Wind Power

At a time when most people choose to avoid the harsh winter winds that roar past corn stubble and whip up billowing dust clouds over table-flat fields, farmers in Michigan's Thumb now talk about catching the wind and all the money that comes with it. Michigan's first commercial wind farm -- a collection of 32 towering turbines that conjure visions of H.G.

Congratulations on the largely excellent job your writers did in the Aug. 29 issue, especially Dan Neil for his take on Honda's hydrogen car ("A Week Without Dinosaurs"). He emphasized that hydrogen is like a battery that stores energy, not a magic supply of energy. And until the supply problem is solved with renewable fuels, it's just another drain on the same old dead-dino pool. Solar panels are one approach, but he alluded to another: wind energy. While much less area-efficient than a nuclear plant, wind power is less costly.

Selim Zilkha is investing in wind power as the next energy growth area. And, because Zilkha has made shrewd choices before, wind bears watching. The 73-year-old Zilkha, who now lives in Los Angeles, has formed Zilkha Renewable Energy with his son Michael, who heads the Houston-based company. The firm is investing in wind-generating projects in California, Costa Rica and offshore Britain. Adoption of wind power is growing in the U.S. and abroad.

Tom DeMoulin was not expecting a bargain when he began buying his electricity from wind farms in the late 1990s. In fact, the community college instructor paid an extra $5 a month to his local utility to strike a blow against the coal- and gas-fired power plants that spew pollution across the Southwest. But starting next month, DeMoulin's conscience-driven decision will save him money.

Re "Small-scale solar's big potential untapped," Dec. 29 The story touting the potential benefits of rooftop and other smaller solar power arrays was well written and informative. Now it's time to look under the rocks. The Times reports that the tiny Mojave Desert town of Nipton, Calif., is off the grid. So exactly where does the electrical power come from when it's cloudy and when the sun goes down? Generators? Batteries? What's the (environmental) good, bad and evil of those systems?

On a wind-swept field overlooking the sea, workers are demolishing a huge coal-fired power plant while nearby, four sleek wind turbines harvest energy from the air. It looks like a straightforward transition from the old to the new, but in this traditional coal mining area of southern Wales the reality is not so simple. It is true that coal-fired power plants are being phased out as mines run short of reserves.

Wind power is taking off in Denmark, already the world's second-biggest producer of wind energy after the United States. A major electricity company plans to build the world's first offshore wind-energy plant--11 turbines on rocks in the Baltic Sea. Elkraft Power Co. said the plant will cost $5.8 million and, by 1991, could produce enough electricity to supply 4,000 homes.

Just west of Mojave, about 15 miles north of the Los Angeles County line, entrepreneurs are harvesting the High Desert's most plentiful resource: wind. Since the early 1980s, a handful of energy companies has erected nearly 5,000 windmills on this roughly 16-square-mile swath of Kern County desert.

Supporters of a bipartisan effort to protect the American wind energy industry say that 37,000 U.S. jobs will be at risk this year if Congress fails to extend the production tax credits that have been vital to wind power development. The call for Congress to pass HR 3307, the American Renewable Energy Production Tax Credit Extension Act, was made during a teleconference hosted by three members of Congress, the American Wind Energy Assn. and TPI Composites, a Newton, Iowa-based wind blade manufacturer.

There is a kind of clarity that an academic mind can bring to a complex subject like the energy crisis; there is a kind of information overload that a scholarly approach can produce as well. The new documentary "Switch" has a bit of both as it examines the many raw and refined materials that fuel our lives. Dr. Scott Tinker, a geologist and associate dean for geosciences research at the University of Texas in Austin, is the film's central figure and one of its producers and writers.