad idea. The US Department of Energy has released an in-depth report on the robust state of the domestic wind energy, along with this handy map that shows exactly which states (it’s a lot of them) are producing wind power—and that are home to the manufacturing plants where wind parts are built. Seeing how wind is indeed a sizable sector, it supports a hell of a lot of jobs, too, and good ones. The above map, which is interactive if you click through, does a pretty good job of bringing it’s scope to life.
Wind is everywhere—that’s why otherwise conservative politicians like those who represent states like Iowa, Kansas, and Texas, are starting to buck their party and call for the preservation of the credits. Wind is, at the very least, going to play a crucial role in our energy future—sure, it can’t be depended on for baseload, not until we get some gigantic batteries up and running, but it’s clear now that it’s an important, efficient, and increasingly cheap source of clean power.
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