Wind energy is one of our best renewable resources. The United States is blessed with an area known as the "Wind Corridor" that has fairly constant and predictable winds. This corridor, which runs roughly from San Angelo Texas north to the Canadian border, is already home to thousands of new wind turbines.
Businessmen like T. Boone Pickens, (who interestingly enough made his fortune in oil,) are pouring billions into the wind industry. His current project near Pampa Texas will be the world’s largest wind farm when it is completed. Currently the world’s largest wind farm is the Horse Hollow project near Sweetwater Texas.
Can all of this wind energy end our dependence on foreign oil? That is unlikely. According to one study the United States alone would have to build a wind turbine every minute for the next twenty years to replace all the fossil fuel that we use.
That’s a lot of wind turbines and a lot of energy in the form of petroleum needed to produce and transport them. Each wind turbine requires hundreds of barrels of oil and natural gas for its construction. Fiberglass blades are made from oil, steel factories that make the towers are powered with natural gas and turbines are transported on ships and trucks, which burn diesel.
It’s a paradoxical situation. How to transform our economy to one using 100% renewable energy when incredible amounts of fossil fuel are required to do so.
One answer may lie in the newly discovered shale formations. A new technology called horizontal drilling is allowing oil and gas companies to produce incredible amounts of natural gas from a source that had never been seen as viable. Now the United States is literally saturated with natural gas. The price as fallen from a high of around $12.00 per thousand BTU’s to around $4.00.
This cheap, clean burning and abundant source of energy just might be what we need to fuel factories making wind turbines.
Wind energy is not the short-term solution but it should be the end game for domestic energy production. Wind and solar energy are plentiful and never ending. New technology such as molten salt and compressed air are being developed that allow this energy to be stored until needed. Natural gas fired power plants can be used as backup energy in the meantime.
It is highly likely that wind energy will one day provide most of the electrical power we use but in the meantime we should take advantage of clean burning natural gas from sources such as the newly discovered Marcellus formation to help us build the bridges to 100% renewable energy. If we don’t begin to transform our economy to one using renewable energy soon, we may one day lack enough fossil fuel to make the switch.
If you are a property owner considering leasing your land for wind power, see the following article: How To Lease Your Property For Wind Power
