U.S. WIND ENERGY INSTALLATIONS REACH 10,000 MegaWatts

[JohnWxy]

http://www.awea.org/newsroom/releases/US_Wind_Energy_Installations_Milestone_081006.html

Record growth generates economic, environmental, energy security benefits as wind capacity reaches 10,000 megawatts

U.S. wind energy installations now exceed 10,000 megawatts (MW) in generating capacity, and produce enough electricity on a typical day to power the equivalent of over 2.5 million homes, the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) announced today. A megawatt of wind power generates enough to serve 250 to 300 average homes.

“Wind energy is providing new electricity supplies that work for our country’s economy, environment, and energy security,” said AWEA Executive Director Randall Swisher. “With its current performance, wind energy is demonstrating that it could rapidly become an important part of the nation’s power portfolio.”

The record growth in wind power is driven by demand for the popular energy source and concerns over fuel price volatility and supply. It was also made possible by a timely renewal of the production tax credit (PTC), a federal incentive extended in the Energy Policy Act signed a year ago by President Bush. Previously, the credit had been allowed to expire three times in seven years, and this uncertainty discouraged investment in wind turbine manufacturing in the country. AWEA is calling for a long-term extension of the PTC before its scheduled expiration at the end of 2007 to avoid further “on-again-off-again”cycles and encourage long-term investment.

~~
~~
Domestic, inexhaustible energy source:

America’s wind resource potential is vast--theoretically more than twice enough to meet current U.S. electricity supply. President Bush said earlier this year that wind could meet 20% of the country’s electricity supply (the share that nuclear power provides today).

[Dead_Parrot]

1. I'd be more impressed...

...if the target was was the ~55% produced by coal. Still, it's a start.

[JohnWxy]

2. I know, it's too slow for me too, but it's building. We'll get there.

[Dead_Parrot]

3. Yeah...

It's the "when" that worries me. This is why I never get exited over things like a 'million solar roofs in CA by 2018': Globally, we need to putting in something like 100GW/year just to stand a slim chance. :(

[JohnWxy]

25. This could be moving ahead much faster with a real commitment

from Washington. What's needed right now is chages in regulations governing how independent producers hook into the power grid. The other thing is the capacity of wind turbine manufacturers really cannot keep up with the demand right now. The provate sector is doing a good job in adding to capacity but if the Government would provide additional low cost funding (maybe by floating some REnewable Energy Bonds) this would incentivize manufacturers to increase capacity by larger increments giving us faster growth of installed wind power.

Go to www.congress.org to kick your Government reps and tell them this is too important to not support more aggressively.

[NNadir]

4. I'd be more impressed if renewable advocates could differentiate power and

energy.

10,000 MW operating 30% of the time isn't very much.

Well some renewable advocates get this but most of the magical thinkers don't get it at all, which is why they advertise power while ignoring energy.

The people at the American Wind Energy Association do not try such weak scams - but that's probably because they're honest.

Here's what they write:

In recent years, the U.S. wind industry has begun using seemingly insignificant refinements in blade airfoil shapes to increase annual energy output from 10 to well over 25 percent. These increases have helped to dramatically lower the cost of wind-generated energy and increase the number of areas in the U.S. at which wind plants are feasible.

http://www.awea.org/faq/basicen.html

Can you imagine if a nuclear power plant improved from 10% capacity to 25% capacity? Wow, there'd be all kinds of crying and whining!

Thus a rule of thumb for the best wind plants, to get their actual capacity from the advertised (name plate) capacity, one needs to divide by 4.

Thus 10,000 "watts" is really equivalent to 2,500 physicist watts.

It will be a long time before wind power causes the shut down of any gas plants. In fact, to have wind plants, you have to keep all the gas plants, because you never know when the wind will blow.

They actually found this out in Denmark, but it isn't widely reported, since magical thinking is very popular these days.

[Dead_Parrot]

5. 30%? Ouch.

That's a good deal lower than I thought...

[NNadir]

6. It's not that high. 30% would be better.

Look, wind is great stuff.

I support every wind plant of which I've ever heard.

But the only function of wind power is to displace natural gas. You still have to have the natural gas capacity of course, but you can shut it down more frequently, reducing the impact of global climate changing gases.

[Dead_Parrot]

7. Or hydro, or course...

But then, I'm part beaver. Show me a clear, trout-filled mountain stream tumbling gently to the plains and I'm practically mixing the concrete. (5l/s falling 20m? there's nearly a kilowatt there. Pass the shovel.)

[NNadir]

8. Well, for the time being, I think we have to have hydro.

With 75 million people living downstream of Three Gorges, with 200,000 or more dead at Banqiao, I know it's not risk free, but it seems to me, that with around 10% of the world's energy, we need it.

