It's time to get the wind at our backs

Pittsburgh, PA, June 8, 2006 –

From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. By Brian O'Neill.

I was taking an after-dinner walk with my 8-year-old daughter when I got a call on my cell phone from an old friend in town for the big wind conference.

"Who was that?'' she asked.

"You know those big white windmills we see when we drive down the Turnpike?'' I answered. "My friend got those built.''

The last time I saw Mike Skelly was at a ceremony beneath those windmills on a mountaintop in Somerset County in 2001, but we go back decades. In the mid-1980s, when we both lived farther down the Appalachians in Roanoke, Va., Mike joined the Peace Corps. I flew to visit him in Costa Rica, and we wound up hitchhiking in Nicaragua, which had "the only war you could drive to," as the investigative humorist P.J. O'Rourke once put it.

I've since settled down. So has Mike, at least in his fashion. We both have the young families and the mortgages, but he has the job where he travels the country pushing wind.

"Kids get it right away,'' he said when I told him how I told my daughter his windmills made electricity. "You take rocks out of the ground and set 'em on fire -- that's not quite so obvious to kids.''

He was in town from Houston because the country's largest-ever conference on wind power was held at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center these past four days, leading to some of the longest-ever lines for drinks at a Tuesday night function in Heinz Hall. (Those two little words "open bar'' always mean so much.)

The handouts suggested more than 4,000 attendees and 200 exhibitors were in the hall trying to sell each other turbines and paint and such, and that looked about right Wednesday morning. The stark simplicity of those mountaintop windmills belies a complex industry emerging from its infancy.

Less than 1 percent of the nation's electricity comes from wind power, but you don't need a weather vane to see more coming. America gets about half its juice from coal, about 20 percent from nuclear power, and another 6 or 7 percent from hydroelectric dams. None of those sectors are likely to increase, which leaves the 20 percent of electricity that comes from burning natural gas and oil.

You know what's been happening with oil and gas prices. You also don't want to see the nation import any more energy than it already does. You've also heard that burning fossil fuels has contributed to global warming.

So why not tap the wind?

It's not as simple as it sounds. Even with the increased costs of other power sources, wind energy requires subsidies to compete. Then there's the odd spectacle of environmentalists fighting amongst themselves. Some are worried about the windmills' potential harm to birds, bats and hikers' views. Others say no threat is greater than global warming, and we can't scrape mountains for coal or pollute the air with fossil fuels forever.

Energy is an industry that encompasses "many of the major issues that we as a species face,'' says my friend Skelly, chief development officer for Horizon Wind Energy.

"If we just 'let the market work its magic' we may not like where it takes us,'' he said. "More imported energy of some sort leading us down a path of carbon emissions where we don't know what's going to happen.''

You could say the wind guys are as eager to spin the story as they are the windmills, but they're pointing to the right questions even if you arrive at different answers.

It's fitting that Pennsylvania is once again in the forefront of energy innovation. First we had coal, then oil, now wind. Along with those windmills along the ridges, a Spanish company has windmill manufacturing plants in eastern and western Pennsylvania.

About 170 workers are employed at the Gamesa Wind US blade factory in Cambria County, and another 300 or so work at the site of a former U.S. Steel plant in Bucks County, a spokesman said.

Windmill towers are made from steel, and at least one former coal miner has been busy helping build windmills in Somerset County. I like that symmetry. I hope they can figure out how to spin the blades without hurting bats, but the bigger question is how to keep all our lights on without hurting ourselves.

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