The Winds of Change

By Margot Roosevelt

Over the Columbia River, on a high desert ridge, the world's largest wind farm sprawls across 50 sq. mi. of Oregon and Washington. When the last of its 460 turbines are installed, this postmodern power plant will offer clean electricity to 70,000 homes and businesses. Every month hundreds of tourists come to gawk at its fiber-glass blades, twirling with balletic grace atop 160-ft. poles. "People are in awe of wind power," says Anne Walsh, community-relations manager of the Stateline Energy Center.

And guess what? Wind is becoming more than a quixotic sideshow. It's now the world's fastest growing power source--a high-tech challenge to the coal mines, oil rigs, nuclear reactors and hydroelectric dams that seem, well, so 20th century. Experts say wind could provide up to 12% of the earth's electricity within two decades. Wind farms in Texas, Oregon, Kansas and elsewhere helped lift U.S. wind-energy output 66% last year, and an additional $3 billion in American projects are in the works. "Wind is competitive," wrote Mark Moody-Stewart, the former chairman of Royal Dutch/Shell who now co-chairs an alternative-energy task force for the Group of Eight, in a recent report. "This is not something to look forward to for the future--it is here today."

The promise is tantalizing. Windmills generate renewable power, so called because the source of the energy, wind, is continually renewed by nature (ditto for solar cells, which are powered by the sun; geothermal systems, which use the earth's heat; and hydroelectricity, which flows from dams). Unlike oil and coal deposits, renewable energy can't be exhausted, at least not until the sun burns out billions of years from now and earth goes cold.

Skeptics may recall the burst of enthusiasm for conservation and renewable power when oil prices quadrupled in the 1970s. State-funded energy research and development surged, while tax incentives boosted solar, wind and other alternatives to petroleum and the atom. But once oil supplies loosened and prices dropped, governments lost interest. In the U.S., rules requiring more fuel-efficient cars were rolled back. In California, subsidies evaporated, pushing wind companies into bankruptcy. "It is a moral disgrace that we have done so little to reduce our dependence on imported oil and oil generally," says Reid Detchon, a former U.S. Energy Department official who now consults for the United Nations Foundation.

But the need to diversify is now more urgent and the consensus to do so greater than when OPEC first played bully. Global energy demand is expected to triple by midcentury. The earth is unlikely to run out of fossil fuels by then, given its vast reserves of coal, but it seems unthinkable that we will continue to use them as we do now, for nearly 80% of our energy. It's not just a question of supply and price, or even of the diseases caused by filthy air. We know that global warming from heat-trapping carbon dioxide, a by-product of fossil-fuel burning, threatens to cause chaos with the world's climate. And the terrorist assault on the World Trade Center raises other scary scenarios: how much easier would it be to crack open the Trans-Alaska pipeline and how much deadlier would it be to bomb a nuclear plant than to attack a wind farm?

Clean energy has a long way to go. Only 2.2% of the world's energy comes from "new" renewables such as small hydroelectric dams, wind, solar and geothermal. (Traditional renewable energy from large dams provides another 2.2%.) How to boost that share--and at what pace--is debated in industrialized nations--from Japan, which imports 99.7% of its oil, to Germany, where the nearby Chernobyl accident turned the public against nuclear plants, to the U.S., where the Bush Administration has strong ties to the oil industry. But the momentum toward clean renewables is undeniable. Globally, solar- and wind-energy output is growing more than 30% annually--far faster than conventional fuels--and their cost is plummeting. "We are on the cusp of an energy revolution," says Christopher Flavin, president of the Worldwatch Institute, a Washington nonprofit. "It will be as profound as the one that ushered in the age of oil a century ago."

Even oil companies are trying to cash in on the decarbonization trend. The world has gradually moved toward cleaner fuels--from wood to coal, from coal to oil and from oil to natural gas. Renewables are the next step. Royal Dutch/Shell has pledged to spend up to $1 billion on renewables through the next five years. Japanese manufacturers, led by Sharp and Kyocera, have moved aggressively into photovoltaic cells, which turn sunlight into electricity. And in April General Electric snapped up Enron Wind from the bankrupt energy giant. "We are on a journey to a lower-carbon world," says Graham Baxter, an executive at Britain's BP, which is building a $100 million solar plant in Spain.

