WANT to hear some good news? American power companies with significant wind power installations are struggling to cope with fluctuations in the juice their turbines are producing, the New York Times's Matthew Wald reports . Why is this good news? First of all, because it's driving innovations in electric storage technology to balance out the flow. And second, because of a question that might occur immediately to anyone reading the article: haven't countries that rely more heavily on wind generation than America, like Germany (8% of total capacity) and Denmark (20%), solved this problem years ago? The answer seems to be: partly. A Europe-wide transmission grid called UCTE sends power from northern Europe to the south when the wind is blowing in the north, and from south to north when the reverse obtains. But the grid apparently needs major upgrades to handle future increases in wind power generating capacity.

But that's only part of the story. The other reason European Big Wind hasn't already solved the problems faced by their American cousins is that America now has more wind-power capacity than any country in Europe. America's installed capacity passed Germany's in 2008; it grew 50% in 2008 and a further 37% in 2009, reaching nearly 35,000 megawatts by the start of this year. America still gets less than 2% of its total electric use from wind, far behind Denmark's 20% or Spain's 13.7%, but the basic reason America has to worry about how to store its wind energy is that it's finally producing lots of it. In any case, the problem seems solvable: simply using excess power to pump water upstream and running it downstream through turbines later can store 75-80% of the energy, the Times reports, and new high-tech batteries and flywheels promise to do even better.

The bad news, if you were waiting for it, is that new installation of wind turbines in the first quarter of 2010 was a mere 539 megawatts, the lowest figure since 2007. The recession plays a role, but the industry also blames the failure to set a national requirement for renewable-energy generation, which it says is broadly popular. Which does rather illustrate the crux of the problem we're having with climate-change legislation: politicians are afraid to touch either a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system, as they're convinced the public is allergic to taxes. But they may be willing to tolerate direct regulatory restrictions on carbon generation, which the public seems to like. Either a carbon tax or cap-and-trade would have been more efficient, but with any luck, EPA action to regulate CO2 as a pollutant will provide the price signal wind generators need to resume expansion.

(Photo credit: AFP)