America’s Wind Energy Potential Triples in New Estimate | Wired Science | Wired.com

"Current wind technology deployed in nonenvironmentally protected areas could generate 37,000,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity per year, according to the new analysis conducted by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and consulting firm AWS Truewind. The last comprehensive estimate came out in 1993, when Pacific Northwest National Laboratory pegged the wind energy potential of the United States at 10,777,000 gigawatt-hours.

Both numbers are greater than the 3,000,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity currently consumed by Americans each year. Wind turbines generated just 52,000 gigawatt-hours in 2008, the last year for which annual statistics are available."

Physicist and MacArthur Fellow Amory Lovins, among others, has some persuasive arguments that we should be pursuing wind, solar, and other micropower solutions over Obama's nuclear option, which he believes will actually increase global warming and be uneconomical to boot.