Wind Power

"Paul Gipe is a very well-known wind energy personality. He’s been in the field a long time, he’s traveled a lot and he’s written a number of books. This one is fun to read because it’s about how ordinary people can harness wind power for homes, farms and businesses. It lays out the basics – it talks about the foundation requirements and how to lift the wind turbine up there. It conveys the idea that you don’t have to rely on giant industrial-sized windmills to supply power. It’s aimed at the little guy. Not everyone is looking to erect wind turbines on their property, but Gipe reminds us that there’s more to renewable energy than massive plants. In some countries, turbines are dispersed throughout the countryside instead of concentrated. Household-sized turbines can even generate surplus energy that can be stored and shared. So even if you’re not in the market for a “how-to”, you might be interested in this book’s vision of the potential of wind energy. It’s an economic issue. The tools are there, it’s just a matter of finding the right policies that will encourage the development and use of new energy technology that is clean and renewable. We need to give incentives for energy efficiency. That means incentives for developing electric vehicles that people feel comfortable with – vehicles that have the same convenience as a gas vehicle, so they have to be able to go 300 or 400 miles on a single charge. It’s really a matter of putting the right resources and incentives in place to get people to make investments in clean energy, and to make sure that those investments pay dividends. If we can put those incentives in place without them costing too much, the payback in the long run will be significant. And we’ll create jobs. Right now we’re spending about $1bn a day for oil imported to this country. We’re creating jobs overseas. If that billion dollars a day was spent in this country, creating energy with our own ingenuity and our own hard work, that would also create an enormous number of energy jobs. And there’s secondary jobs that come with them, too. We need Congress to get the message that the future of this country is in clean energy. I feel proud to carry that message in Congress while I am there to represent all the interests of my constituents. Solyndra certainly needs to be accounted for. But in order to develop new sources of energy we need to do research and development, and a well-supervised loan guarantee is one way to achieve that. I think there is a need for loan guarantees, especially considering what’s happening overseas. Solyndra happened to be competing with Chinese companies. The Chinese have absolutely no compunction about putting all kinds of resources into their industry so that they can outcompete our companies. That puts us at a disadvantage. It’s not a good argument to say that the failure of one company is an indication that the whole industry has a problem. Moreover, oil, gas and coal companies have had government subsidies for 100 years or so, so I think it’s reasonable that renewable resources companies can look to the government for help both in research and in incentives. We not only want to develop the resources for our country, we want to develop the manufacturing. We want to develop products to sell both in the US and overseas. Let me give you an example. The wind technology that I developed, as part of a team, we developed in this country. But it is now being manufactured overseas, especially in Germany, because we didn’t have the right policies in place in the US – the incentives were over there. So we developed the technology but as they are paying top dollar for energy in Germany, the manufacturing went over there and that’s where it stayed. They have good tax incentives for development, installation and production. But the chief policy was that utility companies were required to buy renewable power, and that caused the renewable energy industry in Germany to just explode. They have more windmills in Germany than we have in the United States. So Europe and Asia have both policies and manufacturing capacity. The US still has the know-how to create the next generation of technology, but if we’re going to lead in clean energy then we have to get back in the fight for the future."