Wind Winding Up to Meet Climate Challenge

Washington Post:

The Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, released last week, requires the country to use a lot more renewable energy by the year 2030 — and a lot less coal. And right on time, two new reports published Monday by the Department of Energy find that one key renewable sector — wind — is booming, a development that can only help matters when it comes to reducing carbon emissions.

The reports being released  — including the 2014 Wind Technologies Market Report, published by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory — suggest that wind is being installed at a rapid rate, that its costs are plummeting, that its technologies are advancing, and that it is creating a growing number of jobs to boot.

Wind energy in the U.S. is now at 66 gigawatts of installed capacity, according to the report — providing roughly 5 percent of total U.S. electricity demand. 66 gigawatts is enough electricity to  power 17.5 million homes (a gigawatt is a billion watts). And, says Jose Zayas, who heads the wind and water power technologies office at the Energy Department’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, 13 more gigawatts are now “in the construction phase” and set to come online by 2016.

For reference, in 2012, the U.S. had 1063 gigawatts of total installed electricity capacity, according to the Energy Information Administration.

“It really dispels some of the past myths that you cannot have significant amounts of wind energy in the system — a variable source in the system — without really affecting the overall efficiency,” says Zayas.

In the meantime, wind now provides 73,000 jobs, the new report finds. And most striking, it found that the wholesale cost of wind energy — bought under a “power purchasing agreement,” or PPA, in which a utility or company buys power from a wind farm under a long term contract — is now just 2.35 cents per kilowatt hour. That’s the lowest it has ever been.

Ars Technica:

Because of the US’ excellent wind resources, however, it led the world in generating electricity last year. As a percentage of a country’s total electricity generated by wind, the US ranked 15th, at roughly five percent. There are sharp regional differences however, with nine states generating more than double that percentage of their electricity using wind, led by Iowa, which generated 29 percent of its energy from the air.

Domestic job growth in the market went up by nearly half (from 50,500 to 73,000 jobs). A number of manufacturing plants closed, however, as the market consolidated around three companies: GE, Siemens, and Vestas had 98 percent of the US market.Newly installed wind power continued to focus on sites with lower wind speeds. While turbine height was stable at 80m and capacity stable at 2MW, the average rotor diameter rose about 5m to 100m. (A larger rotor allows more wind to be harvested.) The use of less windy sites has partly offset improved hardware, leaving capacity factor—the fraction of a rotor’s rated generation that’s actually used—at about 33 percent.

If all these trends are somewhat ambiguous, there are two figures that are not: the costs of building wind farms and the amount the people who own them are charging for their electricity. Capacity weighted costs were about $35 per MegaWatt-hour in the 1980s; by the 2000s, this had dropped to $10/MW-hr, and it is now down to about $9. The newer hardware is also cheaper to maintain, even after adjusting for the low number of years it’s been in use.

Ars Technica again:

Jose Zayas, the director of the Department of Energy’s Wind and Water Power Technologies Office, compared the wind power situation with that of the car. Both are extremely well understood technologies where effective products are already on the market, but neither technology is at a dead end. Innovations in cars—from cameras and sensors to hybrid and electric drive systems to self-driving experiments—show that there are still plenty of new directions for automobiles.

These sorts of evolutionary changes have already been at work in the wind industry. One major example to this point has simply been scale; average rotor sizes have doubled since the 1980s. That has helped bring the cost of wind power down dramatically. Over the same period, the levelized cost of wind power dropped by an average of seven percent each year, driving total costs down by over 90 percent. As a result, enough wind power has been installed in the US to avoid 115 million tonnes of carbon emissions in 2013 alone.

Despite that progress, wind currently accounts for less than five percent of the total electricity generated in the US. That stands in stark contrast with the total potential for wind power, which is more than 10 times our current electrical consumption.

We aren’t taking full advantage of this for several reasons. It’s partly a matter of manufacturing capacity; wind has only been booming for about a decade, and it takes time for companies to respond to that demand. But two interrelated factors have also slowed wind’s adoption. Many of the best areas of the US for wind power are in the most sparsely populated states, far from the high-capacity transmission grids that support more populous regions. And many of the most populous regions have wind resources that we simply can’t harvest economically at the moment.