Boosting Wind Power's Share of U.S. Energy Production

In a mammoth report being issued this month, the U.S. Department of Energy lays out a detailed scenario in which, by the year 2030, one fifth of America’s electricity could come from wind.

The report, which is the work not only of DOE employees but of academics and a wide array of industry figures, announces itself as an effort “to start the discussion” about the various issues involved in attaining what they label the 20% Wind Scenario. The authors conclude that a “20% Wind Scenario in 2030, while ambitious could be feasible if the significant challenges identified in this report are overcome.”

While policymakers analyze the costs and benefits of making such a push, capitalists like T. Boone Pickens — whose fortune came, famously, from oil — are busily trying to construct the facilities that will make it possible. Pickens’s Mesa Energy has just ordered 667 wind turbines from General Electric, the first step in a plan announced last summer to build the largest wind farm in the world.

Ultimately, Mesa’s Pampa Wind Project should house 2,500 of the turbines, producing 4,000 megawatts (enough to power well over a million homes) by 2014. While phase one will cost around $2 billion, the entrepreneur guesses the final price tag will exceed $10 billion — the kind of investment, he emphasized in interviews this week, that most businesses will make only if current federal tax credits for production of renewable energy, currently set to expire in December, are extended by Congress.

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