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Published: July 25th, 2008
The statistics are in for the first half of 2008 and they show that USA, for the first time, generated more wind energy than Germany. This “milestone” wasn’t expected to be reached until late 2009.
Germany still has more wind turbines than USA and is able to generate 22,000 - 23,000 megawatts of power compared to USA’s capacity of about 18,000 megawatts.
But Randall Swisher, the executive director of the American Wind Energy Association, said that “the difference is that because the winds are so much stronger here in the U.S. we are actually providing more wind-generated electricity than Germany.” He also said that the US “wind energy capacity is growing faster than anyplace else.”
This is great news but USA is still far behind everyone else in terms of green renewable energy, especially wind energy.
For example in Germany wind power accounts for 7% of their total energy. And the even smaller country Denmark gets 20% of its energy from wind power. USA is awfully behind with only 1.2%.
“We need to back away from fossil fuel and embrace renewable energy. The survival of the world depends on it,” said Randall Swisher.
USA has now become the leading country in wind energy production, another example that Al Gore’s major renewable energy challenge for USA is possible.
Both presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain have been positive about Al Gore’s challenge.
Barack Obama said that he “strongly agree with Vice President Gore that we cannot drill our way to energy independence, but must fast-track investments in renewable sources of energy like solar power, wind power and advanced biofuels.”
John McCain said that “if the Vice President says it’s doable, I believe it’s doable.”
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7 Responses
The good news is we are making progress. T Boone is adding a lot of infrastructure. I am proud of Iowa, as we have four wind power components plants here and quite a few installed windmills.
I see some fresh technology coming on the horizon also. Vertical rotors, floating rotors, wind machines designed after the Tesla motor.
I expect someone will soon mix wind power and wave power and perhaps tidal power too, all anchored together.
Every bit helps.
larryhagedon
American Flex Fuel Experience.
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Any progress is good progress, and we ALL will need to make as much progress and as quickly as possible if we want to see some improvement in global CO2 levels.
The electric output might be higher then the one Germany produces, but you should consider, that “only” 82 Mio people live in Germnay and arround 320 Mio then in the US. Germnay currently produces 14.2% of its electricy from renewable sources. The ammount of energy consumed per head is also much lower then in the US. The last numbers on that I heard was, that we need less then the half ammount of energy per head. Also Germnay is is currently the only big industrial country, that is on a good way to achieve it´s Kyoto goals.
Don´t get me wrong I realy like you folks and I realy like it to see that america finaly starts to change.
Joachim
Hi,
It’s not so bad as in Flanders (Belgium) where one doesn’t invest in wind mills. The current 123 units are peanuts compared to the 18000 mills in Germany and 1840 in The Netherlands. Even when recalculated to the size of Flanders, we should have at least 583 wind mills installed if we want to catch up with The Netherlands.
As said in this blog for a private person, it’s rather impossible to install a private wind mill. There are a lot of mills suitable for domestic use. Despite the fact that the size and yield of the little ones are perfectly within the limits, requests for a building permit are in general refused.
Eddy
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