The Answer Is Blowin' In The Wind...?

Anybody who reads this blog knows very well how staunch a supporter I am of green initiatives and environmentally-conscious thinking. The idea of green power supplies makes me fairly tingle with delight. But sometimes I'll read an article like this one and I start to question the validity of some of these technologies.

Wind power makes a certain amount of sense to me -- it's about as clean as you get, and from what I understand there's a lot of energy to be had by tapping into air movement -- but on the same token, it seems like there's an awful lot of work involved for very little payoff. Now, obviously, there's work involved in saving the world, and I'm the first person to step up to that plate. But it seems to me that we're going to do more harm than good in building, as the article suggests, a wind turbine for every rooftop...I mean, in order for these turbines to be effective they have to be constantly fed, well, wind. And if you figure you clog up an entire neighbourhood with giant fans on every rooftop...won't that sort of cause a mass drop in efficiency for each individual turbine? Wind resistance and all that? I'm not a physicist, so I don't really know how this works...maybe one of you can enlighten me?

Rather than propping up giant fans all over the place, I'd be more interested to see a larger initiative that would place several large (very large) turbines about 20,000 feet up where the wind activity is severe all the time, and have those turbines power generators on the ground. I know, me and Isaac Asimov, right? But it's food for thought, and to me, makes more sense than millions of tiny generators all over suburbia. What are your thoughts on this issue?