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USA TODAY SPECIAL EDITION
INNOVATION
Innovative Energy Technology fuels advances in renewable power production
PROVIDED BY TURNER & TOWNSEND
Advances in blade size and turbine outputs are helping to make wind power more efficient.
By Adam Stone
D
RIVEN BY TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION, alternative
forms of energy just keep getting better. “We have made tremendous progress in renewable technologies, and it has resulted in dramatically more efficient forms of energy, delivering power at less cost,” says Gregory Wetstone, president and CEO of the American Council on
Renewable Energy. People are eager to see such advances. In a recent study, business consulting firm Deloitte found 68 percent of consumers are very concerned about climate change and their personal carbon footprint. Nearly 6 in 10 businesses say they see the need to address climate risk. Across the renewable-energy landscape, technological innovation is at work in five key areas: wind, solar, biopower, hydropower and geothermal.
WIND At the American Wind Energy Association, vice president of research and analytics John Hensley sees significant advances in wind power production. “There has been a real effort to increase the efficiency of wind turbines, to enable (them) to capture more of the wind resource that flows across the blade and to convert that CONTINUED
