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Twenty Percent Wind by 2030: Not If, but When
This week the Department of Energy released a study showing how wind energy can supply 20 percent of our nation's electricity by 2030, defying the oft-heard defeatist argument that "renewable energy only provides a percent of our country's energy supply, therefore it can't solve our energy problems as demand grows."
Such anti-renewable condescension picks winners and losers in brave defiance of facts, such as the fact that wind supplies 20 percent of Denmark's electricity and about 6 percent for Spain, Germany and Ireland, and that last year, installed U.S. wind power surged 45 percent.
The success of big wind power is a well-kept secret outside of Europe and Texas. The well-researched promise of 20 percent by 2030 drew scoffs of disbelief from a nuclear expert assisting China's Vice Minister of Science and Technology, when told about it by National Renewable Energy Laboratory's chief engineer for wind technology. With such widespread misinformation in mind, DOE joined with industry to set the record straight.
The performance of wind power to produce affordable energy is more than proven and the manufacturing sector is growing here. Our nation currently demands about 800 gigawatts of electricity; we possess ten times that much in the wind blowing over our land. To reach 20 percent wind generation, we can design sites from an embarrassment of riches. However, installing wind plants at a clip of 16 gigawatts per year until 2030, with transmission lines, would require the tenacity of a thousand Hillary Clintons (with better planning skills) to engage the myriad levels of permitting and financing.
Renewable portfolio standards would help, and so would tax credits or carbon costs; in the meantime fuel savings brought by wind power are already helping the deployment of big wind.
When considering 243 gigawatts of wind power for land-based installation, a vocal objection arises. Letters in the Camera have protested the land use of such installations; one has gone so far as to extol coal mining. These advocates for land -- where were they when mountaintop removal mining got going in Appalachia?
Some perspective, please. The strip mining of coal permanently alters hundreds of square miles of land each year. In Appalachia, home to our nation's most biodiverse forests with countless animals and birds, 300 square miles have been denuded and flattened for its coal, leading to catastrophic flooding and breakouts of toxic coal slurry. In ten years, another 600 square miles of this virgin land shall go.
Today's coal mining is not land use -- it's land consumption. By contrast, wind energy adds economic utility to land without consuming it. The 20 percent scheme would encompass about 20,000 square miles of land but use only 5 percent for installation. The land would remain habitable for farming, ranching and open space, enriching landholders but not emitting mercury to taint our food, or particulates which cause asthma or heart disease, or carbon to heat the globe. The turbines would need no water or fuel, and contribute not even 1 percent of bird deaths caused by all human impacts. It would cost more than conventional fossil fuel installation by only 2 percent.
Wind power with transmission is a durable investment, and this scheme could reduce our need of natural gas by 11 percent and coal by 18 percent. It's like the choice between buying a good painting or splurging on floral bouquets each week for years -- which is the better value to hand on to your kids?
Like sunflowers, prairie grouse and sun-cracked skin, the western United States is made for wind energy. Oilman T. Boone Pickens fell in love with the scheme of big wind while quail hunting on his windy prairie and is now putting up his ante of 4 gigawatts on his own little corner of Texas.
The pdf report, 20% Wind Energy by 2030, can be downloaded here.
--Anne B. Butterfield
© 2008 The E.W. Scripps Co.
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21 Comments so far
Show All"Renewable energy projects meet opposition from environmentalists" -- Press-Enterprise (Riverside, CA), June 2, 2008
http://www.wind-watch.org/news/?p=13916
"They say the projects mean new transmission lines and towers across some of the very mountains and desert vistas people have fought to protect."
"Texas wind farms choked off from grid due to insufficient power lines" -- The Independent, June 3, 2008
http://www.wind-watch.org/news/?p=13905
"Thousands of wind turbines in the US are sitting idle or failing to meet their full generating capacity because of a shortage of power lines able to transmit their electricity to the rest of the grid."
Wind, solar and hot-rock geothermal should be expanded and pursued agressively. We can have abundant, robust, and dirt cheap grid supplied electricity. We want the dirt cheap because with that any economic advantage of gasoline is completely obliterated.
