It’s summer, and I’m looking forward to storms. I’m a storm spotter for Metro Skywarn, the “eyes in the skies” for the National Weather Service. You may remember the severe wind storms of June 21-23, 2013. Trees were down all over the metro and up to 600,000 Xcel Energy customers were without power at any one given time. With those storms came strong, damaging winds. And in that wind is energy.

The hills of southwest Minnesota are home to dozens of wind energy farms. On a recent flight to Denver, I saw miles upon miles of wind farms in the flight over the foothills. It is one of the easiest forms of energy to generate, and wind-powered anythings are found throughout history. One thing I’ve done to reduce my carbon footprint is to sign up for the Windsource program from Xcel Energy at <http://responsiblebynature.com/choices/windsource>. For just a few extra dollars a month, my bill resources are directed towards renewable wind energy sources.

For my Web hosting business, I use a Web host that uses 130% wind energy to power its server farm. How? They purchase extra renewable energy credits, on top of their monthly usage, to be able to claim this remarkable milestone. Server farms generate a lot of heat, require extensive cooling, and server energy consumption needs to be considered in the long term. When you think of the current 1 billion Facebook users and the billions of daily Google searches, consider that one search uses more computing power than all four of the space shuttle computers combined in launch. Don’t blow your chance to put your money into wind energy.