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Installed Wind Power now exceeds 10 Gigawatts
U.S. wind energy installations now exceed 10,000 megawatts (MW) in generating capacity...[if President Bush's PR people were smart he would be making trips to wind farms and citing the fact that capacity has increased several hundred percent in his administration] The first commercial wind farms were constructed in California in the early 1980s, and after reaching 1,000 MW in 1985, it took more than a decade for wind to reach the 2,000-MW mark, in 1999. Since then, however, installed capacity has grown fivefold (for a chart showing historical cumulative capacity, see http://www.awea.org/faq/instcap.html). Today, the industry is installing more wind power in a single year (3,000 MW expected in 2006) than the amount operating in the entire country in 2000 (2,500 MW). As the U.S. wind energy industry sails past the 10,000-megawatt mark, AWEA released the following figures and statistics to illustrate some of the economic, environmental, and energy security benefits of wind power development. Posted by: mhw 2006-08-18 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=163332 |