Baby Creative's Blog

**Official: wind power can cover all our energy needs**

As oil prices inch ever upwards and our pockets become ever lighter, there’s finally a bit of news that suggests we should rethink energy policy straight away and leave the black stuff in the bloody ground once and for all.
In a development that has had all of us here at Baby thudding our fists into our foreheads and saying “But, duh!”, a team of international scientists at Harvard has confirmed the remarkable potential of wind power. They have calculated that in-shore wind farms alone could supply more than 40 times the electricity consumed in the world today.
The findings, which appeared in journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, broke the world down into regions and then worked out the potential electricity that these regions could produce. The results are staggering, with the report concluding that the potential in the US alone could amount to more than 16 times current consumption.
The group’s analysis suggests that a network of land-based turbines operating at 20 per cent of capacity, built only in tree-less and ice-free regions, could happily account for total current and anticipated future global demand for electricity.
Now consider this from a British perspective. As Europe’s windiest country™, you can forget the 15 per cent target that the Government has set for 2020 and start being a hell of a lot more ambitious. This should be the stuff of politicians’ dreams, allowing for a revolution in energy and uncoupling the British economy from its carbon dependency.
2.2 per cent of Britain’s electricity supply is currently generated by wind power. We must demand that any politician vows to increase this to 50 per cent by 2020. In the fight against climate change there is no room for half measures. Ambition, even if it is ultimately thwarted, must be the agenda of the day.