A lack of wind won’t stall our future renewable energy economy, but Congress might.

Wind has its downsides. It’s intermittent; it’s too expensive. Fair points, but there are ways around them. For example the whole intermittency issue could be handled now by using spatially diverse sources; and once affordable energy storage technologies are developed, intermittency will likely become a non-issue.

And the cost issue is in many ways a red herring. Many argue that fossil fuels are cheaper than renewable energy sources because of the market’s failure to account for the so-called external costs of fossil fuels such as pollution. These are costs we all bear but are not reflected in the price we pay for the energy; if those