Over the past 15 years, Bowling Green, Ohio, has truly gone green,
installing solar panels on schools, building a wind farm, investing in
hydroelectric projects and even generating power off landfill gases.
Today,
the city of 29,000 residents gets somewhere between 16 percent and 20
percent of its electricity from renewable resources.
If Ohio's governor has his way, more cities will follow Bowling Green's example.
"We've
been working on it without any government push. It's been the
conscience of our community," says Bowling Green Utilities Director
Kevin Maynard.
If Ohio embraces green energy, wind turbines
like those at the AMP-Ohio/Green Mountain Energy Wind Farm in Wood
County will be a more common sight, Maynard predicts.
The four
turbines are such an oddity that they draw tourists and schoolchildren
by the busload to the wind farm, which is next to a landfill. A
solar-powered kiosk with a touch screen offers data on the project,
wind speed and real time power generation.
"We sort of turned
the Wood County landfill into a tourist attraction," said Kent Carson
of AMP-Ohio, which operates the US$10 million wind farm.
Building
on Bowling Green's initiatives, Governor Ted Strickland wants to
require that 25 percent of the electricity sold in Ohio by 2025 come
from alternative energies, such as fuel cells, solar panels, windmills,
nuclear and hydroplants. Half of that would have to come from renewable
energy, while the other half would come from nuclear, fuel cells or
clean coal sources.
Strickland wants the state's General Assembly to adopt his plan by year's end.
The state has a long way to go to meet the governor's renewable energy goal.
Currently, about 90 percent of Ohio's electricity comes from coal-fired power plants.
Less than one percent comes from renewable sources.
Bill Spratley of Green Energy Ohio said wind power leads the way among renewable sources in Ohio.
Exactly how many wind turbines Ohio would need to hit the goal of 12.5
percent for renewables depends on factors such as turbine height,
location and technology, said Erin Bowser, state director of
Environment Ohio.
"If
we tap into a small amount of the (wind) resources across the state, we
could easily get up to 20 percent of our energy from clean wind energy
by 2025," Bowser says.
The AMP-Ohio site currently generates up
to 7.2 megawatts of electricity, while two wind projects that recently
received grants from the Strickland administration are expected to
generate 149.5 megawatts of power. Some states are further along: Texas
has 2,631 megawatts of capacity installed, California 2,323 and Iowa
837.
Mark Shanahan, Strickland's energy adviser, said the cost
of wind power is getting closer to market prices for other power, but
wind won't replace coal-fired power plants that churn out 90 percent of
Ohio's electricity. If it isn't blowing, the wind turbines aren't
moving.
But wind can produce electricity inexpensively. Bowser
noted that a US Department of Energy report pegged wind energy at 4.9
US cents per kilowatt hour and estimated new clean coal plants would
produce power at as much as 8.7 US cents per kilowatt hour. A
Massachusetts Institute of Technology study estimates new nuclear power
plants would produce electricity at 6.7 US cents per kilowatt hour.
For environmental advocates such as Spratley, the promise of government mandates for renewable energy is a dream come true.
"We've been in the wilderness a long time in Ohio," Spratley says. "I can see the promised land, and it looks pretty good."
