According to an article on inhabitat.com:

Lake Erie is about to join Cape Cod in hosting one of the first offshore wind farms in the United States. For a while now, plans have been underway to construct a wind power site on the Great Lakes after a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) was signed between GE Energy and the Lake Erie Energy Development Corporation. Then earlier this month Ohio Governor Ted Strickland announced that there were plans for the development of five wind turbines on Lake Erie to generate 20 megawatts of power by 2012, with additional turbines to generate 1,000 megawatts by 2020.

It may not be much as far as freshwater farms, but it’s a start. Most of the problem has been citizen’s complaints that the turbines will ruin the view and/or tourism, which doesn’t appear to be true. As a matter of fact, one of the most beautiful places I can think of is Oahu, Hawaii’s north shore. On a point where the road turns from the northern end of the island and heads down the east coast is a bluff that boasts wind turbines. They’ve been there for years. I find it to be a serene sight. Wind turbines represent our willingness to help the planet. Something about this picture in Timon Singh’s article about Lake Erie’s wind farm represents that serenity.

http://www.awea.org/faq/wwt_environment.html#Will wind energy hurt tourism in my area.

Like anything new naysayers have warned that whole economic sectors will collapse if we change too quickly. I read an interesting article about that. It went back to other inventions that were touted to be the ruination of huge industries. Those predictions never panned out, and as a matter of fact, the industries that were supposed to go under not only benefited but adopted the new changes in a big way. One example: seat belts. According to the article when seat belts were first considered, naysayers claimed it would ruin the auto industry:

Does anyone remember their bitter lamentations over automobile seat belts? If the auto industry was to be believed, passage of regulations requiring seat belts would prompt Americans to become a nation of lawbreakers and to abandon their cars, collapsing the auto industry. Twenty-six states passed mandatory laws, seat belts save an estimated 15,000 lives a year, and the auto industry now runs ads promoting its safety equipment, having found — gasp! — that consumers want more safety.

The same goes for naysayers relative to energy progress. We hand out $36 billion in subsidies to the oil industry to drill, and one wind energy project in California gets 1.2 billion this year. And it will be the largest in the U.S. Who thinks that’s fair, especially when big oil is going to drill anyway?

Even though wind power funding lags behind and wind power has slowly progressed, wind turbines have already improved. Gearboxes have been replaced by magnets, making the turbines much lighter and improving efficiency. They turn more easily in much lower winds. We really do need new innovation to reduce the size of wind turbines. Like many environmentally minded people, I see there is a finite end to just how many of these large turbines we can actually erect across the country. There simply isn’t enough land. But, I’ve reminded readers that until we actually unleash new alternatives we simply will not advance quickly to smaller, more efficient, and cheaper alternatives. Think digital watches, portable radios, laptaps. The precursors to all of these products were huge and/or expensive and/or unreliable.

I know. I worked on keypunch machines before the computer terminal. Looking back that was so archaic. Then I worked on a computer terminal in 1974 in U of M’s personnel dept. That system would dump everything we did the prior week for whatever reason. We would walk in on Monday morning with the bad news all had to be input again. It was so unreliable that we continued to type 4-5 carbon copies AND input the same info into the system on a daily basis. The main frame for that system took up an entire room. I marvel the way our cell phones have morphed into the pc’s of the future. To think we will hurt the U.S. economy with more opportunities in that economy is convoluted thinking. Competition is supposed to be the back bone of the free market, if there is a free market when it comes to energy.

Read more:

About Lake Erie’s Wind Farm

http://inhabitat.com/2010/07/06/lake-erie-to-become-the-united-states-first-fresh-water-wind-farm/.

About Doomsayers and New Innovation:

http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2009/05/29/dont-believe-climate-bill-doomsayers#ixzz0ut6eLNpz.

About Improved Wind Turbines

http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/25188/.