Wind/Hydrogen Energy Age Is on the Way

Osama bin Laden has urged his followers to blow up the oil fields of the Middle East. This will hurt, of course, but technology to be used with other energy sources is developed and being perfected.

The wind-energy capacity for the United States has been underestimated as Wyoming, North Dakota, Kansas, and Texas have “enough harnessable wind energy to satisfy national electricity needs. Using wind energy, “we have the option of electrolyzing water to produce hydrogen, which provides a way of storing and efficiently transporting wind energy.”

…Hydrogen is the fuel of choice for the fuel cell engines that automakers worldwide are working on and, if push comes to shove on the climate front, cars with gasoline-burning internal combustion engines can be converted to hydrogen.

Once in storage, hydrogen can be used to fuel power plants, much as natural gas is used. This hydrogen can be either a backup for wind power
or an alternative to natural gas, especially if rising prices make gas prohibitively costly for electricity generation.

The principal cost for wind-generated electricity is the capital outlay for initial construction. Since wind is a free fuel, the only ongoing cost is for maintenance. Given the recent volatility of natural gas prices, the stability of wind power prices is particularly appealing. With the possibility of even higher costs of natural gas in the future, natural gas-fired plants may be used increasingly as a backup for wind-generated
electricity.

The United States is lagging in developing wind energy not because it cannot compete technologically with Europe in manufacturing wind turbines but because of a lack of leadership in Washington. The wind production tax credit of 1.5¢ per kilowatt-hour, which was adopted in 1992 to establish parity with subsidies to fossil fuel, has been permitted to lapse three times in the last five years, most recently at the end of 2003 when Congress failed to pass a new energy bill. The uncertainty about when it will be renewed has disrupted planning throughout the wind power industry.

If leadership in Washington is what’s necessary to get this project off the ground, prod your Congressmen, or better still, their staff, to get the ball rolling.