popular press article

Seeing as how I want to further develop my topic for the popular press article, "The Idea" has some very useful information for me.

It's first suggestion is to ask what/who interests you and what creates emotion. For me, I'm interested in wind energy. Being able to harness the power of the wind seems like an almost magical idea that gets me excited enough to want to learn about the science behind it. This interest in wind energy is also coupled with fears about the future. Personally, I am not so worried about global warming as I do not think any reductions we make to greenhouse gases will have any effect on the earth's temperature for at least 100 years. Instead, what worries me is the rising price of oil and our continued dependence on it. The supply of oil can no longer keep up with the growth of the human population and I believe the price increases we see today may only be the beginning of more dire circumstances. To that end, I believe its vital to vigorously pursue any energy source that can reduce our dependence on oil.

After examining what I have just written, I've learned that it would benefit me to include information about America's reliance on oil in my article.

I was hoping to interview Dr. Bruce White at UC Davis who is part of the California Wind Energy Collaborative. I read one of his research papers about siting wind turbines using data from wind tunnels which interested me because I would be interested in having that as a job someday. I'm worried that siting wind turbines using wind tunnels may not be a very good subject for my article though as I do not think that others will find it significantly interesting. I think a better topic may in fact be the future of wind energy in California as it is relevant to many people and contains more interesting pieces of knowledge to impart. For example, in the future, wind turbines will have rotors with diameters greater than 100 meters and wind farms may exist in the ocean near our shores.

Again following the advice from "The Idea", I'll try to answer the basic questions a story should contain for the topic of The Future of Wind Energy in California.

Who: Californians?
What: New wind turbines
When: The next 10 years
Where: California
Why: Reduce oil dependence.
How: Build wind farms