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The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind:
Wind turbines across the Great Plains states produced, for the first time, more than half the region's electricity Sunday.
The power grid that supplies a corridor stretching from Montana to the Texas Panhandle was getting 52.1 percent of its power from wind at 4:30 a.m. on Sunday, Little Rock, Arkansas-based Southwest Power Pool Inc. said in a statement Monday.
As more and more turbines are installed across the country, Southwest Power has become the first North American grid operator to get a majority of its supply from wind. That beats the grid's prior record of 49.2 percent and the 48 percent that a Texas grid operator reached in March, Derek Wingfield, a spokesman, said in an e-mail.
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For the First Time, Wind on the Plains Supplied More Than Half Region’s Power
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New crypt. See /usr/news/crypt.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday February 15 2017, @08:48PM
No I didn't research the boundaries of Tornado Alley. I am not from that region and my sense of the boundaries of Tornado Alley are inexact. Notionally Southeastern Colorado, Northeastern New Mexico, the top of Texas, and the entirety of Oklahoma, which is the eastbound route I drove through, seem like the heart of tornado country. A friend I used to work with in Chicago became a tornado chaser and that region is where he would go.
I did not see windfarms there the way I saw them on our westbound leg through the upper midwest. But thank you for more or less answering the question--the difference seems to be down to policy more than the physics of wind power and tornadoes.
It does seem foolish to me, though, for them to deprive themselves of a perfectly fine revenue stream that benefits rural communities in several ways, simply to serve dogma. Fossil fuels and wind power are not necessarily a zero sum game. If you're a landowner in that region making lease revenue off oil & gas extraction, why wouldn't you welcome lease revenue from wind turbines, too, since the one doesn't preclude the other?
Washington DC delenda est.