As we drove up U.S. Highway 65 one Saturday afternoon, a bevy of spinning white blades appeared on the eastern skyline. An earlier nighttime sighting of red lights on the horizon was confirmed. Another wind farm had popped up out of the ground.

It didn’t seem far away, so we decided to check it out. Tall objects can fool you, and after 10 miles, we turned around. But it’s out there somewhere, northeast of Baxter. If you get to Laurel, you’ve probably gone too far. Unless you were specifically trying to get to Laurel, which is, after all, the gateway to Haverhill.

Iowa has more than 35 wind farms now, and the claim is that they crank out 20 percent of the electricity produced in this state. They’re all over the countryside near Colo; you see them in northern Iowa from Interstate 35; they loom up alongside I-80 in western Iowa. The coolest-looking ones are the two south of U.S. Highway 30 in Nevada; I didn’t know we were importing Klingon products.

But just when Iowa becomes a leader in a cutting-edge industry, the government is thinking about pulling the plug. A production tax credit for the wind industry is slated to expire at the end of 2012, and Congress doesn’t seem to be all that worried about it.

According to an article in the Texas Tribune – Texas is the national leader in wind energy production – the credit gives wind farm owners 2.2 cents for every kilowatt-hour of power they produce for 10 years. “It makes wind power substantially cheaper, but is projected to cost the federal government about $1.3 billion this fiscal year,” the paper said.

We’re all looking for ways to cut government spending, but putting money into wind energy is part of the effort to save on some other, extremely expensive energy endeavors. Like invading oil-producing countries. It costs a couple of million dollars just to provide every soldier with an afternoon snack for the day of the invasion.

Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander was quoted in The Hill as saying: “I’m ready to reduce the subsidies for Big Oil as long as we reduce the subsidies for Big Wind as well.” Aside from the fact that petroleum companies have had a century’s head start on wind farmers, Sen. Alexander seems to disagree that wind energy has its peculiar advantages.

I’m no engineer – still not sure what that cosine stuff was all about – so I can’t compare wind turbine investment and return with petroleum investment and return, but I have noticed one thing: We get our wind for free.

The volume fluctuates, but at least we don’t have to build pipelines, punch holes into the ocean floor, steer supertankers past reefs or burn up our inventory of cruise missiles to keep our import supply secure.

We probably will never have to go to war to protect the unobstructed flow of air molecules into Iowa, unless those jerks in Minnesota build a really big wall.

With government support, it seems to be working. MidAmerican Energy Co. is rushing to install 177 more turbines this year, while the tax credit is still a sure thing. That will give MidAmerican a total of 1,200 units.

Without the tax credit, the wind energy industry claims the nation could lose 37,000 jobs.

I don’t particularly want to see wind turbines everywhere I look, but it does seem logical to take advantage of the natural resources we have.

It also seems logical to keep trying to develop other energy sources, beyond oil and coal, but that can take a while.

The idea of using geosynchronous satellites to collect solar energy and beam it down as microwaves was first described in 1968. Still waiting for microwave helmets to be issued.

But that’s nothing. Benjamin Franklin found a way to pull electricity out of a thunderstorm in 1752.

So, any day now.