JENNY HAGER, NATIONAL RENEWABLE ENERGY LABORATORY
Ten years ago, one of the nation’s largest electric companies received an unexpected Christmas present from Mother Nature. On Christmas Eve, wind speeds became so powerful that the company’s wind turbines generated electricity equivalent to that from an average nuclear plant. The turbines were spinning out so much power that the company — Minneapolis-based Xcel Energy — could not use it all. It shifted the excess electricity to another region.
Since then, Xcel has become one of the nation’s most aggressive producers of wind energy, a source of pollution-free power for its 3.3 million electric customers.
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