Wind Power: Clean, Renewable Energy for New York

By Dave Bradley, Wind Action Group ~

You might be surprised to learn that there are 5 wind turbines working on the frozen continent of Antarctica. In fact, these are among the more productive ones presently operating in the world. The total installed capacity is only 1.6 megawatts. But that is still more than the installed capacity of all but 8 of NY State's 62 counties. That leaves a lot of room for improvement in NY State.

For NY State, it will probably take a whole new way to price renewable energy, and an understanding that replacing the pollution-sourced electricity (natural gas, coal, nuclear) can provide a working career for hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers. That would put a nice dent in the estimated 1 million New Yorkers who need a job, and these jobs would provide decent pay.

The most successful pricing system for renewable energy is known as FIT, for Feed-In Tariff (Examples are in Ontario, Spain, Germany, and Denmark). Another name for FIT is CLEAN contract (Clean Local Energy Accessible Now). New manufacturing jobs, supply chain, real-wealth creation are the goals, and the byproduct is clean electricity that displaces pollution-based electricity and often fuel imports that also require exporting real wealth.

If you want details of how FIT/CLEAN contracts work and what they can do, see this link to an excellent Green Paper written by Bill Nowak for the NY Sierra Club Atlantic Chapter.

If you want to see a highly-condensed summary in the form of a Powerpoint presentation (.pdf format), download this one by Dave Bradley. 

If you are interested in a presentation and discussion of this material for a group, email Dave Bradley at Tantalum73@verizon.net. After all, there is a lot of "misunderstanding" and "lack of awareness" as to what renewable energy can do.

This report is a condensed version of the full article edited by David Kowalski. The full article by Dave Bradley is available at the Wind Action Group Engineering website.