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I saw a posting on Facebook this week that asked, "Is wind energy for real? I have been told that it is just hype". My thoughts were that if you lived in the Southwest you would witness daily the progress of wind energy. We in the Southeast and Northeast see occasional wind generators and do not relate to the future of wind energy. If we visited the European countries, especially Germany, we would see a major growth in wind energy generation. The progression of harvesting energy from moving air can no longer be thought of as tilting at windmills. Wind energy will be a major player in the replacement of fossil fuels.

The key reason for the acceptance of wind energy is its dropping cost for electrical energy. Over the past three decades, the cost of a watt of electricity generated by wind has dropped to equal the cost of fossil fuel. During the 1970s, turbine blades were 32 feet long and wind power cost $2.00 per kilowatt (kW-hr). Today, wind turbines with blades 130 feet long have cut the cost to around .05 cents per kW-hr. with federal subsidies to build the installation. In the future, the cost of wind energy will continue to decease while fossil fuels will continue to increase.

As noted above, the larger blades are more efficient in producing electricity. This is because more wind is caught by a blade with a larger surface area. A town of 8,000 needed 40 turbines to meet its power needs in the mid-1990s, while just one larger model is needed today to produce the same amount of energy.

There is a great deal of ongoing research around the world to continue to improve the efficiency of the wind turbine. On the drawing boards are turbines with blades almost 300 feet across. This size blade will drive the cost of wind energy down to less than fossil fuel generation. To take advantage of the larger blade, Energy Unlimited in West Conshohocken, Pennsylvania has patented the variable length blade or blade with a blade. This innovation extends or contracts depending on wind conditions. A controller in the base of the tower responds to changes in wind speed, extending the inside blade in lighter winds and retracting it in heavier winds. Conventional turbines have to be shut off when the wind is too strong. The variable blade is claimed to be 25% more efficient and is operating as a prototype since 2002 near Palm Springs, California. For those who are technically curious, there is a lot more research occurring in universities and research laboratories on the components

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