As with any potential source of electricity generation, what ultimately matters is how much can be produced relative to the demand and how fast can a particular generating technology ramp up to a) meet increasing demand and b) become a replacement source for dirtier methods of producing electricity.

In the case of wind power, it's mostly good news with respect to a) and b) above. There is great potential in the wind, and some of this is now being realized as confirmed by recent growth data on total installed wind generation.

Here we see a fairly strong exponential growth of total (cumulative) installed wind capacity in units of MW. If you recall our exercises on exponential doubling times, you can infer the growth rate from this graph. For instance, in 2001 installed capacity was 24,000 MW by 2004 that had doubled to 48,000 MW. A doubling time of 3 years is a growth rate of n = 70/3 = 23% per year. Based on that, we could predict that by 2007 there should be 96,000 MW of worldwide, close to the reported value of 93,000. But how much longer can this trajectory continue without running into material shortages and/or grid limitations?

However, 100,000 MW electricity generation represents only 10% of annual US consumption and about 2% of the world's annual consumption.. Therefore installed wind capacity is going to have to ramp up even more as the current trajectory is insufficient (since worldwide demand is also rising).

Here is the same worldwide data but plotted in a way that shows annual growth rates:

And here is where most of the growth in the world is occurring:

In the US while growth would appear to be significant,

As of the end of June 2012, total US installed wind capacity stood at about 50,000 MW nameplate. While this is an impressive amount in absolute terms, 50,000 MW/1.36 TW is still only 3.7% of our total production porfolio.

But note the loss of momentum (downward trend) after 2009. Renewable energy buildout needs to increase every year; every year of a decrease makes recovery that much more difficult:

Great advances in turbine design have also been realized which has produced important economies of scale. That is, for about the same size physical footprint on the land, the wind rotor size is much larger and the unit capacity is much larger. This has a significant effect. Unit capacities per footprint have grown by a factor of 10 over the last 15 years. No other technology has this going for it.

But Manufacturing Still Lags: Wind turbine manufacturing, however, has fallen behind 2008 levels in both announcements and in production activity. While this is bad news, the good news is that a solution is readily available: A strong national Renewable Electricity Standard (RES) will create the market certainty that manufacturers need in order to invest, enabling the U.S. to become a wind turbine manufacturing powerhouse creating hundreds of thousands of jobs. but only if we committ to it.

So far, we have only discussed the land potential of wind, but there is much more resource in OFF shore wind production. Of course, the difficulty there lies in extending the grid to such potential facilities. The use of hydrogen as a proxy for a transmission line may well come into play here.

In addition, many mountain ridgelines represent natural wind funnels and lining them with turbines produces maximum efficiency.