If you still think alternative energy development is pseudo-science, or the toy of a few idealistic environmentalist, think again.

Wind-farm produced alternative energy electricity capacity has, since 1995, increased at a rate of thirty percent per year.

Oil production, in the same period, has grown two percent annually, as have natural gas and nuclear power production. Coal production has increased a whopping one percent.

Why the sudden wind rush? There are several reasons.

Wind, as an alternative energy source, is not merely renewable; it is inexhaustible. Available everywhere, it is inexpensive, non-polluting, and is a part of the climate, not a threat to it. It is, quite simply, as close to a perfect alternative energy solution as we are going to find.

And for fifteen years, since the Department of Energy took its first serious look at wind as an alternative energy resource, the U.S. government has known that the harnessable wind power available in just three of the fifty states—Kansas, Texas, and North Dakota–would be sufficient to meet all of the United Sates’ electricity demands.

And that was in 1991. Since then, wind turbine efficiency has advanced so that turbines can harness winds of much lower speeds, opening more areas of the country for use as alternative energy wind farm sites. Turbines are now capable of capturing enough energy from the wind to possibly supply not just national electricity, but national energy, demands.

If the U.S. ever developed enough cheap wind-based electricity, it could use some of that electricity to electrolyze water, and create another alternative energy, hydrogen. The hydrogen would both store, and transport, the wind energy.

The stored hydrogen could, in the place of natural gas, fuel electrical generators.

Once the initial cost of constructing wind farms is recouped, the only continuing cost of producing wind-based alternative energy is turbine maintenance. Like the air, the wind is free. And as natural gas prices continue to rise, we may begin to see gas-burning facilities reduced to backing up wind farms.

That would, indeed, be a shift in the wind.