These are some common questions about stranded renewable resources and what can be done with them.

What is stranded wind?

Stranded wind, or any other renewable for that matter, is a means of generating electricity that exists in a place where there isn't a population to make use of it.

How do we use stranded wind?

There are many ways of using stranded renewables, but we think the best one for Iowa is the generation of ammonia, which can be used as both a fertilizer and a fuel. Other parts of the country will have different ideas, for example in the upper northeast they want to use Great Lakes wind to restart their local manufacturing businesses.

Why is the wind stranded?

It really depends on location, but here in northwest Iowa we have a lot of 34.5 and 69.0 kilovolt electric lines, but very few of the 115 kilovolt and none of the large lines needed to move electricity around. We can spend a million dollars a mile building means to move electricity to urban areas, or we can use the money to create jobs right here, freeing ourselves from fossil fuel in the process.

Does stranded wind exist where I live?

Here is a national wind energy map. You have to dig a bit to find out if you've got transmission lines in your area, but if you're in a rural place you can safely assume that you've got some stranded wind available. The darker blue patch in northwest Iowa is the color for 7.5 meter/second wind and the lighter color is 7.0 meter/second. Darker is faster and thusly better in terms of energy density. This map shows averages. If you are in a not so good looking area on the national map you can still find small sites that can work, for example there are plenty of ridge lines in the southeast where one could slip in a few hundred megawatts and get a system going.

What about other stranded renewables?

We own the Stranded Sun web site, too. Right now we use it for testing, but we hope someone in the southwest will ask to use it to do the same things we do for wind. Wind and sun are the two big stranded resources in the U.S., but there may be others we've not considered.

We have stranded wind! What do we do next?

We're happy to answer questions from people who think they might have a stranded wind project. If it turns out that you do and you need help we've got people here who do engineering, project management, grant writing, and lobbying. The Stranded Wind Initiative itself doesn't directly provide services, but it isn't hard to round up a group of folks out of our body of contributors to help you flesh out your project and get it funded.

What about ...

We get a number of common questions about various aspects of stranded wind, ammonia generation, and other things that are a bit too weighty for this FAQ, so they've received their own separate sections.