Also we need to open up our natural gas resevers (highest hydrogen per carbon fuel we have) in order to make LPG which would cut out all foreign diesel and provide a bridge to the hydrogen transportation economy as well. We should bottle up our cleanest of hydrocarbon fuels when it will make us cleaner and independent from foreign fuel constraints.
There are profits to be made on the moral high ground. No need to start a war, unless, in the confusion of war, you plan to steal everything that is not nailed down.
Will the wealthiest .01% ever have enough? If you are in a state of perpetual want you will always be poor. I would pity the super rich if their constant grasping did not create such extreme poverty.
Prairie grouse are seriously threatened by sprawling wind energy facilities and their accompanying transmission and road infrastructure. T. Boone Pickens is planning to spare his own land and put his turbines up on the property of others.
One thing missing in the statistics of wind energy's construction is any evidence of actual benefit. Where are the figures of decreased growth in coal or any other fuel?
Producing electricity is one thing. Producing useful energy that can actually reduce the use of other fuels is quite another. Vehemently denying wind's own negative impacts doesn't remedy that shortcoming.
This article sounds like John McCain on Iraq.
Small-scale, distributed, decentralized renewables should be the mainstay, with large-scale, centralized renewables as a backup. This is far more efficient, equitable and resilient to disturbances. This will only happen from the grassroots, since the .01% wield little power in that ideal situation and thus have an incentive to lobby for centralized power production. The high cost of renewables is a manufactured falsehood. Contact your local solar/wind/microhydro installer and have them explain ways of financing these systems that work for you. Once you look at the overall financial impact, you'll realize that you can't afford not to install a renewable energy system.
As for hydrogen, why use an energy storage system that is far less efficient than existing battery technology and requires a massive new processing and distribution infrastructure? Battery electric vehicles exist TODAY and are extremely efficient. The "hydrogen economy" is touted for the sole purpose of lulling people to sleep, convinced that "they" will solve our energy problems because the technology is "just around the corner." That way, business as usual can go on for as long as possible.
"Prairie grouse are seriously threatened by sprawling wind energy facilities and their accompanying transmission and road infrastructure."
Piles of dead birds around the base of windmills is just a distraction. It doesn't happen. The blades move relatively slowly anyway and are clearly visible. Other than for infrequent access, why would there need to be any road infrastructure? Transmission infrastructure? How are they going to get the electricity out? -- truck it? How many birds are killed by other road traffic that is far more of a threat? (And if they happened to find oil there, how much consideration would the prairie grouse get then?)
Spiraling down:
Catastrophic loss of Arctic ice in Sept '07. Last week Polar Bear listed as "threatened". New paper by James Hansen and team states, "If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted…CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm". (It had been previously thought that 550 ppm would be safe and that is the target the European Union already has in place--US has no target.)
The rate of rise in CO2 has now jumped to 2.1 ppm, and on top of that, China is putting in a new coal fired power plant every week, India has introduced a new $2,500 car to its aspiring 1.1 billion citizens, and the US continues increasing its emissions.
The time is up. Make radical change now or watch chaos rapidly grow and over take civilization.
Wind power has some drawbacks. Wind is fickle, first off. In fact, it's hard to think of the word capricious without thinking immediately of wind. Maybe we have Robert Frost to thank for that.
Anyway, the capriciousness of wind means you would have to rely on wind farms dispersed across regions of the US for reliability.
But, now you have parochial grid constraints.
Every time you pass a node, there's a toll. Then, grids are not connected. What if the Gulf Coast is roaring, but everything else is dead calm? The ERCOT grid is isolated.
Would be very hard to break down the legal and infrastructure barriers to wheel power all around the grid as the wind blows, so to speak.
I think it's going to take a combination of wind, solar, geothermal, hydroelectric, and some residual fuel based stuff.
The pumps that use renewables to pipe water up an incline for manmade hydroelectric power during peak times are a really cool way to parse the time of supply from the time of need.
Maybe each wind farm could have such hydro pumps to time when the energy is transferred to the grid.
