Inherit The Windmill
In England, people -- and not just those living on some country commune -- can opt to have their electricity from wind power. Nothing doing for most people over here in the States. How dumb -- especially here in California, where we've got plenty of natural wind, plus more than our fair share of blowhards. Here's an excerpt from an editorial about wind power in Denmark from the Boston Globe:
In the early 1970s, before Chernobyl or Three Mile Island, before anyone was worried about climate change, the Danes decided to harness the wind, and not the atom, to generate much of their electricity. Today, the design and production of state-of-the-art windmills is this small country's biggest industry. As most of the rest of the world seeks to slow down or reverse the production of greenhouse gases from fossil-fuel power plants, Denmark provides an example of one way to make electricity without emitting carbon dioxide.
In the United States, electricity generation accounts for about 40 percent of all greenhouse gases. That share will increase if plans in the next decade for 100 new coal-burning plants are not revised. China and India also plan to build hundreds of new plants burning coal, which produces more carbon dioxide than other fossil fuels. The resulting increase in CO² will greatly exceed the reductions in greenhouse emissions planned by the countries that signed the Kyoto Protocol.
Wind, the world's fastest-growing form of electricity production, deserves consideration in the United States and elsewhere as a carbon-free alternative to fossil fuel power.
Look how easy it is to not just consider it, but sign up for it, in the UK.
Here in windy Colorado, you can opt to pay a little more for blocks of wind-generated
electricity. The extra funds offsetting the higher costs (It all comes out of the same wires, unfortunately, and we've been unable to get the electrons to warm to the idea of team jackets, so it's really a trust issue). I haven't seen the figures lately, but the cost gap was narrowing rapidly two years and is likely to get close to even soon.
We also get a ton of sun and there are folks who've cut their use enough and installed sufficient solar panels to move into negative usage territory, in which case they get credits on their bills.
Alan at June 15, 2005 11:31 AM
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