Little Windmill on the Prairie

A new report by the US Department of Energy and the Berkeley Lab puffs up wind power in the US, noting that "35 percent of all new electricity-generating capacity added in the U.S. in 2007" came from wind projects. That still means that we get only 1.1 percent of our power from wind, as you’ll see in the PDF of the entire report.

I already knew that Texas had the most windmills, but I was surprised that Minnesota and Iowa have become the states most dependent on wind power; 7.5 percent of all electricity in those states comes from gust collectors. None of the New England states hits the 1 percent mark, and wind power has a minimal presence in Massachusetts — something that will change if the Cape Wind project is ever completed. (See Charles Euchner’s review of the book Cape Wind in last summer’s edition of CommonWealth.)