An episode of Science Friday talking about how wind power is plentiful.

So many cool things learned from this episode:

• Research shows that bird kills due to wind turbines would be less than from coal and gas.
• One rare-earth element is necessary to build turbines: Neodymium to make the generators efficient. Worldwide there is 7x the amount we’d need if we were to build 4 million turbines.
• The Bush administration did a technical study that showed we could quite easily get to 20% of our power from wind by 2030.
• Iowa already gets ~20% of its power from wind. Damn! link
• We wouldn’t want to strive to get all of our power from wind, because then we’d have to store the power in batteries. If we balance wind with solar and hydrothermal (or other), we won’t have to worry about energy storage, and would be able to handle peak demand regardless of the fluxuations in weather. Sweet!