There’s a new term for attempting to own the wind: ventography

Wind ownership is up for grabs.

As an unpaid intern at an energy company in England, Emilia Groupp spent two years creating wind maps for renewable energy development. Colleagues told Groupp to ignore wind blowing across British borders, saying things like, “Oh we don’t want French wind,” recalls Groupp, an anthropologist of energy at Stanford University.

Groupp refers to this politicizing of wind for energy development as “ventography” in a study published September 18 in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space.

People tend to have faith in wind as an “elusive force that cannot be bound or owned,” Groupp writes. And yet, she says, nations are following an old blueprint to just do that.

For a few years, laws and policies worldwide have let nations make bigger their territorial claims offshore and belowground to drill for oil and gas. Some nations are now turning to those self same policies to show their gaze skyward. “Oil has shaped … the root of the nation state as going downward, into the subsoil, now not stopping at just the head,” Groupp says. “Now we're going up.”

If wind may okay be owned, it truly is distance ready to even be stolen. Wind theft occurs when one entity, normally a nation, builds a wind farm close to and upwind of an existing wind farm. Those new turbines, especially when built offshore, can slow wind speeds and in the reduction of power generation on the old turbines.

Many countries are now battling for control over wind resources by generating expensive maps that use satellite data to “forensically trace wind currents,” Groupp writes. Greece and Turkey have generated competing wind maps; so too have the many countries surrounding the South China Sea.

Lest anyone think that wind ownership is exclusive, Groupp may well be researching the politicization of solar power. But she has yet to coin a word for owning the sun.