U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm visits New Orleans today to tour the G.E. wind turbine blade test center at Michoud.
Wind energy has grown from a non-factor about 20 years ago into a reasonable player in U.S. energy production, says LSU professor Greg Upton.
"The United States had essentially zero wind energy that was being sold into utility scale operations," said Upton. "And today that's about 9.2 percent."
Upton says having that grow in our region will take more technological advancements.
"Here in the Gulf Coast we have a lot less wind potential, and so therefore we have not seen a lot of development thus far, but as technology improves, there's definitely a possibility for that in the future," he said.
Upton says the near future for alternative energy in Louisiana will likely be more investment in solar.
"So we have several hundred utility scale solar projects that are currently in the planning phase," said Upton, exploding the advantage for those projects is that they can be placed in the immediate vicinity of the consumers, as opposed to wind, which really needs to be offshore to get the best breezes -- but that power has to be sent back to shore over miles of transmission lines before it can be fed into the grid.