In 2004, one of the big buzzwords surrounding the election was “swift boating,” as in attempts to discredit John Kerry’s Vietnam service. This year, we’re hearing all about green, green, green.

And the man behind both these campaigns? One T. Boone Pickens, a billionaire oilman from Texas, who is now making headlines promoting wind energy as a way to relieve the United States’ dependence on foreign oil.

This week Pickens is presenting his plan in Topeka. According to his Web site, the U.S. uses 25 million of the world’s 85 million barrel daily production. Yet Pickens and others say the U.S. is the “Saudi Arabia of wind power.”

And Kansas could very well be Riyadh.

In actuality, Kansas has the third highest potential for wind energy in the country. But a 2006 study placed it seventh out of 10 plains states in utilization of wind power. With so much talk about high gas and energy prices, fears of climate change and a battle over coal fired plants in western Kansas that may not be finished, wind energy is certainly an intriguing topic.

Figure 1. Wind power has been installed in many states. Here’s a list of what Plains States are doing; their national rankings are listed beside the states’ names.
 

A Stanford research projected reported that wind power could more than satisfy the world’s energy demands.

Currently there are at least seven wind farms in Kansas. They’re dispersed throughout the state, but are mostly found in the southern and western parts of Kansas, where the wind blows the hardest. That’s not to say that smaller pockets of wind farms don’t exist; the city of Greensburg is encouraging its citizens to install wind turbines, and activists in Lawrence will show people how to install their own back yard turbines at the upcoming Little Green Festival.

So obviously Kansas has the potential to be a great wind power contributor; anyone who has driven across the state can attest to that.

But there are skeptics out there. They say wind power is unreliable, coal can burn clean and, in Kansas’ case, coal plants would bring jobs and money to the state. Ironically, the company that was vying to build the plants, Sunflower Energy, has a division devoted to wind energy.

Opponents also say wind farms are a blight on landscapes, are loud, and can harm farmland and crops due to construction and shadows cast by the turbines.

But it seems the positives outweigh the negatives.

Here’s some raw data about our most abundant resource.
•    It’s free. Wind energy, unlike other types, is an abundant and free resource. It does not have to be mined, processed or transported.
•    Fewer subsidies: Wind power costs taxpayers significantly less than other types of energy. Renewable Energy World magazine reports that conventional energy receives about $300 billion per year, but wind energy lasts on less than $20 billion of your money.
•    It’s clean. Wind energy produces no emissions or runoff that could harm the environment.
•    If Pickens’ plan goes into action, natural gas currently used to generate 22 percent of the country’s electricity could fuel vehicles. But this might just be pie in the sky thinking, since millions of vehicles would have to be converted to run on natural gas. (Kansas, by the way, is home to the largest underground gas field in the Western Hemisphere, located in Hugoton.)

Picken’s plan would cost a mere $1 trillion, building wind farms from the Dakotas to Texas.

What do you think? Is wind energy something we need to invest more in? Or is it a fad that’s here today and gone tomorrow? And have any of you Kansans seen wind farms first hand?