Great little story in the Forest City Summit about an Iowa farm family who had the foresight to invest in wind turbines more than a decade ago. Now instead of paying an electric bill each month, they get a check.
Some nifty enviro tidbits in the piece, including:
*A 1.5-megawatt turbine displaces 2,700 tons of carbon dioxide, the primary global warming pollutant, each year (equivalent to planting 1.5 square miles of forest)
*The existing U.S. wind turbine fleet (11,603 MW) displaces more than 19 million tons of carbon dioxide each year, based on the current average U.S. utility fuel mix
*To generate the same amount of electricity as one megawatt of wind for 20 years would require burning 29,000 tons of coal (a line of 10-ton trucks 11 miles long) or 92,000 barrels of oil
Virtual Farmgirl 