The second in a series of reports on America’s transition to green energy.

CHICAGO — Sometimes known as “The Windy City,” Chicago is the apt location this week for the world’s largest convention on wind energy.  “Wind Power 09″ is the annual meeting of the American Wind Energy Association, but such is the level of interest in America’s development of wind-generated electrical power, that the gathering has turned into an international meeting point for green power.  More than 19,000 participants, representing all the major international players in renewable energy, are in attendance this year.  A few years ago, only 2,000 were on hand.

Blade Runners

Thanks to the Obama Administration’s support for renewables, the wind and solar energy markets are enjoying unprecedented interest in the United States, a fact not lost on American and international wind turbine manufacturers.  Vestas (Denmark), Suzlon (India), Siemens (Germany) and GE came to this convention in force, along with hundreds of innovative mid-sized companies that are coming up with new designs for producing and distributing clean energy.  Last year, the U.S. passed Germany as the world’s largest producer of wind power, with about 28,000 MW now on line.  Although this is only about 2 per cent of total U.S. electrical supply, the new wind energy capacity added last year amounted to almost half of the total new power added across the U.S.  The trend line clearly favors renewables.

“We don’t need BP and we don’t need Shell,” T. Boone Pickens, the energy entrepreneur, told the conference yesterday.  “A few months from now, things are going to look a lot different.”  Pickens foresees Congressional approval by the end of August for Renewable Energy Standards (RES), a legislated mandate for the country to achieve 25 per cent of its electric power from renewable energy by 2025, similar to the standard already in effect in the EU.  The assumption is that a long-term federal mandate will attract investors still sitting on the sidelines.

Pickens as Oracle

Boone’s bullish advocacy for wind power (and for compressed natural gas to power the U.S. trucking industry)  has a few detractors, but not at this conference.  The 81-year-old has invested $60 million of his own money to develop wind projects and to gain popular support for his “Pickens Plan,” which argues that independence from imported oil is a national imperative.  The national security argument – beyond ecology and climate concerns – has helped to close the deal with the American public, which now supports renewables by large margins.  It also doesn’t hurt public acceptance that the industry has recruited retired General Wes Clark, former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, as a kind of spokesman-advocate.  Clark is on the board of a wind turbine company (Netherlands-based EWT — Emergya Wind Technologies) and was another prominent speaker at the conference.  Other admired public figures and corporate leaders (such as Google CEO Eric Schmidt) are speaking out.  All that is left is for the economics of renewable energy to catch up and the nation’s power grid to be modernized.

Each of the major wind power “powers” – U.S., Germany, Spain, China – possesses certain advantages.  The U.S. is the largest wind power producer, Germany has most experience, Spain has the highest production per capita, and China has the potential to dwarf other producers in the future.   All these countries are well represented at Wind Power 09.  At the moment, the American market is center stage.  Vestas is building a substantial manufacturing facility in Colorado.  Last week, Siemens announced a wind turbine manufacturing facility in Kansas.

As James Baker once famously said about the argument for liberating Kuwait in the first Gulf War, it all comes down to jobs, jobs, jobs.  In the midst of a national recession last year, the wind power industry added 35,000 jobs to the U.S. economy.  If the wind industry expands to the recommended RES quota over the next two decades, 500,000 jobs will be created in the U.S.  The U.S. states with significant wind potential (Iowa, Minnesota) or the greatest idle manufacturing capacity (Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania) are aggressively pursuing investors and project developers.

The governors of four Midwestern U.S. states (Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin and Iowa) came to promote their respective states as the best sites for new wind turbine plants.  Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm said she wanted her state, which has the nation’s highest unemployment rate (more than 11 per cent), to go from being the “poster child” for jobs lost in the “rust belt,” to the leader of a new “green belt.”

Granholm: "A New Poster Child?"

The transformation of the American energy industry landscape will transform the physical landscape of the rural American Great Plains as well.  From Texas (America’s largest producer of wind power) to North Dakota, communities that have lost population in recent decades now stand to gain jobs as wind farms appear on the horizon.  This part of America will come to resemble nothing so much as the Landschaft of flat, northern Germany, where the crops farmers plant are not nearly so interesting as the power being reaped.

Photos by Joshua Lott/AWEA