I wondered over the weekend how to craft a story about our newest neighbor—that blowhard Irene—while injecting some environmental message. With that storm in mind, what lesson did we take home, now that we know we still have homes?

I asked around. One noted the severe financial loss in the region from shuttered businesses and hunkered-down homeowners—true, but lacking in green value. Another took aim at the connection between global warming and intensifying natural disasters. I'll leave it to the scientists to wade into those waters. And various friends on Facebook seem to have caught on that squirrels took the brunt of the wind's energy.

Hmm. Wind energy, you say?

In fact, there's already an undercurrent of activity involving wind farms off the coast of New Jersey. With Secretary of Energy Steven Chu's announcement this February of a national goal to reach 10 GW of offshore wind production by 2020, a new era in renewable energy was launched. Grand plans include the Atlantic Wind Connection—a $5 billion electrical infrastructure bringing the power generated off the East Coast back onto land. Its establishment will facilitate scores of wind farms that can bring tens of thousands of jobs and billions worth of economic activity.

One such wind farm is being proposed by a group of NJ-based commercial fishermen. Their company, Fishermen's Energy, just may build the country's first offshore wind turbines—eight of them that will run from Atlantic City to Avalon. Sited 2.8 miles from shore in order to stay in state waters (and avoid the scrutiny of federal approval), they'll produce 24 MW of electricity and serve rural South Jersey customers.

With permitting in its latter stages, completion of the $250 million to $300 million project could be as soon as September 2012.

Twenty-four megawatts isn't much. Of course, the Atlantic City project is considered "demo-scale", and serves as a proving ground for a 350 MW project, 12 miles off the shore, that by 2015 would power more than 200,000 homes.

All that clean energy sounds great. But would it stand up to the next Irene? The answer: it should.

The kinds of turbines that are installed in offshore settings are designed to withstand Category 5 hurricanes. With the vast majority of wind production installed only in the past few years and given the rarity of strong hurricanes, there's not a lot of empirical data to point to.

The technical specs show they'd hold up—the broad-side of the blades flip back, reducing lift and the potential for damage. This means electricity production is halted, but resumes once the worst of the winds have ceased.

Harnessing the power of the wind isn't just for 250 foot high mega-turbines. Homeowners can install roof- or ground-mounted turbines that produce between 1 KW and 5 KW (one kilowatt being a thousandth of a megawatt). Such installations start in the $2,000 range, but get ready for some red tape.

Peter Clifford, Moorestown's zoning officer, said that no one had yet approached the township inquiring about such an install. And since it's not found in the town code as a permitted use, that slides it into the category of prohibited uses. This would require a variance.

Of course, those small-scale wind turbines wouldn't have been much good this past weekend. Most major manufacturers of the 40- to 80-foot-high units recommended they be taken down prior to the storm. So as far as municipal acceptance and hurricane-proofing goes, these power-producers aren't ready for prime-time.

But as with most other sources of renewable energy, the tide is turning fast. The graph of installed production for both solar and wind is not a steady incline, but a sharp one. And unlike with fossil fuels, efficiency breakthroughs are happening frequently.

Most estimates hold that three million people lost power in the storms. While a solar or wind system wouldn't have kept you up and running this time around, the trend towards distributed power production (as opposed to centralized nuclear, coal and natural gas) means less stress on our already overtaxed electrical grid.

While Irene fell short of her expectations, there's no assurance the next one won't deal us a mightier blow. Keeping steady pressure on all levels of government to steer away from dirty fuels and toward clean ones is our best method of protection.

As for our suddenly soaring squirrel friends, we can only hope.