Steve Sawyer: Wind power is really the main supply side technology that can make a difference in the short term between now and 2020, to reduce emissions in the power sector.
Steve Sawyer is secretary general of the Global Wind Energy Council, a trade association that represents the wind industry at the international level. Use of wind power is on the rise, Sawyer said, as governments all over the world consider how to generate more electricity and emit fewer of the greenhouse gases thought to be warming the planet. Sawyer said wind power production grew by 40 percent in 2009, across the globe.
Steve Sawyer: The biggest trend, I suppose, in the last few years is the dramatic growth in the markets in China and the United States. China has become the fastest growing market in the world by far. It would be the single largest market this year. And the United States just last year took over first place.
For the U.S., Sawyer said, upgrades to the electric grid could help raise wind power’s share from about 2% of total electricity today to 20% or more, by the year 2030.
Steve Sawyer: You could supply the whole country with electricity, no problem, in terms of the raw resource. But we have to actually capture that and get it to the markets. That’s the challenge.
Steve Sawyer elaborated, explaining that the U.S. needs proper wind infrastructure if it really wants to push forward with a wind energy agenda.
Steve Sawyer: I think the biggest constraint on the development of wind power in North America is getting the transmission infrastructure in place, rather than the ability of technology to deliver competitive electricity, because that’s been clearly demonstrated. And certainly, the upper Midwest and Rocky Mountain states have some of the best wind resources in the world. That whole great central area – starting down in west Texas running for 200-300 miles east of the Rockies right up to the Canadian border – is a gold mine in terms of wind.
Sawyer spoke more about wind energy trends in the U.S.
Steve Sawyer: One of my jobs is to make projections for how we expect the industry to go forward in the next one to five years. The most difficult market to predict is the United States, simply because of the nature of the support scheme for wind energy in the United States, which is authorized, and re-authorized by Congress on a year, or maximum of three-year basis. On two occasions in the last ten years that support has been allowed to lapse, and the market collapses for a year. Hopefully the market is now of a size and there are enough large companies involved, and a hundred thousand people employed in the sector, such that it will have its own constituency in Congress, which won’t let that happen again.
China’s wind energy sector, said Sawyer, has grown rapidly in just a few short years.
Steve Sawyer:The single biggest factor is the clear expression of government will and the government’s ability to decide on a policy and implement it without a lot of ‘messy’ democracy in between the decisions of the central planners and what gets implemented in the field. Obviously there are advantages and disadvantages in both forms of government and organization of the economy. I wouldn’t want to advocate one over the other, but the point is that Chinese planners decided, about four or five years ago, that they wanted to make the development of wind power part of their strategic priorities for providing energy security and diversifying their energy supply. And it’s happened very, very quickly.
The hidden costs of wind power (besides sliced birds) include intermittent wind, opposition on aesthetic grounds (noise and visual pollution, mostly objected to by wealthy liberals on Martha’s Vineyard and similar places), and the maintenance…many of these turbines still have poor records in terms of mean hours between major failures, with costly rebuilds of gear boxes and blade mechanisms. Add in the cost of distribution to get the power from, say, empty Wyoming prairie to, say Denver or even Casper, and wind power is economically not ready for prime time…unless you factor in artificial distortion of the economy like Cap and Trade.
Doug
Carbon dioxide is not the enemy, but don’t try telling that to a former Greenpeace CEO…he’s a true believer and Defender of the Faith. If Congress has to force feed money the wind industry either through subsidy or artificially raising the price of every other form of energy, something is seriously wrong with the concept and its application.
Wind power generation is an excellent niche application technology. However, it is not a practical solution to base load power generation needs. The United States doesn’t have enough class 5 land to build sufficient wind power plants to replace even one modern nuclear plant.
To understand the problem one needs only look at the statistics of existing European wind farms that operate at less than 10% output 80% of the time with output dropping to less than 2% of demand at least one day out of the week. It happens that Europe has far more class 5 land than the United States. England has scrapped plans to decommission older coal plants because their wind plants essentially stopped producing power this past winter due to the record breaking cold still air. Had those coal plants been scrapped previously, England would have been in a serious hurt with a high death toll.
Please understand that I’m not opposed to developing these technologies but we need to be realistic in presenting their practical limitations. First, we need to solve the power storage issuesthese technologies present and even overcome the environmental group opposition to covering our natural lands with vast tower farms.
Personally, I think the focus needs to be on deploying wind (and solar) power generation in the numerous small and local applications that are best served by these technologies. Parallel to that we need to focus on improving clean coal, natural gas, geothermal, and especially nuclear power to meet our industrial needs over the next three to five decades. If we aren’t talking about improving and further deployment of these older conventional power technologies and improving power consumption efficiencies then we aren’t being responsible or practical in our planning.
First I am not a wealthy liberal from Martha’s vineyard. I have studied some local wind farm installations of 6 or 8 turbines located on hills in New York State. They are not very obtrusive and spin gracefully in the frequent winds. I did not object. I do not know off hand how much energy each can produce and intend to look this up. But I assume it is a few thousand watts max.
This month we drove accross the country, I-80 through Iowa, Nebraska and then into Colorado. I was suprised to find several clusters of dozens if not > 100 turbines. And you know what. They are ugly. Disrupting the natural beauty of the farmland and hills. Of particular dismay was my view of the Pawnee Buttes on the Pawnee National grassland in Colorado The buttes, previously always sitting proud above the grassland, are now surrounded by turbines (when viewed from the south).
No, for a few thousand watts each. We cannnot destroy the natural landscapes of the world with thousands of these things.
If you will look at the amount of energy produced by the large wind farms and the value of that energy, you will find they cannot apy for themselves at market electricity prices. Whihc means they are subsidized by the taxpayer. And, as mentioned above, the power gotten from them is intermittant at best. Wind power can be used to charge batteries for the homeonwer. It is an horrible idea for the commercial production of electricity. We need to build nukes.
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