V.W.H. Campbell, Post-Gazette Click photo for larger image. Tom Gray is deputy director of the American Wind Energy Association (www.awea.org).

The U.S. wind energy industry convened in Pittsburgh last week for its largest-ever trade show, the Windpower 2006 Conference & Exhibition. This was not only a successful business event for what is now a $4 billion a year industry, but it marked the technology's breakthrough as the second-largest source of new electricity generation installed in 2005, after natural gas. Wind power is now a major option for new, utility-scale power generation.

This is good news for our environment. The urgency of curbing the emissions that are linked to global warming is pressed upon us every day by the reality of more violent hurricanes, retreating polar ice caps and glaciers -- the polar bear is now one of many species threatened by global warming -- and more extreme weather patterns. Power plants are one of the large sources of emissions of carbon dioxide, the leading greenhouse gas linked to global warming. Wind power offers a safe and cost-competitive way to reduce such emissions.

What's not as well known, perhaps, is that more wind power is also good news for the economy.

Wind power is a fuel-free source of electricity. Because its only expense aside from relatively low maintenance is that of amortizing capital equipment, the cost of electricity from wind farms is stable and predictable over time. This means that with wind power, utilities can lock in stably priced electricity for as long as 20 years, providing solid value for their shareholders and ratepayers and insurance against fuel price volatility.

Xcel Energy, the utility that is currently the nation's largest purchaser of wind power, and which serves customers in the upper Midwest, Colorado and Southwest, estimates that wind power yielded a net $9.75 million in savings in 2005 on its Colorado system alone. Xcel was one of several large utilities addressing the conference last week.

Wind energy also works to strengthen our energy security by reducing our need to import natural gas and other fuels for electricity generation. Currently, wind farms across the country are saving an estimated half a billion cubic feet of natural gas every day, or about 5 percent of the total amount of natural gas used for electricity generation, helping to alleviate upward pressure on the price of that fuel. Wind turbines are also an unattractive terrorist target -- and if hit, they do not cause explosions, release of radioactivity or other large, secondary threats to the public and the environment.

But is it possible to bring ever-larger amounts of wind power onto our electric system without affecting reliability or costs in a major way? The exciting news from the conference is that the answer, from the utilities that use wind power, is that, yes, wind power can play its part in strengthening overall reliability of electricity supply, in spite of wind farms' naturally variable output.

At the Windpower conference, Audrey Zibelman, executive vice president and chief operating officer of PJM Interconnection, which operates the regional transmission grid serving 51 million people in all or parts of a vast area extending from Illinois to Pennsylvania and Maryland, said wind has become a highly reliable energy source thanks to the system's size and competitive market rules. PJM has over 11,000 megawatts of wind capacity currently in operation or requesting interconnection to its grid by 2009 (one megawatt of wind is sufficient to power the equivalent of 250-300 average homes).

Even as it is buoyed by strong demand, wind power faces constraints to its development on a scale.

Industry leaders at the conference identified two major hurdles. The first is lack of a stable policy commitment at the federal level, causing uncertainty in the planning process for companies involved in the wind energy business. With a more dependable long-term commitment, companies will be eager to further expand their wind energy operations in the years ahead.

The second is the need to plan for transmission lines to tap wind-rich areas and bring wind power to market. Energy is shipped over vast distances these days -- pipelines cross national boundaries, oil and natural gas and even coal come from continents away -- so shipping wind power on a large scale from the American heartland should certainly be feasible over time.

The U.S. wind energy industry was delighted to be in Pittsburgh to discuss these ambitious plans. The conference's 5,000 attendees were swept away by the beautiful, environmentally sound design of the David L. Lawrence Convention Center. Gov. Ed Rendell received a standing ovation for his welcoming address, and for his leadership in attracting wind energy investment in the state. Pittsburgh provided the perfect venue for the transition of wind power into a new energy option for America today.