The Economist reports that Norwegian and Dutch companies are pursuing new designs for floating deep-sea wind turbines that potentially can produce multiples of the amount of electricity possible with turbines that must be firmly anchored into the sea-bed. Farther out to sea, winds blow at least twice as fast as they do closer to shore. The increase in electricity production with increased wind speeds is not linear. Twice the wind speed can equate to five times the power production. Additionally, it would be possible to locate wind farms out of sight from land, overcoming one of the primary complaints of scenery-loving coast dwellers.

Once again, European companies are taking the lead in research and development for clean energy while American political-industrial fossil fuels cartels seek to maintain the unnecessarily destructive processes and infrastructures they believe will enable them to stay in control. The grim irony is that by truly taking the lead in clean energy R&D, America could ensure its long-term industrial and economic leadership, and increase its national security, while reclaiming the moral heights it aspires to reach. The Rocky Mountain Institute’s Amory Lovins has made a successful career out of showing corporations (including WalMart and Texas Instruments) that green operations directly and often dramatically improve the business bottom line. RMI has consistently advocated that recognized business practices, properly applied, favor strategies that simultaneously protect the environment and make excellent profit-making sense. For example, natural alternate energy sources — such as wind, solar, and tides — have been criticized as too variable for us to depend on, but by linking these source from multiple regions into grids the variability is greatly reduced so that the overall variability becomes acceptably low. This is the same portfolio management approach to variability management that Capitalists universally endorse and that objective analysis validates.

To hear Lovins talk about his pro-business, pro-environment ideas, view his recent presentation at TED Talks.