It’s been an amazing few days here in Los Angeles, and I’ve really enjoyed the chance to experience Windpower.

At the end, a few topline thoughts:

• The wind industry is a real industry. From ball bearings to gears to trucking, we’re talking serious capabilities and serious dollars. And then there’s the manufacture of the finished products. The towers, the blades and the generators themselves. It’s extraordinary.

  
  A GE generator for a wind turbine.

  On Monday, Senator Tom Daschle suggested that the industry “can be bigger than the entire dot-com revolution. This can have the same economic impact.” That sounds a little over the top to me, but only a little.

• From a political standpoint, wind power is one of those rare instances where Left and Right can truly agree. If you’re a pro-business conservative, it’s easy to get behind a substantial and fast-growing industry that promises to be a long-term boon to the economy. If you’re a left-leaning, environmentalist-type, you can be thrilled that a growing industry is providing a real solution to global warming. When it comes to Congress, that ought to translate into broad, bi-partisan support for things like the renewal of the wind energy production tax credit. After all, conservatives like me support tax incentives for businesses all the time. And we can make progress on global warming through a sensible tax reduction. That’s awfully unusual and, I think, very excititing.
• No matter what form of power generation you prefer, we’re going to need more transmission lines. (Read a great primer on this topic here.) Remember the northeast blackout in 2003? At that time, experts told us that we needed a major upgrade to our power grid. They reminded us that our grid is decades old. Now, with more wind and solar coming online, we need to bring power from places like Montana to places like Las Vegas, and we’re going to need new transmission lines to do it.

These aren’t the only thoughts though. During my time in L.A., I’ve gotten to meet some great bloggers, and their coverage of Windpower is starting to appear.

Start with David Anderson, the founder of Green Options. Then check out this post from Randy Riggs at Ecogeek. And if you want all of the details, don’t miss the great event-focused blog by the folks at Renewable Energy Access. And, if you really want all the details, don’t miss the Windpower 2007 YouTube channel, which has complete footage of a couple of the expert discussions.

And we’ll see you next year in Houston at Windpower 2008.

So, if you saw the post about In-n-Out, you know that I’m in Los Angeles. I’ve come west to attend Windpower 2007, a major convention and trade show put on by my client, the American Wind Energy Association. (And I should say that I almost never blog about my clients. Indeed, this will be only the second time. But my test is simple: I would blog about this even if my client wasn’t involved. And I promise that my coverage will reflect the fact that I like both my client and the issue.)

I arrived Saturday, and watched as exhibitors put the finishing touches on nearly 100,000 square feet of exhibitions. The floor is, in a word, incredible. Every facet of the industry is represented. From the major players like GE, Vestas, and Clipper that build the massive turbines and generators to the folks who build every component of those turbines. (Yesterday, for reasons that remain a mystery even to me, I snapped a photo of a table full of pipes and conduit. I’m telling you, they have everything here.) They even have small turbines that you can add to your home or business.

A few months ago, I wrote a post about my visit to a wind farm in rural Pennsylvania. The title of the post was “Wind Energy is for Real”. After seeing the show floor here at Windpower, that title seems even more unnecessary and silly than it did at the time. Don’t believe me? Check out the show’s Flickr feed. (Full disclosure: I’ve had the privilege of shooting some of the show’s photos with my cool new Cannon Digital Rebel XTI.) You’ll see unbelievable displays, including a complete “nacelle” — that’s the part of the turbine that sits on top of the tower and houses the generator — brought in by Spanish turbine maker Gamesa. The nacelle weighs 170,000 pounds and was positioned to the millimeter on the show floor to ensure that it wouldn’t fall through the floor into the parking garage below.

I have to say though, in my personal opinion, the coolest display at the show isn’t the giant nacelle. It’s the Vestas booth, which brings home the advantages of wind energy in the starkest possible terms.

Last week, Jim and I debated whether and how it was appropriate to combat global warming. Here’s a great example of how we can do it in a way that helps our environment, and creates new jobs in a high-tech manufacturing industry.

Indeed, just last week, the National Association of Manufactures Shoptalk blog wrote favorably about wind power.

As I commented to a friend at the time, finally, we have a way to help the environment that left and right can agree on.

I’ll be reporting from Windpower 2007 as the week goes on. So will a number of other great bloggers including our friends from Green Options, Treehugger, New Energy News and others. Thus far, the folks at Renewable Energy Access are providing the best minute-by-minute coverage.

If you have comments or questions, throw them in the thread below. I’ll try to answer them whenever I can.

I’m in Bentonville, Arkansas, visiting a client. Earlier in the week, it was 80+ degrees, with blue, sunny skies. In short, perfect spring days.

Yesterday — when I arrived — it turned cold.

