Wind industry is showing little growth in 2010

The U.S. wind-power industry has hit a plateau, adding just 500 megawatts of capacity since the end of the first quarter of 2010, says the latest quarterly report from the American Wind Energy Association. "In 2009 about 10,000 megawatts of new capacity came on line nationally and another 4,000 megawatts were finished in the first quarter of 2010," Dan Piller of the Des Moines Register reports on the paper's Green Fields blog. AWEA cites factors including "lack of long-term U.S. energy policies, such as a Renewable Electricity Standard, and resulting lack of certainty for business, which has the country’s utilities failing to move forward with wind build-out plans" as reasons for the decline.

"We’re increasing our dependence on fossil fuels, impacting our national security, instead of diversifying our portfolio to include more renewables," Piller heard from Denise Bode, CEO of AWEA, which claims more than 2,500 companies as members. A steep drop in prices for natural gas, "which two years ago sold for an average of $10 per thousand cubic feet but for most of this year has sold for $4 or less," has also contributed to the decline, Piller writes. Vast shale gas reserves have opened cheaper and cleaner supplies for the urbanized Eastern U.S. (Read more)