The raging wind policy war in North Carolina exposes a vast gulf in understanding, and in limited cases, the inability to carry on a civil discourse to explore difference. This has a polarizing effect on the discourse and creates a blind spot for the third way– “distributed generation” or community-based renewable energy. Certainly some favor utility-scale wind farms in the present struggle, however, AIRE favors community-based renewables, and in some areas wind is a viable resource. The scale of community wind is NOT utility-scale wind farm though, as some claim. (Note: The article below discusses sun-baked Southern California. NC must have a more diversified generation mix of renewables, including appropriately scaled wind.)

See this from Fast Company:
“The evidence is growing that privately owned, consumer-driven, small-scale, geographically distributed renewables could deliver a 100% green-energy future faster and cheaper than big power projects alone. Companies like GE and IBM are talking in terms of up to half of American homes generating their own electricity, renewably, within a decade. But distributed power — call it the “microgrid” — poses an existential threat to the business model the utilities have happily depended on for more than a century. No wonder so many of them are fighting the microgrid every step of the way.”

Read the entire article here:
//www.fastcompany.com/magazine/137/beyond-the-grid.html