How soon we reach an era of clean, inexhaustible energy depends on technology. Solar and wind energies are intermittent: when the sky is cloudy or the breeze dies down, fossil fuel or nuclear plants must kick in to compensate. But scientists are working on better ways to store electricity from renewable sources. Current from wind, solar or geothermal energy can be used to extract hydrogen from water molecules. In the future, hydrogen could be stored in tanks, and when energy is needed, the gas could be run through a fuel cell, a device that combines hydrogen with oxygen. The result: pollution-free electricity, with water as the only by-product. Already fuel-cell buses, cars and small generators are being tested. Eventually, some visionaries say, fuel cells placed in individual buildings could replace many of today's giant electric plants. But that will not happen unless the technology is refined and the cost drops. "A hydrogen economy," says Alan Nogee of the Union of Concerned Scientists, a U.S. environmental group, "is the Holy Grail."

While the developed nations debate how to fuel their power plants, however, some 1.6 billion people--a quarter of the globe's population--have no access to electricity or gasoline. They cannot refrigerate food or medicine, pump well water, power a tractor, make a phone call or turn on an electric light to do homework. Many spend their days collecting firewood and cow dung, burning it in primitive stoves that belch smoke into their lungs. To emerge from poverty, they need modern energy. And renewables can help, from village-scale hydro power to household photovoltaic systems to bio-gas stoves that convert dung into fuel. More than a million rural homes in developing countries get electricity from solar cells. "The potential is enormous," says Anil Cabraal, an energy specialist for the World Bank, which has helped finance 500,000 residential solar systems from Argentina to Sri Lanka.

Ultimately, the earth can meet its energy needs without fouling the environment. "But it won't happen," asserts Thomas Johansson, an energy adviser to the United Nations Development Program, "without the political will." To begin with, widespread government subsidies for fossil fuels and nuclear energy--estimated at some $150 billion per year--must be dismantled to level the playing field for renewables. Policymakers must factor in the price of pollution: coal plants are more expensive than renewable power when one includes the cost of scrubbers on smokestacks and the expense of health care for coal-related illnesses; nuclear energy costs would soar without government insurance. Environmentalists are calling for taxes on carbon to slow the growth of fossil-fuel use.

Another way to increase renewables' share of the energy mix is to reduce the use of conventional fuel through efficiency incentives. Experts estimate that efficiency could slash the globe's projected energy consumption by a third. Strict standards can cut energy use in everything from air conditioners to cars. Compact fluorescent lamps use a quarter of the electricity of incandescent bulbs to provide the same amount of light.

Governments are increasingly forcing utilities to make it easier for windmill and solar-panel owners to connect to the grid and get credit for providing extra electricity they don't use. Governments are also pressuring utilities to meet targets for renewable sources of energy. The European Union, for instance, is requiring its members to boost electricity from renewables to 22% of production within the next eight years. Brazil plans to push a global standard at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg this month.

On the road to enlightened energy policy, a few countries offer models of reform. More than a decade ago, Denmark required utilities to purchase any available renewable energy and pay a premium price; today the country gets 18% of its electricity from wind. Thanks largely to Germany and Spain, which have enacted vigorous incentives for renewables, Europe today accounts for 70% of the world's wind power. In Japan 80,000 households have installed solar roof panels since the government offered generous subsidies in 1994; consequently, Japan has displaced the U.S. as the world's leading manufacturer of photovoltaics. India established a fund that has lent $1.1 billion to alternative-energy projects; the country is now the globe's fifth largest generator of wind and solar power. Iceland, which lies on a hotbed of underground volcanic activity, uses that geothermal energy to heat 90% of its buildings. The island nation is planning to use geothermal and hydroelectric power to produce large amounts of hydrogen, creating the world's first hydrogen economy.

Such examples show that the future "is more a matter of choice than destiny," as Brazilian physicist Jose Goldemberg, the chairman of a recent United Nations energy study, put it. On the windy border of Washington and Oregon, citizen groups are already making a choice. They have pressured utilities to invest in green energy, and a federal tax credit has made it more profitable. "It's the right thing to do," says Vito Giarrusso, manager of the Stateline wind farm, "to help our little piece of the earth." --With reporting by Toko Sekiguchi/Tokyo

With reporting by Toko Sekiguchi/Tokyo