North Dakota Adds To Its "All The Above" When It Comes To Energy; Largest Wind Project To Date Has Been Approved For North Dakota

The Bismarck Tribune is reporting:

A wind energy project that would be among the largest in North Dakota in terms of production capacity was given the green light Wednesday by the Public Service Commission.

Commissioners unanimously approved the 200.5 megawatt Courtenay Wind Farm. The $350 million project is being developed through Edina, Minn.-based Geronimo Energy.
Commission chairman Brian Kalk said the wind farm would be spread over a roughly 21,000-acre area in northeast Stutsman County.

Geronimo Energy is still considering whether they will utilize 1.5-megawatt or 2-megawatt turbines. The company told him recently it is leaning toward 2-megawatt wind turbines, Kalk said. This would put the number of turbines constructed at about 100.

North Dakota had approximately 1,672 megawatts of wind energy capacity in the state as of October of this year. An exact figure on how much of that capacity is being used wasn’t available.

 

From Wiki

So now that we've all agreed killing tens of thousands of bats, bald eagles, golden eagles, hawks, whooping cranes, California condors, it's nice to see that North Dakota is pushing its way to the top of the chart. I assume the gap between North Dakota and Minnesota will widen over time.

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A Note To The Granddaughters

I continue to enjoy Freeman Dyson's Disturbing the Universe. Another excerpt, pp. 108 - 109:

At that time [during the London Blitz] in London, those of us who were seriously engaged in the war were very grateful to Wernher von Braun. 

We knew that each V-2 cost as much to produce as a high-performance fighter airplane. We knew that the German forces on the fighting fronts were in desperate need of airplanes, and that the V-2 rockets were doing us no military damage. From our point of view, the effect of the V-2 program was almost as good as if Hitler had adopted a policy of unilateral disarmament. Unilateral disarmament had certainly not been the intention of the military leaders who set up the Peenemunde organization.

This is an extreme example of the stupidities which often occur when bureaucracy takes control of scientific projects. Such stupidities are by no means an exclusively German phenomenon.

The global investment in renewable energy comes to mind.