Why stop at 20%? You might be able to get 30 if you try...
mirf59 May 19th, 2008 5:31 pm
Anyway, the capriciousness of wind means you would have to rely on wind farms dispersed across regions of the US for reliability.
It appears to me that is exactly what is taking place. Wind farms are going up everywhere across the country. In the area of the country I live in you see the blades going across the state in every direction. Wind may be fickle in some areas more than others but where I live it's hard to remember the last day the wind didn't blow.
I do believe it's time we redesigned and rebuilt the transmission grid across the country. That in and of itself would be a huge energy savings.
Wind is very attractive and on it's way. It does have drawbacks and the way it's being planned has the same flaws that have screwed US up before. CJM, those blades appear to be going slowly, but at 150' long, while the center is going slow, the tips are moving very near the speed of sound. And the best sites for wind energy also, often are migration flightways, the bird problem is real but not insoluable. There are new designs for wind turbines that are bird-safe, it may take a while to develope the efficiency that the big fan-blade systems have.
The planning problem is gigantism. By concentrating power generation at a massive facility, far away from the end users, huge transmission lines have to run the distance. Electricity is not like water, where all the water going in one end of a pipe comes out the other end, wires radiate energy and lose a portion of their load by the foot, it's called line loss and there are formulas for computing the loss based on the type of conductor and distance traveled.
greensolutions has it right, small generators, decentralized alt power, made right near the user (maybe by the user), has a lot of advantages; Stability of the grid (when one big plant goes offline, the whole system groans, when a couple small generators shut down, no one but the direct user notices), less line loss, no huge denuded stripes of transmission lines (they spray defoliants on the powerlines to prevent brush and trees from growing) and if enough small generators come on line, there's no need to build any more Nukes. In fact, if enough independent producers upload their excess capacity to the grid, we can take a share of control of the system!
One of the turbine designs that is out there is a beautiful spiral shape that takes wind from any angle including updrafts. They are already in use on bouys in the North Sea and on sailboats (replacing the fuel engine generator). These could be put on the roofs of buildings in cities, right where it will be used.
Hey Landlord, turn the roof of your building into a profit center.
The current model of massive interconnected redundant arrays of giant turbines in remote areas (where only animals and a few country folk are adversely affected) is a dead end.
Besides the extra expense and impact of redundant facilities (with the hope that if the wind isn't blowing sufficiently in one place, it will be in another), storage, such as pumped hydro, further increases the cost-benefit balance by adding another layer of loss (it takes more energy to pump the water uphill than is generated when it flows down again).
Denmark hasn't added new wind capacity in 5 years.
I think there is too much fuss over the need for building a transmission grid for wind power. Actually, I believe the electricity generated from the wind can feed right in to existing transmission lines and thus become part what's in the grid. What's produced is metered so the wind farm owner can be paid accordingly.
Remember, the whole country has been electrified. The transmission lines already exist and are interconnected. Almost all of them are pretty deep underground now except where they go across long expansions of land where there are no users where the cost of going underground cannot be justified.
Oh, and birds are pretty smart. They learn fast about where it is safe to fly. I think they communicate with each other too.
When you raise children there is no one big grandiose thing you can do to insure their development. There is no foolproof recipe. It is a process of noticing and learning along the way and doing lots of little things over years of time. You cannot put off taking care of them until you have all of the right answers. You just have to start somewhere and do your best.
Clean energy is also something that has to be developed with patience and care, but starting NOW. Every little windmill is part of the solution. As greensolutions says "Small-scale, distributed, decentralized renewables should be the mainstay, with large-scale, centralized renewables as a backup." That sounds right, but we have no guarantees until we start doing it and seeing if the idea needs modification.
Developing clean energy seems to me such an obvious social imperative. But our current government is a negative force that is intent on solving energy problems through imperial conquest and wanton violence, while allowing oil owners to profiteer to the hilt as oil gradually disappears.
Even a pretty good, if imperfect, approach to wind energy is far superior to the current war based energy policies which are catastrophic financially, inhumane to people, and ruinous to the earth.
