The 1,500 or more megawatts to be added this year will be located in a dozen states. But this is only the beginning. Advances in wind turbine technology, drawing heavily from the aerospace industry, have lowered the cost of wind power from 38 cents per kilowatt hour in the early 1980s to 3 to 6 cents today depending on the wind site. Wind, now competitive with fossil fuels, is already cheaper in some locations than oil or gas-fired power. With major corporations, such as ABB, Shell International and Enron plowing resources into this field, further cost cuts are projected.
Wind is a vast, worldwide source of energy.
The U.S. Great Plains are the Saudi Arabia of wind power. Today Denmark, the world leader in wind turbine technology and manufacture, is getting 15 percent of its electricity from wind power. Spain's industrial state of Navarra, starting from scratch six years ago, now gets 24 percent of its electricity from wind. And as wind generating costs fall, and as concern about climate change escalates, more and more countries are climbing onto the wind energy bandwagon, including Argentina, the United Kingdom, France and China. The Bush plan to add 393,000 megawatts of electricity nationwide by 2020 could be satisfied from wind alone.