The recent Al Gore Speech has had one great effect - widespread news, publicity for the idea, at least for a day. he made the evening national news...so far, so good. And he focussed a lot of people on the tremendous wind resource that our country just happens to have.

Right now, this is all "big picture" stuff, with a central theme of making mass quantities of electricity on midwestern wind plantations, and then shipping the electricity off to large urban centers, or more properly phrased as "load centers" via very efficient high voltage direct current systems (HVDC). A 765,000 HVDC system just got proposed for Oklahoma. These are quite pricey - this 170 mile project will cost close to $500 million, but the line losses are very small - about 3% per 1000 miles.

Anyway, what would stay behind after these wind plantations have been installed? Well, there is the lease income - always handy - at ~ $3000 to $5000 per MW of turbine capacity, or more. There are also the taxes, or PILOT fees that are the same thing, at about the same price as is with the lease. There will be a few maintenance jobs, but not that many - these are supposed to be dependable devices, once the bugs get worked out of them. With these, presumably most property and school taxes can be paid by someone else (= electricity sales to somewhere and someone else). So, for $1 billion invested (say, 250 x 2 MW turbines, perhaps 0.5% of that will stay as yearly income to farmers/landowners/the community, and maybe 0.5% will stay as O&M operations/expenses, mostly as wages for someone living in the area (hopefully). So, about 1% can be tapped off.

Well, better than nothing. But if local economic growth is desired, that will only provide a minimal amount, and keep things more or less stable. The other approaches would be to own a portion of this wind farm, and to try and do something with some of that electricity. Economically speaking, this avoids some of the HVDC costs (use it to make something locally, avoiding unneeded transmission expenses, and recycling local money around to a greater extent than would other wise be the case). How this can be done without Feed-In Laws is hard to see, and probably close to impossible. Thus, if you want more local value out of wind plantations and wind farms, acquiring some local ownership of these would be an important first step. Think Feed-In Laws....(http://www.wind-works.org)

Next comes identifying what could be done locally with some of this electricity. Making methanol by hydrogenating the CO2 by-product from ethanol fermentations would be a start, thus providing something else that can be used to make biodiesel, and not sending the money out of the country to get it. Or, this CO2 could also be hydrogenated to make ethanol or diesel or natural gas - all it takes is electricity and water to make the H2. There is also ammonia from electricity and water and air. Or ultrapure silicon from sand, carbon (made from corncobs, for example) and electricity, followed by electricity and water and salt. Or server farms, powered by renewable energy with biofuel backups - those computer "farms" pull down lots of electricity. You could even run a greenhouse or a school, heat wise, from the reject heat out of those facilities. It is even possible to distill EtOH by the use of heat pumps, for those facilities that use the fermentation by-products in the wet mode, as opposed to the dry mode. That gets rid of most of the fossil fuel inputs to EtOH manufacture, also to the good.

Anyway, this will tend to avoid the fate of electrical production zones like Niagara Falls, NY a (more or less an economic basket-case, finished off by a downtown casino), or Oswego, NY, which is not quite as bad, but much smaller. In Niagara Falls, much of the electricity produced is shipped outside of the area to rural and small town electrical cooperatives, allowing them to live large and inefficient on supercheap electricity. So zip stays behind to help out with taxes and more employment, though that used to be done. A lot of it goes out of state, for a similar end. As for Oswego, it is plagued by 4 nearby nukes that need that wonderful Lake Ontario cooling. Most of that electricity gets shipped to NYC and Long Island, so that they don't have to go through the horror of looking at wind turbines in NY harbor, or on Long Island, or in nearby waters. Actually, those (NYC and Long Island) are some of the windier parts in our country, and with some of the priciest electricity in the country, due to transmission constraints and the use of natural gas and oil to make electricity. Wind turbines, even offshore ones, which are twice as expensive as onshore ones, would be cheaper than using oil and natural gas for electricity. Or from a new nuke; most of the existing ones in the state are going on 50 years, and soon will qualify for Social Security, and are well past their design life.

Anyway, there is that "horror" of seeing how electricity is made by blades that move in the wind....NIMBY's gone haywire....it may be OK for farmers and the "non-rich" rurals, but imposing this view of wind turbines on the rich and infamous of The Hamptons...perish the thought. Odds are, they might be the partial or complete owners of some of your wind plantations. Besides, they will be able to get it "dirt cheap" from remotely owned wind plantations, and they should be able to buy the desired outcome from legislators of rural communities. Maybe.

So, got any ideas for how to tap into the stream of monies and clean, renewable electricity from these future wind plantations? Just bear in mind, it's not all easy money..that money has strings, and it can affect people in different ways. Not everybody can handle it, and some get quite foolish with it. But, it sure beats having no money and no future....