by Bill Whitney

Created on: January 11, 2008   Last Updated: July 05, 2008

I fully believe that wind turbines and wind farms have a very bright future for a good, non-polluting source of electricity for our future. They are developing more sizes and higher efficiency turbines all the time and while they may never be small enough to put on the roof of a house like a satellite system in a urban setting, I think they are the future for ranch and farms and the wind farms will produce electricity for the smaller communities at least.

I have been pretty much all over the world thanks to Uncle Sam and I can't remember being any place where the wind doesn't blow at least part of the time. They are developing smaller and more efficent turbines all the time that don't really require a real strong wind to turn them. They can generate a lot of electricity with just a breeze. One wind trubine can generate all the electricty that a household would need or even a small farm or ranch and maybe even have some to sell back the the electric company. They are required to buy your excess.

When we lived on our forty acres out west of Gillette, Wyoming I really wanted to get a wind turbine but they were just too expensive at the time and they werent giving breaks for buying them so I never got it done but we certainly had plenty of wind to generate lots of electricity. I have often thought that if I ever got a bunch of money from somewhere I would buy a couple hundred acres up around Wheatland Wyoming and put a couple wind turbines per acre on the land. The way the wind blows up there, you could recoup your investment very quickly and probably become a millionaire in a few years. I have never see a place where the wind blows like it does up there. I am not sure what the law is in every state but I know that in Wyoming, Nebraska, and Colorado, any excess you generate, the utility companies have to buy from you.

Another thing that I think makes the future of wind turbine look very bright is that they don't take up a lot of room. The turbines are high enough off the ground that their is not danger of getting hit by the blades and the base does not take up a lot of room so you don't lose a lot of production from the farm or ranch land. I would probably build a small fence around the base of each one to keep the cattle from rubbing on them but otherwise they should not be a lot of problems I don't think.

Wind turbines definitely have a lot of potentail for rural applications or for wind farms to generate electricity for the utilities. I think that anything we can do as a nation to decrease our dependence on foreign suppliers for anything is a step in the right direction. Saudi Arabia and that area charge us $140 a barrel for oil, maybe we ought to up our price on grain to $130 a bushell and if they can't pay for the grain, they can alweays eat their oil.

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