Yes, on your last point, there certainly do continue to be siting issues for various reasons. Either local residents or conservation advocates have found reasons that particular wind turbine farm sites have been unattractive to them. I would certainly say that by and large the siting for wind farms in the U.S. has been far, far less contentious than the siting for traditional fossil fuel or nuclear power plants has been. The contentious issues have been, by far, in the minority.
In terms of the technologies that appear to be the most promising, I think there is a debate among economic development specialists about what they would prefer seeing. On the one hand are the very large, high-megawatt wind farms that produce several hundred megawatts of power within a relatively small area in the form of a traditional power plant and then have significant transmission corridors built, attached to them, to bring wind power to big urban centres. On the other hand are some economic developers who have a vision of returning to a highly decentralized power system in which one really doesn't rely on these big development projects to the extent we have historically. They point to the very clear economic development benefits that have accrued across some rural communities where it has allowed traditional family farms to maintain agricultural production, with a side income from electric production.
I don't tend to have a strong feeling about either one of those. It seems clear to me that both of them provide necessary and important economic benefits. I can't see us in the U.S. getting to the scale of wind development needed to make an appreciable contribution to global warming solutions without there being very large, significant wind farms all up and down the Midwestern corridor, from the North Dakota-Canada border down to Texas. There, the potential for producing at least 100,000 megawatts of wind power I think is very, very strong.
I do recognize there is a real value to using small wind development, even individualized, home-based wind turbines, which are now available enough to provide some meaningful support for an individual rural home, especially when excess power produced during windy periods can be sold back to the grid and help make those economically attractive.
I like both models. I think there's a place for both models in the system. As the turbines themselves become more and more efficient, they of course produce power at a much more attractive rate.