Future of Small-Scale Wind Power

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Dan Juhl, who understands farm life from his own childhood in Woodstock, Minnesota, has been creating profitable business arrangements to encourage small-scale wind power cooperatives.
Dan Juhl, who understands farm life from his own childhood in Woodstock, Minnesota, has been creating profitable business arrangements to encourage small-scale wind power cooperatives.
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"The Upcycle," by William McDonough and Michael Braungart, imagines a world that goes beyond sustainability to create abundance — a world where every citizen thinks big, even if actions are only small.

Authors William McDonough and Michael Braungart seek a world that is full of clean air, water, soil and power. In their latest ecological manifesto, The Upcycle (North Point Press, 2013), that is precisely the goal they envision. They propose that a better designed world would lead to overall prosperity. In the following excerpt, from “Wind Equals Food,” see how the revamping of wind power can used to produce clean energy, even on a small-scale.

Purchase this book from the MOTHER EARTH NEWS store: The Upcycle.

Wind Power: A Renewable Fixing Its Flaws

What makes large-scale hydropower so troublesome is that it does not allow for easy revision. What if the designers and engineers are wrong? How can the structure adapt? If you’ve flooded square miles of wilderness and built a dam 63 stories tall, it’s hard to revise, to amend the system. It is not much different than strip mining or generating nuclear waste in that one has no opportunity to revise. That’s why we believe the best solution is a humble approach combining small solutions that add up to something huge.

Wind power was a renewable that seemed flawed early on but is now fixing its problems step by step. Wind power had the advantage of not massively reconfiguring our terrain at the start and then discovering the downside. That relatively smaller profile allowed wind power to adapt, fix itself, and grow.

  • Published on Mar 31, 2014
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