Photo: The Plain Dealer
Harnessing the wind and sun: Ohio can do better
Ohio is missing the green revolution, and the many jobs that go with it. Consider this fact. Ohio gets less than one percent of its electricity from wind power. Iowa, by comparison, gets 28.5 percent. Minnesota, 15.9 percent.
Ohio generates even less of its electricity from solar power, while California leads the way with a solar contribution approaching 10 percent.
Today, cleveland.com launches the first installment in a series that will look at why Ohio has fallen far behind other states in harnessing renewable energy, and what it would take for the state to get back into the race and begin reaping the economic benefits that come from a fast-growing industry.
By Peter Krouse, cleveland.com
Next slide: Missed opportunities
Graphic: USEIA, June 2015/Photo: Gary Tramontina, special to The Plain Dealer
For the states that have embraced renewable energy, the benefits go well beyond breathing cleaner air and reducing carbon footprints. Acccepting renewable energy also means putting people to work.
And yet the political forces that prevail in Columbus seem satsified with reyling heavily on fossil fuels. Coal and natural gas interests figure prominently in the state.
But is the legislature doing what's best for Ohioans? Renewable energy is not a gimmick anymore. Its growth is inevitable.
Before examining the future of renewable energy in Ohio, let's first look at where we've been. Did you know that wind-generated electricity was born in Ohio?
Next slide: An ingenious idea
Photo: Western Reserve Historical Society
An ingenius idea
Cleveland's Charles Brush was a remarkable inventer who counted Thomas Edison among his contemporaries. In 1888, Brush built what was billed at the time as the nation's first electricty-generating wind turbine in the backyard of his mansion at East 37th Street and Euclid Avenue.
Brush's turbine featured 144 cedar blades "twisted like those of screw propellers" according to an 1890 article in Scientific American. It could light up his house. Remarkable, for sure, but practical?
"The reader must not suppose that electric lighting by means of power supplied in this way is cheap because the wind costs nothing," the Scientific American article reads. "On the contrary, the cost of the plant is so great as to more than offset the cheapness of the motive power. However, there is a great satisfaction in making use of one of nature's most unruly motive agents."
That certainly wasn't the end of the discussion.
Next slide: The energy crisis of the 1970s spurs research into wind energy
1970s energy crisis spurs research in Ohio
Following the energy crisis of the 1970s, NASA's Plum Brook research station near Sandusky became a center for experimental wind energy. The technology created there has been instrumental in the development of modern wind turbines, but it did little to spur the industry in Ohio.
Around the same time, a Toledo entrepreneur was developing ideas for harnessing another renewable-energy source - the sun.
Next slide: The glass man cometh
Photo: First Solar
The glass man cometh
Dubbed "The Glass Genius" by Fortune magazine, Ohio native Harold McMaster started a company in 1990 that would become First Solar, one of the leading solar-panel makers in the world. First Solar's plant south of Toledo in Perrysburg opened in 2002 with full-scale production of its current line of panels beginning in 2006. The plant now employs 1,300 people.
The company makes panels for large, utility-scale solar farms, the kind you might find in Southern California.
Around this same time, progressive leaders in Cleveland tried to embrace renewable energy in its various forms. They saw it as a way to bring good jobs to the state.
Next slide: A far out idea or jobs for the future.