Aesthetically I'm a free river man and I hate the dams, but we also need to embrace reality.

I think a lot of hydro may go away all by itself though when the glaciers are gone.

[Dogmudgeon]

9. DICK CHENEY LOVE'S HYDRO !

REPULBICAN'S AND DLC TRAITER'S LOVE'S HYRDO POWER ! ! !

HYDRO IS COPROATE ! ! !

THIS IS HUGH !1!

--P!
REMEMBER bANQUITO ! 1 !

Tribal Peace, EarthLove, and Magic Mushrooms can solve the Energy Crisis.
Go EnergyShaman.

[NNadir]

14. ...

:rofl: :hi:

[Dead_Parrot]

22. Well, there's a possiblity...

Get the Chinese to build lots of dams, and you can tackle both climate change and over-population simultaneously... :evilgrin:

[NNadir]

23. If 75 million Chinese were swept away, China would still have a population

problem.

If everyone in the United States (300 million) was swept away, the world would still have a population problem, but they would be one quarter further along on the path to eliminating the climate change problem.

Probably, from an efficiency standpoint, getting rid of the Americans is a better bet.

[skids]

11. FWIW, and I know this doen't address your point...

...but generally as a rule of thumb, at times when I've bothered to do the math, in wind industry articles the "units" they have decided to use for energy are the # of average homes powered. These figures are usually -- not always as there are the occasional uneducated journalist error -- consistently based on the estimated annual energy yield of the particular project in question, not the peak power of the project's turbines.

Again, I'm not arguing any point here (though I have no delusions that my comment will not be used as a jumping-off point for more cut-and-paste rhetoric) just letting you know for your own personal edification.

[NNadir]

13. "Number of homes" is a silly unit.

Especially if the "number of homes" are powered for a part of the day. Are the homes McMansions running a brazillion watt stereo and a big screen TV, or are they cramped studio apartments with three light bulbs and a space heater occupied by 10 people from El Salvador?

I don't know why it should be difficult to simply use units of energy. It takes two sentences to do it informatively.

Here is how:

"The Republic of Kyrgyzstan announces that they have installed wind capacity that can provide peak power of 900,000MWe. Meteorological data from the area suggests that these plants will provide about 20% of their capacity or 1.1 trillion MW-hr."

If one wants to be more informative, and give a frame of reference, one can say this:

The per capita energy consumption in Kyrgyzstan is 8.1 MW-hr and thus, the new wind capacity will provide the energy needs of 193,000,000 Kyrgyz, or roughly 40 times the country's energy demand

.

There is nothing fraudulent in this approach. It is clear and simple and it does not involve misrepresentation. Any fool reporter with access to the internet could write these sentences as well as I can.

But I know why the "renewable only" crowd must rely on misrepresentation, why it derides data in terms like "cut and paste," squiggles with units like "MW," most of the time leaving out the important word "peak." Because the data kicks the legs from under the ridiculous conceit that renewable energy alone can address the crisis of global climate change.

The fact is that you cannot market this conceit by simply telling the truth as I have done. You must try to make a wind plant running at 25% capacity look like a nuclear plant running at 90% or else no one will buy into that conceit. But the laws of physics say other wise. Energy = time X power. I think they teach that in the seventh grade.

I am going to continue to give out the data, which is available to anyone who bothers to look for it: It's in the public record, which I was also continue to point out, continue to "paste."

Why do I do this?

Because the lives of my children are at stake. I'm sorry that this too, is an inconvenient truth.

Personally, I think fraud under the circumstances of global climate change is highly unethical.

[Dead_Parrot]

21. It also makes it sound good.

Saying "We're installing 3,000MW of wind power - enough for 750,000 homes" sounds a lot better than "We're installing 3,000MW of wind power - almost enough for one aluminum smelter".

Unfortunately, most people - including 99.99% of reporters - wouldn't know a joule if you tasered them with one, so "standard American home" is now an SI unit.

[ItsTheMediaStupid]

20. Having power when the wind isn't blowing

If you build some excess capacity in wind farms or geo-thermal or pig manure reactors or whatever collection of energy sources, you can save excess energy by making hydrogen.

When the wind quits blowing, or the pigs get constipated then you can turn on the hydrogen power. I'm a newbie on the forum, but I'm not a magical thinker. I know we have a long way to go and may not get there before it is too late.

However squashing hope is not productive.:)

[Oerdin]

10. Small potatos.

We haven't built a nuclear plant in 20 years yet yearly energy output from nuclear power plants in the US is 780,464,675 Megawatt-hours. Compare that to your theoretical 10,000 megawatts. I bet that is a peak output number which is based upon running at 100% of capacity every day for a year. The only problem is it never does run at 100% of capacity much less for a whole year. Based upon the US Department of energy statistics which NNadir has quoted multiple times the actual output is likely 10%-15% of the theoretical maximum.

