I was driving back from the Twin Cities this past weekend when I noticed a big windmill off in the distance. As I looked more closely, there turned out to be a lot of them and they went on for more than a mile.

I was extremely excited to see alternative power in practice, despite the constant efforts of the oil and coal industries to impede the development of new energy technologies.

It turns out that I saw the Cerro Gordo Wind Farm, which is visible from I-35 at mile marker 188 if you look west. The farm consists of 55 turbines with a capacity of 42 megawatts and is run by FPL Energy.

Clean, alternative power sources are often portrayed as being on par with flying cars — a romantic science fiction vision of the future. However, it turns out that wind power is a reality today.

Much to my surprise, I found out Iowa is actually a national and world leader in wind power. According to the American Wind Energy Association, Iowa’s 354 wind turbines have a maximum output of 246 megawatts and produce 646 million kilowatt-hours of electricity per year. This is enough for 66,204 average residential customers.

Currently, Iowa gets 87 percent of its power from coal. This coal is all shipped in from outside of the state at an annual cost of $300 million. Iowa’s wind turbines eliminate the need of 382,094 tons of coal each year, which would cost $6.2 million.

This coal would fill a train 36 miles long.

Burning this coal would have produced 1.3 billion pounds of carbon dioxide (greenhouse gas), 5.9 million pounds of sulfur dioxide (acid rain), 2.8 million pounds of nitrogen dioxide (smog) and 44 pounds of mercury (send the mortician a down payment). Not to mention that coal strip mining completely destroys the land.

They must be paying lobbyists a whole lot of money to be able to come up with an argument against these figures.

I got to thinking, this is the Iowa State University of Science and Technology, and we burn coal like it’s going out of style.

The city of Ames at least mixes garbage in with the coal, which helps save money and the environment. But really, burning coal hasn’t been avant garde since the English chopped down all of their trees and panicked 200 years ago.

Shouldn’t Iowa State be on the forefront of new energy technology?

Back in 1991, the Spirit Lake school district began to investigate utilizing wind power, and they teamed up with the Iowa Department of Natural Resources early in the study. They won a $119,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy and got a low-interest loan from the DNR for a wind turbine for the elementary school.

The turbine and installation cost $239,500 and it began producing energy on July 22, 1993.

In 64 months, the turbine produced 1.57 million kilowatt hours of electricity, worth $124,900. Since they had no energy storage, they bought electricity from the local power company when it wasn’t windy and sold it back when the turbine produced more than they needed.

This resulted in a $25,000 refund from the power company during that time. The loan was paid off by 1997 and they are investigating the purchase of another larger turbine to power the middle and high schools.

I’m sure Spirit Lake is a fine town, but it has 3,872 people. Ames has 47,000 and a slight edge in the Ph.D. engineer demographic. One would logically think that Ames and Iowa State would have more resources and technical knowledge than Spirit Lake.

So how come they have had a wind turbine since 1993 and we still don’t?

According to an annual average wind speed map I found at www.energy.iastate.edu, the average wind speed (50 meters above ground in exposed sites) in parts of Story and Boone County is 15.7-16.8 mph. It is slightly windier in Spirit Lake, 16.8-17.9 mph on average, but the turbines start pumping out juice at 7.5 mph.

There are other advantages to wind power as well. It took 200 people six months to build Iowa’s two wind farms, and 40 people work there now. The Storm Lake farm was built by Enron Wind Corp., whose subsidiary, Zond, employs highly skilled American factory workers at their factory in California.

The wind farms pay about $2000 rent, per turbine per year, to 115 land owners.

The Spirit Lake school district plays up the educational value of their turbine. The aerospace and electrical engineers and meteorologists could all play with turbines.

You could pay meteorology students to do site studies. I’d personally rather get paid to drive around checking anemometers than scrub plates at food disservice.

Wind turbines are also much more aesthetically pleasing than a coal burning plant. I think it would be cool to have one on campus.

A Zond 750 kW sits on a 208 foot tower with a 40-foot by 40-foot concrete base and has 79-foot long blades, which turn at 18 to 34 revolutions per minute.

Zond has made several technological advances. The turbines are designed to last at least 30 years, able to withstand 100 mph winds as a once a year event, and 131 mph winds as a once in a 50 year event.

They produce power at a constant frequency despite the variable speed of the turbine, and change the pitch of the blade at different wind speeds to reduce torque on the drive train.

These advances should be proof to doubters in Congress that a dedicated effort to alternative power leads to technological advances and greater feasibility.

Wind power is no longer a hippie pipe dream, but a technological reality. Iowa State should jump on the wind power bandwagon as soon as possible.

While turbines can be expensive, they pay for themselves in the long run financially, aesthetically, environmentally and educationally.

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Erik Hoversten is a senior in math from Eagan, Minn