India shows the shape of things to come:

Wind pow­er may still have an image as some­thing of a play­thing of envi­ron­men­tal­ists more con­cerned with clean ener­gy than sav­ing mon­ey. But it is quick­ly emerg­ing as a seri­ous alter­na­tive not just in afflu­ent areas of the world but in fast-grow­ing coun­tries like India and Chi­na that are avid­ly seek­ing new ener­gy sources.

While the US focuss­es on find­ing ways to make coal clean­er, the glob­al mar­ket in wind gen­er­a­tion is dom­i­nat­ed by Euro­pean com­pa­nies (Ves­tas, Game­sa, Siemens) and an upstart from India. The Indi­an elec­tri­cal grid is unre­li­able, so many indus­tries pre­fer to install wind farms for their pow­er gen­er­a­tion. Those rur­al wind­farms bring eco­nom­ic oppor­tu­ni­ty to the impov­er­ished coun­try­side, and bring the oppor­tu­ni­ties of the mod­ern world to towns that still plow fields with oxen.

The argu­ment that wind pow­er is the future is not new, cer­tain­ly not here at TfK. Kansas can pro­duce as much as 30 times the elec­tric­i­ty it con­sumes, and that would have a foot­print of less than 5% of the land. Farm­ers could con­tin­ue work­ing below the tur­bines, while sell­ing sur­plus ener­gy to sur­round­ing states. Cheap, local­ly pro­duced elec­tric­i­ty would also make elec­tri­cal vehi­cles more prac­ti­cal for peo­ple (con­sid­er the “spark plugs” from Watch­men by Alan Moore).

And it ain’t just me say­ing this. Via the World’s Fair, we have Jere­my Rifkin advo­cat­ing wind and sim­i­lar tech­nolo­gies over nuclear. There are copi­ous prag­mat­ic rea­sons to pre­fer lots of things over nuclear. Not least that nuclear is dirty, expen­sive and poten­tial­ly disastrous.

As some com­menters observed in the oth­er thread, a key advan­tage of wind pro­duc­tion over cen­tral­ized nuclear plants is that it pro­tects against attacks. A sin­gle smart attack could destroy a nuclear plant, black­ing out an urban cen­ter and poten­tial­ly releas­ing radioac­tive con­t­a­m­i­nants (though the indus­try insists that mod­ern designs would pre­vent the lat­ter prob­lem). Attack­ing a wind farm tur­bine by tur­bine would be cost prohibitive.

That isn’t to say that wind alone is the solu­tion. I’ve seen it argued that no more than a third of the pow­er in a grid could come from wind (on aver­age) because of fluc­tu­a­tions, so oth­er sources would be nec­es­sary to sus­tain a reli­able pow­er sup­ply. I focus on wind because it’s per­fect for Kansas, a state with lots of land to spare, lots of wind, and a des­per­ate need for new industries.

Kansas ought to be sell­ing tur­bines to India. The US ought to be lead­ing the world into the bright future of sus­tain­able ener­gy. Instead, the nation is let­ting Europe and Asia set the pace for ener­gy devel­op­ment in the 21st century.