Prevailing Winds

For decades, Big Energy blew off renewable energy as insignificant. Now the industry’s biggest players are racing to build wind farms — and cash in on the latest energy boom.

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


If Ben Givens ever needs reassurance that his bosses at American Electric Power (AEP) — the country’s biggest generator of electricity and a leading coal-mining company — support his work to develop wind energy, all he has to do is whip out his company credit card. There on its face, pictured beside an image of belching smokestacks, is a cluster of huge, pinwheel-like turbines. “Pretty cool, huh?” says Givens, who operates the company’s three wind farms in Texas. “We’re finally hitting the big time!”

The credit card might seem like a public-relations ploy. But behind the green imagery is a remarkable corporate about-face: After decades of belittling wind as a puny and unreliable energy source, AEP and other major companies are scrambling to cash in on what is now the world’s fastest-growing source of electric power. Multinationals like Shell and General Electric are investing hundreds of millions of dollars in wind operations from Washington state to Massachusetts. Last year, energy firms spent a record $1.7 billion on wind projects in the United States, increasing wind power capacity by some 60 percent, to more than 4,200 megawatts — enough to provide electricity to 1 million homes. (By comparison, solar photovoltaic cells currently supply about 200 megawatts.) “The big players who didn’t give a hoot about this a few years ago are finally getting in the game,” says Ronald Lehr, a former Colorado public utilities commissioner and a wind energy expert. “Which is precisely what’s needed to make wind a viable energy source.”

Even with the recent growth, wind power fills only about one-half of 1 percent of the country’s total electricity demand; the European Union, with a total population only about one-third larger than the United States, has four times as much wind power capacity and plans to obtain 22 percent of its electricity supply from renewables by 2010. Yet a growing number of industry experts say it is the United States — with its huge electricity market and its vast, windswept plains and blustery coastlines — that has the greatest potential to reap power and profit from wind. And perhaps nowhere is the trend more apparent than in Texas — home to many of the nation’s oil companies and their longtime champion, George W. Bush.

The complete version of this article can be read in the July/August issue of Mother Jones, available on news stands now or through our online single-issue purchase feature.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate