Are the answers to our energy problems blowin' in the wind? Tom Wind (yes that's his real name) evaluates the resource.

Transcript: Iowa's Wind Resources

Iowa's fortunate that it has very good wind resources. And it has the 10th best wind resources in the U.S. That amounts to about 550 terawatt hours of energy that could be derived from wind power in one year. Iowa's energy use is about 40 terawatt hours, so you can see there's more potential in the wind to supply all the energy for the state of Iowa by a factor of 10. Now it's not practical to supply all the power in the state of Iowa by wind turbines, because when the wind stops blowing, they quit generating power. But it does make sense to take a certain percentage of your energy needs from the wind. We think that's around 10 percent -- could be derived from wind turbines such as this. Now it wouldn't take many more wind turbines than what we have here to get 10% of our power from the wind in Iowa. We're very fortunate. The windiest state is North Dakota, and they have probably 3 times as much potential as we do here in the state of Iowa.