Sunny and Windy with Increasing Megawatts Around the Nation
The Earth Policy Institute offers a rosy update on the booming wind and solar industries in every corner of the country. A sample:
Consider Texas. Long the leading oil-producing state, it is now also the leading generator of electricity from wind, having overtaken California two years ago. Texas now has nearly 6,000 megawatts of wind-generating capacity online and a staggering 39,000 megawatts in the construction and planning stages. When all this is completed, Texas will have 45,000 megawatts of wind-generating capacity (think 45 coal-fired power plants). This will more than satisfy the residential needs of the state’s 24 million people, enabling Texas to feed electricity to nearby states such as Louisiana and Mississippi.
The analysis is chock-full of such data, which they helpfully also provide in table and chart form. To get a real sense of the intense growth in these sectors, words alone don’t really do the job:
These numbers underscore the point that we currently have the technologies to power the country on renewable energy and create jobs at the same time. The federal government can help with the development, scaling, and deployment by investing more in energy R&D.
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