And tonight, when a friend and I walked out of the restaurant after dinner, it was snowing. And not just a little. It was snowing hard.

So, let me get this straight. It’s April 5. I’m in the south. And it’s snowing?!

Someone send the devil a space heater.

Last week, my friends at the American Wind Energy Association were kind enough to take me out for a tour of a wind farm in Meyersdale, PA. AWEA recently became a client, so the trip was an opportunity to see wind at work up close and personal. (UPDATE: I completely forgot to thank the great folks from FPL, the energy company that runs the facility we visited. They made us feel right at home.)

If you’re like me, you probably have a lot of out of date notions about wind energy. You might think that the whole notion is a little bit pie-in-the-sky — a product of idealistic hippies who somehow managed to slip through engineering school.

It turns out that wind is a serious player in our electric grid, and its contribution to keeping our lights on grows every day. Indeed, wind energy relies on mature technology that’s been tested and improved for almost thirty years. Recent technological improvements have made wind turbines more reliable and consistent. And the demand for wind is growing. Companies like GE (also an Edelman client), Siemens and BP Alternative Energy see wind an important investment.

I knew most of this before I headed north to Pennsylvania for the day. I got into the car thinking that wind energy was pretty cool.

I had no idea.

We arrived at the site shortly before noon. It had snowed the day before, and there was a fresh white powder on the ground. But the storm had gone and left in its wake a perfect, crytsal blue winter sky. (Although, it was a little brisk. I believe the temperature topped out that day at a balmy 5 degrees on the Farenheit scale.)

The turbines sat on the top of ridge overlooking the town. They were much taller than I expected, but they didn’t overwhelm the landscape. Indeed, they were an attractive part of it. And there was nothing industrial about them. They simply sat on their spot and turned, nearly silent. Of course, with each revolution, the turbines were sending electricity down the mountain and into the power grid.

And that’s the coolest part of all. Here’s a technology that can produce a significant part of the energy we need every day, and it’s totally, completely 100% clean. There are no emissions. Period. No mountain tops that need removing to strip mine their fuel. No wells that need drilling. And no carbon dioxide drifting into the stratosphere to contribute to our slow bake.

I was a believer in wind energy before I went to Meyersdale, but the trip really brought it home for me: there’s so much we can do. We just need the will to do it.

And for once, I remembered to bring my camera. Here’s a photo that I took:

Cam: As an Oklahoma boy, I can attest to the feasibility of wind power. OG & E (Oklahoma’s big electric company) gives consumers the choice to purchase electricity from their windfarm in the western part of the state.

Marshall: UPDATE II: Some guy who subs himself an “energy consultant” has apparently learned how to use Technorati watchlists, and he’s posted a lengthy comment. Just for the record, I think much what he’s proposing is way over the top.

As to the other question in the comments — the wind is unaffected.

Jim: Oh, sure. We all just sit back and fall for the Marshall Jedi Mind Trick. Wake up, people! Where do you think all of that wind in Pennsylvania comes from? Canada! You people think you’re ending our dependence on Foreign Oil, but all this will do is expand our dependence on Foreign Wind! And sure, the ”American Wind Energy Association” sounds like a good, all-American group. We know this giant, corporate-dominated industry by its more familiar name: Big Air.

Obviously, we haven’t even gotten into the theories that the world has reached Peak Wind. Every time the cost of wind goes up — largely because of increasing wind demand in China and India — we hear the familiar calls for breaking into the Strategic Wind Reserve. Or, as Tom Friedman prefers, increasing wind taxes to reduce our wind usage. Isn’t it long past time to increase the fuel economy standards on hang gliders and hot air balloons? It’s long past time to break the power of the international Wind Cartels that are manipulating the market!

(Okay, I know next to nothing about this topic, so I just took my BoilerPlate Talking Points Cliche-o-matic and stuck “wind” in for the other, more frequently discussed sources of energy.)

Sometimes, spring sneaks up on you. A few days in the 50. A few days in the 60s. A couple of days of 70s sprinkled in. And slowly, spring seaps into your life. Sometimes, spring doesn’t arrive at all. A couple of years ago winter never would have ended here in DC (damn jetstream) were it not for the earth tilting on its axis.

But sometimes, spring appears suddenly, without warning. Like yesterday.

When I went to bed, it was winter. A trip to the store that night required a heavy coat. The temp was in the low 40s. But the next morning, when I went out to retrieve the newspaper, it was comfortably in the 50s, and warm breeze portended a lovely spring day. Today was perfection. Temps glided into the 70s. The sun shown and a warm breeze kept things stirring. I’m writing this post from my deck, sipping a glass of wine and soaking up the perfection.

Welcome spring. We’re glad you’re here.