The Winds of Change

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Over the Columbia River, on a high desert ridge, the world's largest wind farm sprawls across 50 sq. mi. of Oregon and Washington. When the last of its 460 turbines are installed, this postmodern power plant will offer clean electricity to 70,000 homes and businesses. Every month hundreds of tourists come to gawk at its fiber-glass blades, twirling with balletic grace atop 160-ft. poles. "People are in awe of wind power," says Anne Walsh, community-relations manager of the Stateline Energy Center.

And guess what? Wind is becoming more than a quixotic sideshow. It's now the world's fastest growing power source--a high-tech challenge to the coal mines, oil rigs, nuclear reactors and hydroelectric dams that seem, well, so 20th century. Experts say wind could provide up to 12% of the earth's electricity within two decades. Wind farms in Texas, Oregon, Kansas and elsewhere helped lift U.S. wind-energy output 66% last year, and an additional $3 billion in American projects are in the works. "Wind is competitive," wrote Mark Moody-Stewart, the former chairman of Royal Dutch/Shell who now co-chairs an alternative-energy task force for the Group of Eight, in a recent report. "This is not something to look forward to for the future--it is here today."

The promise is tantalizing. Windmills generate renewable power, so called because the source of the energy, wind, is continually renewed by nature (ditto for solar cells, which are powered by the sun; geothermal systems, which use the earth's heat; and hydroelectricity, which flows from dams). Unlike oil and coal deposits, renewable energy can't be exhausted, at least not until the sun burns out billions of years from now and earth goes cold.

Skeptics may recall the burst of enthusiasm for conservation and renewable power when oil prices quadrupled in the 1970s. State-funded energy research and development surged, while tax incentives boosted solar, wind and other alternatives to petroleum and the atom. But once oil supplies loosened and prices dropped, governments lost interest. In the U.S., rules requiring more fuel-efficient cars were rolled back. In California, subsidies evaporated, pushing wind companies into bankruptcy. "It is a moral disgrace that we have done so little to reduce our dependence on imported oil and oil generally," says Reid Detchon, a former U.S. Energy Department official who now consults for the United Nations Foundation.

But the need to diversify is now more urgent and the consensus to do so greater than when OPEC first played bully. Global energy demand is expected to triple by midcentury. The earth is unlikely to run out of fossil fuels by then, given its vast reserves of coal, but it seems unthinkable that we will continue to use them as we do now, for nearly 80% of our energy. It's not just a question of supply and price, or even of the diseases caused by filthy air. We know that global warming from heat-trapping carbon dioxide, a by-product of fossil-fuel burning, threatens to cause chaos with the world's climate. And the terrorist assault on the World Trade Center raises other scary scenarios: how much easier would it be to crack open the Trans-Alaska pipeline and how much deadlier would it be to bomb a nuclear plant than to attack a wind farm?