Get your facts right in future before commenting in future please.

Wind turbines generate electricity, and batteries are required to store any surplus electricity. To store massive amounts of surplus electricity requires massive banks of batteries, which quickly gets expensive. Because batteries are DC, huge and expensive inverters are required to convert the DC current back into AC current for transmission over the electrical power line infrastructure. Because wind farms are usually constructed far away from where the power is consumed, the electrical power lines must be extended great distances, and this cost is either rolled into the bills consumers pay for electricity, subsidized by government through higher taxes, or both.

Alternative energy is great in theory, but the engineering must be viable, and viable engineering includes an economic component. (As engineers like to say, “You can have it fast, good, or cheap. Pick two.”) Hydroelectric is an excellent clean, renewable resource and generates power as long as the water flows. Geothermal works great in certain areas, but it’s still more expensive than conventional energy (just the installation costs alone can make such projects inviable). PV technology has been around for decades but is still too expensive and unreliable, and only works when the sun shines (as long as the panels are free of dust & debris, snow, leaves, bird droppings, etc).

We should certainly investigate alternative energy resources, but meanwhile here in the USA we need to build more nuclear power plants, more coal power plants, and more gas & oil refineries and power plants. The engineering for all of these conventional fuels is solid, they can be used safely and cleanly, and nothing packs the energy, portability or flexibility of hydrocarbon based fuels.

America needs energy, and we’ve known for decades that we must become energy independent; the DoE was established for this very purpose, but 33 years later it has failed to even address that objective! It’s well past time to dissolve that inept and bloated gov’t agency.

Alternative energy such as wind and solar cannot come close to replacing conventional energy sources, they cannot provide baseline power, nor are they economically viable, they can only appear to be with government subsidies, which creates an unsustainable false economy. Bio-fuel (ethanol) requires more energy to produce than it can provide, and alchemy lesson even California has learned! Creating new taxes and penalties for energy consumption is no solution unless the intent is to further cripple our economy. Politicians who fail to recognize these things must be retired at the first opportunity, so too, must the DoE (both of’em).

Do a search on Wind Turbines on YouTube.com You’ll never want one near you house. There’s a terrific video of one failing in high winds – the brakes are supposed to stop them over a certain wind level, but these failed and the turbine failed spectacularly. Then there are the videos of ice build-up on the blades. Note: the turbines are not supposed to operate with ice on the wings, they are supposed to shut down automatically.

Also, wind power is not safer than conventional sources of energy:
http://blog.heritage.org/2010/06/26/wind-power-is-more-dangerous-than-coal-or-oil/#comment-126732

BTW, Germany subsidizes solar more than any other country.

It’s the perfect country for plugin electric cars and they know it.

So now we have established that you need not read the German press.

The EFOY fuel concept is excellent.
Even Bloom energy has a fuel cell that runs on Methane.

I think fuel cells will also start playing an important role in the EV world.

There is a plenty of natural gas coming to the market from Shale Gas, Qatar, Russia, other bio-sources, landfill and animal waste etc.