WIND FOR THE BIRDS

Yes, there are exceptions. There are places where strong and consistent winds blow over terrain with favorable contours (Hawaii is one) and wind power also makes sense on a small scale in windy, remote locations (mountain tops, offshore installations).

But for large-scale conversion, the Swedish Power Board found, 1500 windmills, each 200 feet high, would be needed to replace a 1,000MW nuclear plant. In the US, according to J.B. Yasinski of Westinghouse Power Systems, one would have to build windmills with 500 ft blades (!), 500 ft apart, in rows from Canada to Mexico, one such row every 30 miles between the east and west coasts; if the wind then blew constantly everywhere at 24 mph, this monstrous grid would supply 20% of today's US electric capacity.

Apart from the problems of fluctuating windspeed, storage facilities and the need for sweeping large areas with the blades, the output power is proportional to the third power of the windspeed, which means trouble: Many a sensitive and concerned advocate of "low-impact" energy has invested thousands of dollars into a windmill promising to give a few piddling kilowatts, only to find out what the 3rd power dependence means: No power in a breeze, and the first gale blew the windmill down. Not even the wind comes for free, he found, and was happy to go back to the 3.5 cents per kWh from his local power company. Even in New York City, where societally aware politicians saddled Con Ed with the highest taxes to finance their orgies of social engineering, where enlightened judges enjoined it from disconnecting consumers who didn't pay their bills, where the environmental hippoisie sued Con Ed for any old reason, until they all drove up the price for a kW-hour to 20 cents, even in New York City electricity coming out of a wall plug is still a bargain.

The long and short of it is that windpower will get nowhere until the man is born who can extract energy from a wide cross-section of the wind without sweeping that cross-section with blades of a windmill or cluttering it with other gadgets.

But hold on! That man may already have been born. His name is James T. Yen, and he is a scientist in the basic research division of the Grumman Aerospace Corporation. As yet, the idea is theoretical, backed up only by preliminary experimental results, but Yen just might swing it. Or rather swirl it.