The dirty little secrets my friend, are blowing in the wind

“The windiest sites have not been built, because there is no way to move that electricity from there to the load centers."

clipped from www.nytimes.com When the builders of the Maple Ridge Wind farm spent $320 million to put nearly 200 wind turbines in upstate New York, the idea was to get paid for producing electricity. But at times, regional electric lines have been so congested that Maple Ridge has been forced to shut down even with a brisk wind blowing. The dirty secret of clean energy is that while generating it is getting easier, moving it to market is not. While the United States today gets barely 1 percent of its electricity from wind turbines, many experts are starting to think that figure could hit 20 percent. Achieving that would require moving large amounts of power over long distances, from the windy, lightly populated plains in the middle of the country to the coasts where many people live.