As Australia welcomes its first female Prime Minister, an ambitiously comprehensive new plan that sees the country generating 100% of its energy needs from wind, solar and other renewables in 10 years time has sparked a national debate after being released earlier this week.

“The world stands on the precipice of significant change,” notes the Zero Carbon Australia Stationary Energy Plan. “Climate scientists predict severe impacts from even the lowest estimates of global warming. The search for dwindling oil reserves is having dramatic social and environmental impacts. A rational response to the problem demands a rapid shift to a zero fossil fuel, zero-emissions future.”

The plan, published by an independent non-profit organisation, says that Australia’s future energy needs can be reliably met by combining energy efficiencies with a massive expansion of wind power and a shift to Concentrating Solar Thermal (CST) with molten salt storage. The two power-generating technologies would be backed up by biomass and existing hydro. The plan predicted that grid electricity demand in Australia will be 40% higher in 2020 than today.

An investment of about $37 billion a year to implement the plan over the next decade would be equivalent to 3% of GDP. About $72 billion would be invested in wind power, while $190 billion would be earmarked for CST.

Wind would supply 40% of the increased electricity demand with 50,000 MW of installed wind turbine capacity, while CST would make up 60%. Approximately 8,000 6MW turbines would be required. The new power plants would be located at different sites around the nation. There would be 23 sites for wind and 12 sites for CST.

A national grid would also be created at a cost of $92 billion, the plan says, adding 80,000 construction jobs and more than 45,000 permanent jobs would be created.

Saying that Australia’s energy, security and economic needs can be transformed, the plan notes the nation has some of the best renewable energy resources in the world.

“What is required to make this happen is leadership from policymakers and society,  with firm decisions made quickly that will allow this transition to occur.”

You have to think that the wind energy industry has entered a new level of public acceptance when a popular American company which specialises in financial information publishes a story promoting the environmental and economic benefits of the emissions-free sector.

In a story headlined “5 green jobs for saving the planet,” Bankrate, Inc. says becoming a wind power salesperson is increasingly appealing to many people, especially considering that the Internal Revenue Service provides tax credits for up to 30% of renewable energy systems.

“Most people want to go green. But if you are going green and saving money at the same time, it’s a really good incentive,” says Loree Long in the story by Bankrate, which describes itself as the Web’s leading aggregator of financial rate information. According to the story, Long, co-owner of wind-turbine sales company Win-Gen Power in Weatherford, Texas, says she and husband Ted, who have installed a wind turbine on their own property, sell an average of one system per month.

The other green jobs identified as helping to save the planet include being a green teacher, a green civil and/or mechanical engineer, a home energy auditor, and a weatherization expert.

“At a time when many career paths seem to be losing ground, green jobs seem to be on the upswing,” the story notes, adding a study released last year by the U.S. Green Building Council estimates that environmentally-friendly construction projects will add 7.9 million green jobs and $554 billion to the American economy by 2012.

Long’s story is yet again more proof that the global wind power industry is reaching new levels of popularity because it can simultaneously provide increasing amounts of green electricity for a growing world, provide tens of thousands of well-paying new jobs and help mitigate environmental damage caused by burning fossil fuels.

Taken together, wind power is indeed helping to save the planet.

The cluster of nations in the Caribbean region has big visions when it comes to wind power and other renewable energies, but they need support from nations that have already forged ahead in the sector.

Carlisle Powell, the Natural Resources and Public Utilities Minister in the Nevis Island Administration, was recently quoted as lamenting the lack of advances in wind power in the Caribbean.

“We have been talking a good talk about wind energy for the last 20 years and only Jamaica and Nevis have made any real advances. Yet wind is widely used in Europe and Latin America,” he said.

Powell called for urgent and continued support from countries that have become world leaders in wind energy, in the form of help with wind studies, power purchase agreements, contracts, data evaluation, legislation and tariffs.

Cuba, the largest nation in the Caribbean, is developing its fledgling wind power sector. Recent reports say that four of six Goldwind turbines have now been connected at the Gibara II wind farm in Cuba’s Holguin province, about 565 kilometres east of Havana.

A Communist state with about 11.5 million people, Cuba is looking to capitalise on the potential of wind energy to produce more than 2000 MW to offset the import of 2,220 tonnes of petroleum into the country, articles published by the Xinhua News Agency and Reve say, adding that the current installed capacity is just 7.2 MW.

Despite the potential in the Caribbean region, the annual hurricane season poses considerable problems for the wind farm industry, which can experience infrastructure damages during brutal storms.

Described as the most often used search engine on the Web, Google is constantly inventing new tricks for the way human beings work, play, research, communicate and learn while making a staggering amount of money for its parent company, Google Inc.

As befitting a company whose unofficial credo is “Don’t be evil,” it came as no surprise to learn that Google has just embraced emissions-free wind energy to further the company’s needs and help save the planet at the same time.

In a Google blog posting earlier this week that was headlined “Not merely tilting at windmills — investing in them too,” the company announced its first direct investment in a utility-scale renewable energy project consisting of two wind farms that generate 169.5 megawatts of power, enough to provide electricity to more than 55,000 homes.

Rick Needham said the North Dakota wind farms that were developed by NextEra Energy Resources will reduce the use of fossil fuels by harnessing the power of wind and delivering clean energy to the region.

“Through this $38.8-million investment, we’re aiming to accelerate the deployment of renewable energy — in a way that makes good business sense, too,” Needham said, adding a clean energy future requires effective policy, innovative technology and smart capital.

Investing in wind power, as Google has just learned, is definitely the opposite of evil and an innovative pathway to a healthier future.

This month’s online Comment Visions forum centres exclusively on wind power, asking: to what extent should we encourage the growth of wind energy in our future energy mix? And the response is positive: from around the world, respondents are singing the benefits of wind power.

Kenneth Reed, founder of Natural Alternative Fuels inc, says that the wind, when harnessed is, “a natural tool that provides man with a clean solution to the problem of declining natural resources, competition (war) over existing resources, addiction to foreign oil, pollution of air and water, cancer and asthma causing emissions and global warming.”

Reed’s comments are echoed by David Hurwitt, Vice President of Optiwind, who says that wind is an, “endless resource that arrives for free and leaves no waste in its wake.”

EWEA’s COO Bruce Douglas points out that wind power is already part of the answer to the multiple climate, energy and employment crises in Europe. Wind is, “already expanding significantly and this growth must be encouraged until we reach 100% renewables in Europe. By seizing this opportunity now Europe will set an example for the rest of the world,” he says.

Backing Douglas, Michail Georgiev, manager at Energoconsult ltd, notes that, “wind is the only renewable source that has the technical and economical potential to reach between 40 and 50% from total energy production in the medium term.”

The President of the African Wind Energy Association, Hermann Oelsner, outlines wind power’s potential development advantages, “wind energy is particularly advantageous for the African continent because the philosophy behind the technology is in cohesion with the overall social and economic development strategies of most African nations.”