28 GIS FOR RENEWABLE ENERGY Renewable Energy—No Longer the Impossible Dream! Highlights „ ArcGIS improves the quality and accessibility of data to maximize the efficiency of decision making. „ Nearly all the wind power facility layouts can be done with GIS. „ Locating the right site can be done quickly and accurately with publicly available data and GIS technology. Just then they came in sight of thirty or forty windmills that rise from that plain. And no sooner did Don Quixote see them that he said to his squire, “Fortune is guiding our affairs better than we ourselves could have wished. Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants? I intend to do battle with them . . . With their spoils we shall begin to be rich . . .” When Miguel de Cervantes wrote of the impetuous and noble hero Don Quixote 400 years ago, he could not have imagined that one day environmental scientists and energy analysts GIS and the Science Behind Tapping Wind Power Offer Insight on the Resource’s Feasibility The Maple Ridge Wind Farm is a 321megawatt project spanning the New York towns of Martinsburg, Lowville, Watson, and Harrisburg, about 75 miles northeast of Syracuse. The project produces enough electricity to power up to 160,000 average New York homes. Maple Ridge has increased the amount of wind power in New York by 600 percent. New York is a state with a 25 percent Renewable Portfolio Standard, designed to be in full effect by 2013. as the world’s biggest generator by volume of wind energy. The amount of wind power the United States generates has doubled in the last two years, according to the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA), a trade group for wind power developers and equipment manufacturers. An investigation into the solid science of wind power facility development clarifies the potential and reliability of this blustery resource. Twenty-eight U.S. states have set renewable energy mandates and are determined to woo wind developers. A Nebraska utility brochure boasts, “Nebraska has wind. In fact, the state ranks sixth in America for wind development.” An energy company in Minnesota is announcing plans to buy an interstate transmission line and develop wind energy to replace coal-generated electricity. One county in Montana is distributing a wind map book compilation of all necessary data to entice investors. transmission lines and the variability of the wind. Many citizens support the idea as long as it’s “not in my backyard.” Despite criticism, wind power is touted as one of the cleanest, most reliable renewable resources dreamed up so far. But is harnessing wind power on a wide scale as quixotic as dreaming the impossible dream? In 2008, the United States surpassed Germany Harnessing the Wind Wind turbines convert the kinetic energy in moving air into rotational energy, which in turn is converted to electricity. Humans have used wind power for centuries to move boats, grind grain, and pump water. Timeless and simple as it may seem, development of a wind power facility is much more complex than staking a pinwheel in the breeze. Iberdrola Renewables is the largest developer This example of siting wind turbines with GIS shows six layers of data. would “dream the impossible dream” of stocking the electric grid with the power of the wind. Nor could he have envisioned the hulking giants that now line many a horizon, the 400-foot-tall wind turbines each wielding three 130-foot steel blades and weighing 8.5 tons. When he talked of tilting at windmills, the Spanish literary master would not have guessed that public utilities, private companies, and investors would someday look to the wind to “beat the unbeatable foes” of waning fossil fuel supply and deleterious carbon emissions. Wind energy now accounts for 1 percent of the United States’ power supply, and forecasts from the U.S. Department of Energy say that figure could reach 20 percent by 2030. While wind farms crop up across the country’s windiest terrain, critics point to the need for new