Leaning to the West
There are a million jokes about our hometown city of Buffalo, New York. Most are about the snow or the wind or the cold or the Buffalo Bills. Many are even some unusually cruel combination of all four. If you live near here you can laugh. If not, then don't you dare, daddy-o. Most of these stereotypes about our city are untrue, or at least grossly exaggerated. For example, the average temperature is as warm or even warmer in Buffalo as it is in most other cities at that latitudinal line.
One of these joke strikes a bit truer than others. It goes like this:
Q: How can you tell if someone is from Buffalo?
A: They always walk with a lean to the west.
What this joke lacks in humor it makes up for in sincerity. There is a constant strong wind heading from west to east off of lake Erie, averaging nearly 12 mph all year. To this point the only thing this wind has produced is frostbitten ears and frozen moustaches. Not anymore.
Green Gold Development Corporation's Wind Action Group is turning the brownfield left when Bethlehem Steel left town in 1983 into a new source of energy for the region. New parts are beginning to show up for a string of new wind turbines. How much power will the new turbines produce? According to the Buffalo News the turbines could:
supply more than a quarter of Buffalo’s electric power needs from this clean, local, renewable energy source. The price of wind power is competitive now, and it could become the “new Niagara Falls” as other power sources skyrocket.
Clean energy isn't the only good to come out of the project. Buffalo also plans to open a plant to make the turbine parts for distribution around the country. It could be a perfect model of how conservation can be used to create jobs and a clean environment. And we can blow those “Buffalo– jokes back in peoples' faces. Who's laughing now?
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