If you read this space regularly, you know the case for wind power: Companies are for it and the technology is already at a point where turbines just need to be installed for us to harvest energy from them. But a pair of Wall Street Journal articles that popped up this week make the case that the industry might have more troubles than just finding places to erect the turbines.

The first talks about the noise these turbines produce:

Complaints about sleep disruption—as well as the deleterious health effects caused by the pulsing, low-frequency noise emitted by the giant turbines—are a central element of an emerging citizen backlash against the booming global wind industry.

The article goes on to describe how groups of people are being kept up by the turbine noise and there are already lawsuits filed in a bevy of states against wind-energy companies. These turbines are being built in rural areas, but it makes you wonder if they might be better off being erected in uber-urban areas. While this seems like a crazy idea, if there is a constant noise, it would likely just blend in to the rest of the constant noises in the city. For example the pin dropped in a rural area is more likely to be heard from someone 100 yards away than the pin dropped in an urban area will be heard from someone 10 yards away. I’m unsure if the power generated would constitute as much as it currently does, but if you’ve ever visited Chicago or Boston you know there is a generous amount of wind there.

The second article details the war wind energy is having with natural gas companies in Texas - once seemingly friendly companies, they’re now fighting for a share of the energy company.

The Texas wind figure is expected to double by 2013 as more transmission lines are built. In the past three years, wind has come to provide 6% of the Lone Star State’s power, up from 2%. Gas’s share has dropped to 42% from 46%.

This is hardly surprising, but it means the time of treating wind energy like the crazy uncle nobody pays attention to is over. And perhaps that’s a good thing. Renewable energy is no longer a niche product - we’ll be better off because of it.