The Plot Against US Wind Power  

I used a story from CleanBeta in my "The Empire Strikes Back: Killing Solar Power In The US" post a few days back. CleanBeta has a similar story about the fate of the US wind power industry a decade ago, killed by a similar tactic - The Plot Against Solar Energy Killed U.S. Wind Power Decade Ago.

The Bureau of Land Management eclipsed the promise of solar energy in the United States yesterday. The tragic fate of the U.S. wind power industry in the 1980s illustrates how the BLM’s decision will impact the still embryonic U.S. solar energy industry.

U.S. Windpower, the largest wind power company in the United States and the last to fall, died on the fields of Carbon County, Wyoming in 1996. U.S. Windpower, which changed its name to Kenentech Windpower in 1993, was founded in 1974 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The founder, Stanley Charren, saw the future potential of generating electric power by means other than fossil fuels and wanted to create an energy company that used wind as its power source. The company was incorporated in 1979 as U.S. Windpower to design and sell wind turbines and wind power. During the early 1980s, U.S. Windpower designed and produced its first-generation wind turbine.

Despite an a clutch of new competitors in the early 1980s, U.S. Windpower remained the leader of the wind power industry through technological prowess and sound management. Chairman and co-founder Charren, himself a graduate of Brown University with a masters in engineering from Harvard University, was joined by an adept management and technical team from Harvard and Yale. They were the best and brightest stars of alternative energy in the entire world.

But after nearly two decades of struggling to compete with rock bottom oil prices and hostile Reagan-era policies against alternative energy, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the BLM suspended construction of a wind-farm project that would have kept U.S. Windpower alive until today. The EPA said it needed to complete an environmental impact statement before the company could complete construction of a massive new wind farm on Foote Creeke Rim, a remote, treeless plateau between Laramie and Rawlins in southeastern Wyoming. The flat rimrock is one of the windiest places in the United States and has since been developed by Towen Power. The company collapsed before the EPA finished its review and declared bankruptcy in May 1996.

Although General Electric remains a world leader in wind power today, the U.S. more generally has become second fiddle to well-supported and entrenched European companies like Vestas. The situation is so desperate that GE has had to literally build a school to train wind-turbine technicians in New Mexico. Meanwhile, European companies are poring into the United States, consolidating control of the U.S. renewable energy space before U.S. companies can catch up.

Today, the United States is creating jobs in Europe’s burgeoning wind power sector because the U.S. government did not support the fledgling clean energy sector at a critical time period. Tomorrow, it will be creating jobs in Europe’s solar energy sector because of what the BLM’s decision to suspend solar energy projects currently under construction in the only six states where solar energy has potential to flourish with today’s technology.