More on wind

Being a child of the prairie, I am a big fan of windpower.  You would be too if you had spent your formative years listening to the wind howl. My most popular YouTube post is footage of a wind turbine being built.  But because of my long-term interest in harvesting the power of the wind, I have heard about the all problems--at LEAST twice.  Some are frivolous--bird strikes (don't happen with modern designs) aesthetics (you're kidding right, in the land of the strip mall someone really wants to criticize the looks of something as graceful as a wind turbine??)

But wind power also has REAL problems.  Intermittence (the wind does not always blow) unreliable technology (gearbox failures are still a headache) and distribution (winds tends to blow the hardest where people choose not to live--hello North Dakota.)

In a series of interviews (list here) Jim Gordon muses about the trials of getting a pretty simple off-shore wind farm built in Massachusetts.

Jim Gordon is a 35-year veteran of the energy business. He founded Energy Management, Inc. (EMI) in 1975, developing energy conservation/pollution control projects and gas-fired electric generation plants.

In 1999, EMI began to work on renewable energy projects.

In this interview with Business Insider CEO Henry Blodget, Jim discusses Cape Wind, a proposed 130-turbine wind farm in Nantucket Sound that has the potential to generate three-quarters of the power needs of Cape Cod - but thus far has generated only controversy.