Martin Rosenberg Editor-in-Chief EnergyBiz Magazine

David Still, managing director of Clipper Windpower Europe, based in London, said that the United Kingdom looks to obtain 20 percent of its energy from renewable power by 2020, and three-quarters of that will come from wind.

To ramp up wind output, congested Europe will increasingly go offshore. The flat ocean allows winds to roll along at top speeds. Offshore wind turbines can be planted close to population centers, making it easy to transmit the electricity.

"We will never get what we want from land," Still said about terrestrial wind power. He predicts that by 2020, half of the United Kingdom's wind power will be cranked out by offshore turbines. Marine wind generation started in the early 1990s but remains in its infancy, amounting to less than 900 megawatts of generation -- all in Europe. Total worldwide wind generation stood at 74,000 megawatts the end of last year.

Peter Mandelstam, who plans to develop an ocean wind project off the coast of Delaware, said, "The Danes originated it, and the Brits are leading the charge."

The United Kingdom is rapidly developing ocean wind, observers suggest, because of its experience operating oil platforms in harsh North Sea conditions since 1975.

To speed development of the next generation of turbines, the Brits have opened a sparkling New and Renewable Energy Center, NaREC, in Northumberland, close to where some of the first marine wind turbines were deployed. Andrew Mill, chief executive of the center, said it has acquired wind blade testing technol¬ogy from the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo. In NaREC's vast wharf-side testing facility, huge tarps were draped over mammoth blades. The dimen¬sions and designs of each blade are top secret for competitive reasons, Mill said.

The objective of the testing facility is to further take costs out of wind turbines, even though they are mature technologies.

When asked if a new generation of the next generation of marine wind turbines would be criticized for destroying the ocean view of beach strollers ashore, Stills responded: "They don't have to be invisible. They are a positive sign of green."

Read that, Ted Kennedy?

A new book, "Cape Wind: Money, Celebrity, Class, Politics, and the Battle for Our Energy Future on Nantucket Sound," by Wendy Williams and Robert Whitcomb, chronicles how Kennedy and others attempted to block offshore wind generation off of Cape Cod. The book is our second annual summer reading recommendation. Last year, we endorsed "The Merchant of Power" by John F. Wasik.

"Cape Wind" describes how entrepreneur Jim Gordon plans to install a 468-megawatt wind farm off Cape Cod. It dissects the orchestrated opposition to the project led by some of America's most powerful political and business leaders who maintain summer mansions in the area.

Kennedy attempted to kill the project in Congress, saying at one point, "The sight of them bothers me."

Gordon succeeds in forging an alliance of liberal and conservative forces, including the Washington Post and Washington Times, and the project is back on track but far from a certainty as of the book's publication in May. "Since Gordon proposed his idea five years ago," Williams and Whitcomb wrote, "not one wind turbine has been built in American waters."

The book is a captivating read -- and perfect if you find yourself headed to the beach in coming weeks. If you get to Cape Cod, send us a digital picture of yourself holding up the book with the playgrounds of Jack Welch, William Koch, the Mellons, DuPonts and Kennedys in the background.

When you get back to the office and confront the realities of the 2007 energy business, however, consider why wind power is marching offshore in Europe while it flounders in the bluest of American states.

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