[Massacure]

12. 21.9 million megawatt hours assuming 25% efficiency

Not anywhere near to nuclear.

[jpak]

15. Boo frickin' hoo

How many mega"watts" of new nuclear capacity will be built this year in the US???

ZERO!

How many homes will receive electricity from this new nuclear capacity???

ZERO!

How many licenses have been granted this year for new US nuclear power plants???

ZERO!

ChimpCo's wonnerful plan for new nucular capacity is 6 GW by 2030...and you will be paying those plant owners ~$12 billion to build and operate them.

So how many mega"watts" of new wind and PV and solar thermal will be installed in the US by 2030???

Several brazillians.

:nopity:

[Oerdin]

16. You just don't get it.

I bet if you look at the total surface area of the wind plants which produced those 1,500 megawatts, not the claimed 10,000 megawatts, then that surface area would be greater then the total amount of surface area it took nuclear plants to produce 52,026,666% more electricity.

Wind has a place as a nitch player especially if teamed up with our existing hydro plants to save water. Other nitch came be solar and geothermal. It doesn't like like the other reknewables will ever amount to much in my lifetime but collectively these alternative sources may one day equal a few percentage points of total electrical output, abet only if they are massively subsidized. For the other 95%-98% of our electrical output we need something which can be relied upon day in day out which doesn't have much down time, which is cost efficient, which is scalable with demand, and which can be located where ever people are reguardless of weather conditions. There really are only two things which can do that 1) fossil fuels or 2) nuclear power (hydro is nice if you have a big river you can damn but there are only 1 or 2 locations left in the US which we could damn even if the environmentalists would let us so there won't be growth there).

For a host of reasons nuclear is far better then burning fossil fuels. The people who continue to live in their fantasy that the whole US could ever get more then a few little percentage points of its total electrical demand from wind & solar are just hurting everyone. You are children acting spoiled while the world burns.

[Name removed]

17. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[jpak]

18. "reknewable" energy does two have a "nitch" - and a hugh!!!111 one too

:evilgrin:

[Oerdin]

24. Bah!

When someone has lost an argument they resort to picking out typos. If you had anything of substance you'd actually post it. As usual you have nothing meaningful to add to the conversation.

[JohnWxy]

26. Wind power potential of U.S. is about double the total power demand

The top four states in wind potential could supply all the U.S. demand.

http://www.awea.org/faq/wwt_potential.html#How%20much%20energy

U.S. wind resources are even greater, however. North Dakota alone is theoretically capable (if there were enough transmission capacity) of producing enough wind-generated power to meet more than fourth of U.S. electricity demand. The theoretical potentials of the windiest states are shown in the following table.

THE TOP TWENTY STATES
for Wind Energy Potential
as measured by annual energy potential in the billions of kWh, factoring in environmental and land use exclusions for wind class of 3 and higher.

                         Bil kWh/Yr                 Bil kWh/Yr
1. North Dakota         1,210     11. Colorado 481
2. Texas         1,190         12. New Mexico 435
3. Kansas         1,070         13. Idaho 73
4. South Dakota      1,030   14. Michigan 65
5. Montana         1,020         15. New York 62
6. Nebraska         868         16. Illinois 61
7. Wyoming         747         17. California 59
8. Oklahoma         725         18. Wisconsin 58
9. Minnesota         657         19. Maine 56
10. Iowa         551         20. Missouri 52

Source: An Assessment of the Available Windy Land Area and Wind Energy Potential in the Contiguous United States, Pacific Northwest Laboratory, August 1991. PNL-7789


Wind power is the cheapest source of power today.

www.awea.org/pubs/factsheets/Cost2001.PDF



Fuel Levelized costs (cents/kWh) (1996)
Coal Fuel Levelized costs (cents/kWh) (1996)
Coal                   4.8-5.5
Gas                   3.9-4.4
Hydro                   5.1-11.3
Biomass                   5.8-11.6
Nuclear                   11.1-14.5
Wind (without PTC)      4.0-6.0
Wind (with PTC)       3.3-5.3


The cost of natural gas has increased since 1996, so that the levelized cost of gas–
fired power plants would now be considerably higher. In January 2001, the cost of
natural gas generated power was running as high as 15 cents to 20 cents per kWh in
certain markets <3>. The cost of wind power, meanwhile, has declined slightly.


