Winds of change .......... Joseph Romm

[RedEarth]

Winds of change
The U.S. can greatly boost clean wind power for 2 cents a day. Now all we need is a president who won't blow the chance.
By Joseph Romm

May. 17, 2008 | A stunning new report just issued by the Bush administration finds that for under 2 cents a day per household, Americans could get 300 gigawatts of wind by 2030. That would:

Reduce carbon dioxide emissions from electricity generation by 25 percent in 2030.
Reduce natural gas use by 11 percent.
Reduce cumulative water consumption associated with electricity generation by 4 trillion gallons by 2030.
Support roughly 500,000 jobs in the U.S.

The report doesn't mention that this would require adopting policies the Bush administration opposes. But that's what elections are for.

Wind power is coming of age. In 2007, some 20,000 megawatts of wind were installed globally, enough to power 6 million homes. Sadly, most wind power manufacturers are no longer American, thanks to decades of funding cuts by conservatives. Still, new wind is poised to be a bigger contributor to U.S. (and global) electricity generation than new nuclear power in the coming decades. As I have written earlier, concentrated solar power could be an even bigger power source, and it can even share power lines with wind.

That means we can realistically envision an electric grid built around renewables: electricity with no greenhouse gas emissions, no fuel cost (and no future price volatility) and no radioactive waste. But while it is poised to happen, and other governments are working hard to claim market share, America will need a bold president to ensure leadership in these major job-creating industries of the 21st century.

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With major government investments in wind in the 1970s, the U.S. was poised to be a dominant player in what was clearly going to be one of the biggest job-creating industries of the next 100 years. As late as the mid 1980s, we had over 85 percent of the world's global installed capacity, and U.S. companies possessed the most critical knowledge about how to develop wind farms cost-effectively.

President Reagan cut the renewable energy budget more than 80 percent after he took office, and eliminated the wind investment tax credit in 1986. His administration saw wind power, clean energy and energy conservation as "Jimmy Carter" strategies, and, like most conservatives, Reagan opposed government-led programs to promote alternative energy. This was pretty much the death of most of the U.S. wind industry.

While President Clinton began increasing funding for wind, the Gingrich Congress blocked that effort beginning in 1995. President Bush and John McCain are two more conservatives who make positive statements about wind power while failing to support the policies that will help achieve this technology's potential. That includes failing to provide consistent support of the tax credit, which allows wind to compete with better-subsidized power sources like nuclear, and to partly offset the much bigger subsidies other countries have for renewables.

Both Bush and McCain have also consistently opposed a renewable electricity standard that would have set a minimum requirement for utilities to generate part of their power from sources like wind. Most European countries have such standards and Denmark, Germany and Spain have had stable, aggressive policies for years, a key reason their countries have become turbine manufacturing leaders.

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/05/17/wind_power/print.html