(And I agree too with AuntEm. We already have the transmission infrastructure. Also, birds have learned how to open shopping mall doors to spend the evening inside. They are clever. We can give them an assist with some better visual cues on the windmills. Ask someone who studies bird thought and perception for ideas)
Renewables are cheaper!
Large-scale Concentrating Solar Power is coming in at 12-14 cents/kWh -- AZ Public Service Company, not exactly a progressive company, is building a 280 MW plant with molten salt thermal storage outside Gila Bend. NREL says that CSP will come down to 7 cents/kWh by 2015, per studies by Sargent & Lundy and Black & Veatch.
Wind is clearly the cheapest of ALL types of generation. Xcel Energy in Colorado fought wind tooth and nail -- spending millions to defeat a ballot initiative -- but is now crowing about having the most wind customers in the U.S. (Never mind that it's less than 50,000; out of a total customer base of 2-3 million...)
Distributed power is another part of the key, but until renewables provide large scale baseload, the utilities will continue to fight it. And they have a LOT of power (no pun intended). Citizens are going to have to demand distributed generation (DG), bc the utilities sure aren't going to want you to stop sending them a check every month, just like Exxon and Conoco have no interest in electric cars....
Thanks Anne, for your energy articles. Keep 'em coming!
On May 19th, 2008 12:34 pm severus1000 wrote:
>>...Also we need to open up our natural gas resevers (highest hydrogen per carbon fuel we have) in order to make LPG which would cut out all foreign diesel and provide a bridge to the hydrogen transportation economy as well.<<
Severus1000. Good points on renewables! But watch out for Hydrogen. It's the toughest fuel alternative fuel source we've had to contend with. It's an energy carrier and not an energy source. Almost all hydrogen on earth is tightly bound into hydrocarbon chains or water molecules. Joseph Romm has written extensively on this subject in his book, "The Hype about Hydrogen," and it's a good read. Anyway here are his 5 miracles you need to have a hydrogen based economy.
1) The cars are $1,000.000.00. That price has to come down.
2) No known material to man can contain enough fuel onboard the car to give the driving distance people can drive now even if you pressurize tanks up to 10,000 lbs/sq. in.
3) The fuel is expensive. If you think $4.00 / gal. gas is expensive try hydrogen fuel. Hydrogen fuel would cost 4 X as much as gasoline. Almost all hydrogen today comes from steam reformed natural gas which would use 1.5 X as much as plain flooded cell lead-acid batteries and hydrogen from water costs 4 X the amount in electricity then storing the same amount of energy in flooded cell lead-acid batteries would require.
4) There is no fueling infrastructure to fuel the cars. That's got to go up to at least 18,000 hydrogen fueling stations.
5) Hope that competitors like hybrids don't get better. Currently Prius GenII gives hydrogen cars a run for their money and the Prius GenIII is predicted to be a bit larger and still get 60 mpg.
See his piece at
And not one turbine of wind exploitation can happen too soon , to fill in the gaps left by losing gas and oil, and reduce the increase in greenhouse gases made from burning coal. The way some coal industry propagandists go on about clean coal you would think they should have called it green coal. Clean coal is not going to happen on your planet any time soon. Nuclear energy is only allowed to be used by great powers with a large number of nuclear weapons and missiles to service. Nuclear electricity generation is just a byproduct in keeping the rest of the military industrial complex in the great game.
Wind power might be better than coal, but it's hardly a good solution. Instead of leaping into better and then being forced to deal with a new set of problems (those of you who are pro-wind, do you want the things in YOUR back yard ), why not take some time to come up with something better.
RosaG, thanks for your intelligent posts.
By 2030 the world will be a wasteland!
"Transmission remains an issue in developing wind power": http://www.wind-watch.org/news/?p=13489 -- North Dakota Public Radio, May 20, 2008
"One of the messages I presented to the coal industry was, 'If you want to have major transmission built, start encouraging wind development.' That's because the cultural value and acceptance of wind energy provides an opportunity to build transmission lines that are not as desirable with traditional forms of generation." (Public Service Commissioner Kevin Cramer)