VRB POwer is selling cost effective vanadium redox flow storage systems for storing power from fluctuating sources:

http://www.vrbpower.com/

This enables you to generate more than 20% of your power from wind.

[NNadir]

19. These people are not going to go away, any more than churches went away

after the Pope's claims about Galileo could and could not say made the church look ridiculous.

One effect, of course, of the Pope's power was simply to cause the shift of the center of intellectual and scientific growth to Northern Europe.

The chilling effect of the Pope's edicts meant there were no more Galileos in Italy, but in Northern Europe there were Keplers and Newtons, and Hookes, and Daltons...

Eventually Italy followed the rest of the world into the scientific revolution, however. The effect of the Pope was temporary, and lasted only a few centuries.

Now of course, the problem is not enlightenment so much as it is a descent into darkness.

Just as there was no pleading with the Catholic Church in the 17th century, there is no pleading with the cult of sun and wind or with other fundamentalist faiths. You will not convince Pat Robertson that evolution is a fact and similarly there are people on this website who will never be dissuaded from the pro-coal cult. Like the Melanesians of the cargo cults who first saw tin cans and thought they were from ancestral spirits, the wind and sun and biofuel cults have seen the Solar House in Maine.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult

http://www.solarhouse.com/

They believe the solar house is magic. With limited understanding outside of their parochial worlds, they believe they have fundamental reality of the world and nothing will dissuade them.

When sentenced to life under house arrest for the crime of seeing, Galileo is said to have muttered, "Still it moves." Far away, Kepler and Newton proved him right.

We seem to be changing our tune in this country now that the reality of climate change is sinking in and for the first time in decades, the nuclear energy option is being seriously explored. However, like the Italians in the scientific revolution, we are behind in the game, as are many Europeans, the Finns and French notwithstanding. But far away, in Asia, those of us who argued for nuclear power are being proved right.

Now I will be the first to admit that sometimes I have had fun at the expense of these cultists, just as I used to have fun as a young man with Jehovah's Witnesses when they knocked on the door. But the appeal of reality is what it is. Basically the power of cults like Greenpeace is way past its peak. Everybody who is rational can see what is happening.

[bhikkhu]

27. Any ideas on the EROI for the new plants?

That is to say...all of that steel represents a substantial energy investment, as does all of that concrete, copper, etc.

I am a skeptic on wind power only based on an article I read some time ago analyzing the EROI on an older wind farm, finding that over its lifespan it was not predicted to produce as much energy as went into its construction.

This is the kind of thing I would like to know up front, hearing all the hoopla about the government handing out cash and credits to huge energy companies for projects like this.

Incedentally, Carter had a program in the works to account the the oil-energy equivalents of various things like this so we might be better educated about what to be enthusiastic about. Reagan killed the program, and ignorance reigns.

[JohnWxy]

28. LOL. I needed a good laugh. Your post provided it. For facts check link:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=115&topic_id=65817&mesg_id=67193

[Dead_Parrot]

29. technically, you didn't answer the question...

...but I can't resist doing inaccurate guesstimates :D.

The lifetime output of a 2.5MW turbine under normal conditions would be ~130GWh, or ~470TJ: the energy used to build it (assuming it takes as much as 10 new cars - figures are a bit sparse here :)) would be about 750 GJ, so the EROEI would be somewhere around 625.

[bhikkhu]

31. Thank You!

I had not thought of using the energy input figure for a car (fairly available) to make the guess. It is close enough for me to store away my rainclouds on this issue.

[skids]

32. A formal analysis by Vestas...

...this should help futher:

http://www.vestas.com/uk/sustainability/lifecycleassessment.asp

Upshot is with the new 3.0MW units from this company, energy breakeven is under a year of operation.

[Dead_Parrot]

35. Oh well...

...that suggests an EROEI of ~125, assuming a 30 year lifetime - although I'll admit it's a bit more carefully thought out than mine :) (I only looked at the second one, but I'm guessing they are similar)

At least I was within an order of magnitude. Not bad for talking out of my arse. :D

Thanks Skids - good find.

[diva77]

30. how 'bout placing a windmill atop every telephone pole - at least there is

a potential infrastructure in place; that is, if it's not too dangerous to do so?? just wonderin' :think:

[skids]

33. Something like this?

http://panasonic.co.jp/mesc/products/en/product/windseagull/feature_goods.html

[diva77]

34. wow, what a beautiful and elegant design

seems like something like that could be adapted to either be attached to a telephone pole or replace it...just brainstorming

how much energy are they capable of generating, on avg.?

[skids]

37. I would imagine that depends on windspeed and insolation.

There might be specs if you browse around at the URL.

[Dead_Parrot]

36. Oooh, shiny pretty thing. want.

Probably can't afford, though. :(