Wind Power - Certainly Not Gone With The Wind

IT Editorial

Wednesday, 31 March 2010 00:11

Written by Rakesh Dogra

Data centers, along with other energy guzzlers are certainly putting increasing pressure on the energy demand as well as the environment. Hence the environmentally conscious people are continuously looking at greener alternatives which could supplement, if not replace, the traditional sources of power. One such source of energy which as a literally huge potential within the United States (and of course globally as well) is wind energy.
Yet, at a recent conference in North Carolina, it was observed that the wind power sector in US is not receiving as much incentives as it should from the government and experts felt that any boost in terms of positive legislation encouraging wind power sector could possibly lead to a literal explosion in this area.

They compared the situation to that in China wherein the United States lagged quite far behind in terms of wind energy production despite having the largest installed global wind power capacity. The experts expect the situation to improve in the next decade providing Washington comwa up with some decent policies on the issue.

As of now the total energy produced by wind power only equals around 1.5 % of the overall energy production, but it has the potential to grow at a fast rate. In fact even the US Department of Energy has very ambitious plans and would like to see this percentage rise to nearly 1/5th by the end of another two decades. This certainly requires a lot to be done to achieve this ambitious goal, however far the date may seem at this point in time.

It is an interesting observation that data centers also consume around 1.5% of the total electric consumption in the United States. Of course this is just an interesting observation, though I would like to clarify that this data center energy consumption percentage is not directly related to wind power generation ratio.

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