Entry #29: Missouri Community Embraces The Wind

Sometime last night, while in the middle of a weird, sleep-deprived trance, I blogged about a community in Canada that recently converted to solar power. To show that our American friends down south can be innovative and green as well, I want to talk about another community that has recently embraced the wind.

In Rock Port, Missouri, esidents recently converted their entire community to use wind energy.

The town of Rock Port, in Missouri, is another of the growing number of towns and cities laying claim to be powered entirely by a renewable energy. And though the small town only boasts a population of 1,300, it is the first community in the United States to be powered entirely by wind power.

“That’s something to be very proud of, especially in a rural area like this – that we’re doing our part for the environment,” said Jim Crawford, a natural resource engineer at the University of Missouri Extension in Columbia.

The four turbines which are powering little Rock Port are part of a greater batch of 75 turbines, which installed across three counties, are used to harvest the plentiful wind scouring the landscape. “We’re farming the wind, which is something that we have up here,” Crawford said. “The payback on a per-acre basis is generally quite good when compared to a lot of other crops, and it’s as simple as getting a cup of coffee and watching the blades spin.”

You know, it used to be hard to find an article like this, but now I see one or two pop up on Digg daily. The continued rhetoric by our governments saying that it’s simply not possible to move to renewable energy sources in the near future is completed negated by these community movements. I mean, if a community of 1300 can find the means to install windmills and remove themselves from the grid, then surely the government, with all its resources, can find a way to convert the majority of the country to renewable sources as well.

Believe it or not, one of the biggest arguments against wind power is that the turbines are an eyesore for many people. But looking at that photo above, I can’t imagine anything more beautiful than the gentle hum of a perpetual source of clean, renewable energy.