Wednesday, August 27, 2008

More on wind farms

Here's the latest from the New York Times about power grid limitations that are thwarting efforts to maximize the use of wind-generated energy, mostly in rural places. The story is by Matthew Wald Here's an excerpt:
The dirty secret of clean energy is that while generating it is getting easier, moving it to market is not.

The grid today, according to experts, is a system conceived 100 years ago to let utilities prop each other up, reducing blackouts and sharing power in small regions. It resembles a network of streets, avenues and country roads.

“We need an interstate transmission superhighway system,” said Suedeen G. Kelly, a member of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Reading the details of the deficient energy transportation infrastructure made it sound at first blush like another example of long-standing neglect of rural infrastructure, but I guess it isn't quite as simple as that.

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