Tag Archives: Renewable Resources

Texas to Deliver Wind Power to Millions of Urban Homes

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The state of Texas has approved a major new project to build transmission lines for wind power, with funding in the amount of $4.93 billion. Already the national leader with 5,300 megawatts of installed wind-power generating capacity, Texas will, when the infrastructure development is completed in 2013, have more wind-energy capacity than Germany presently does. The project is a major step toward freeing the American economy from high-contaminant power generation.

The New York Times reports that:

The planned web of transmission lines will carry electricity from remote western parts of the state to major population centers like Dallas, Houston, Austin and San Antonio. The lines can handle 18,500 megawatts of power, enough for 3.7 million homes on a hot day when air-conditioners are running.

The consumer advocacy group Public Citizen praised the plan, saying it should provide an $8 drop in electricity costs for every $3 invested in the new transmission network. T. Boone Pickens, the oil tycoon who is waging a national campaign to build wind-power infrastructure to provide at least 22% of all energy consumption in the US, has praised the initiative, but has also said his project will include its own transmission capacity, in part because it will be completed in 2011, well ahead of the major new transmission network.

Also according to the Times:

The transmission problem is so acute in Texas that turbines are sometimes shut off even when the wind is blowing.

“When the amount of generation exceeds the export capacity, you have to start turning off wind generators” to keep things in balance, said Hunter Armistead, head of the renewable energy division in North America at Babcock & Brown, a large wind developer and transmission provider. “We’ve reached that point in West Texas.”

Transmission capacity is a major obstacle to expanding wind-generation capacity nationwide, and Texas represents possibly the most hopeful place for advancing the cause, in part due to its massive wind resource and mounting investment infrastructure, but also because it enjoys its own power grid. Other states have to go through the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in order to win approval for new infrastructure development, and may be hampered by bureaucratic lag-time, unless a major federal initiative to deliver new transmission capacity is undertaken.

Nuclear Power & Offshore Drilling May Help Keep Oil Prices High

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CafeSentido.com :: With gasoline prices at record highs, and the strain on a weak American economy already at an extreme, Pres. Bush is pushing Congress to hold an “up-or-down vote” on renewed exploration of the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) before its August recess. Opponents protest that none of any oil found there would be available for production for 10 to 15 years, and the OCS plan is an attempt to deliver oil firms an otherwise unjustifiable gift, taking advantage of the pressurized situation of exorbitant prices.

The Energy Information Agency (EIA) evaluating the OCS strategy have found that opening offshore sites in the Pacific, the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico would still not be producing enough oil and natural gas to have a significant effect on domestic reserves, even as far out as the year 2030. CNN today reported that Democratic members of Congress say a preliminary investigation attributes more than 50% of the soaring prices to speculation, while traders say OPEC has deliberately held production low in order to drive prices up.

We must also face the increasingly clear economic reality that carbon emissions are not just destructive to the health of our natural environment, but that they have real economic costs not directly related to ecosystem resilience, such as human health, and the cost of industrial activity related to clean-up and to the obsolescence of devices running on combustible fuels. So devoting increasing amounts of our energy economy to combustible fuels at a time when prices are soaring has a multiple-negative economic effect.

The key to understanding what is happening that makes recourse to nuclear and carbon-based fuels potentially counterproductive is to understand that we are no longer living in a traditional industrial energy economy. We are now dealing with the consequences of that economy’s exploration and combustion burden. The “carbon footprint” is not merely an environmental ethics concern, but a serious economic factor potentially mitigating future productivity, or added long-term costs.

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Food price crisis: more complex than first thought & putting food beyond the reach of the planet's poor

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FEATURE FROM SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT UPDATE, ISSUE 3, VOLUME 8, 2008

Fredrik Moberg/Miriam Huitric, Albaeco :: Food prices are skyrocketing. Initially, many put the blame on the rising demand of biofuels in the transport sector, but bio-ethanol is far from the only thing driving up food prices. New diets, soaring oil prices and climate change are all in the complex soup of explanations behind the recent development putting food beyond the reach of the planet’s poor.


The price of wheat has doubled in less than a year.
Photo: Wen-Yan King: medapt.org, azote.se

More than 800 million people are still undernourished in the world today. The Haitian riots over soaring food prices in April this year were a startling reminder of the inequalities between developed and developing countries – with the latter feeling the impact of the growing global food crisis in ways that go beyond the imagination of most people living in developed countries.

The price of wheat has doubled in less than a year and prices for milk and meat have more than doubled in some countries. International nominal prices of all major food commodities are at the highest levels in nearly 50 years. While this crisis is real – so much so that the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) recently held a High-Level Conference on World Food Security: the Challenges of Climate Change and Bioenergy – its causes are not so clear.

Initially, many put the blame on bio-ethanol and claimed that food prices were surging because we have chosen to feed our cars instead of feeding human beings (see SDU Issue 4/2007). Lately, however, the discussions have broadened to also include a whole set of other explanations. A recent post on the ecogeek weblog was right to the point: “All-in-all, it’s not a good time to be burning what can otherwise be eaten. But there is no good reason to say that biofuels are the one and only problem. SUV’s are certainly limiting the future of the world, but not by burning hungry people’s food.”

Six major factors behind the rising food prices

  • Soaring fossil-fuel prices (needed to produce fertilizers, pesticides and for transportation)
  • Emerging economies and Westernisation of diets (rich people eat more and buy more meat and milk that increase demand for grains to feed livestock)
  • Population growth (food demand growing faster than supply)
  • Climate change (drought, more frequent flooding etc already beginning to have significant impact on agricultural production)
  • Use of crops for fuel (shifting production from food to biofuels)
  • Market speculation (investors from traditional markets now focus on financial products tied to agriculture commodities as food prices increase)

Even more recently, however, the British daily “The Guardian” claimed to have obtained a confidential World Bank report that claims that biofuels are the main cause and have forced global food prices up by 75% – far more than previously estimated (at the other extreme, the US Government says it is less than 3%).

Key causes of the soaring food prices
Until recently global production of food matched demand. In fact, for a rather long period of time there has been an excess of production in many parts of the world. These surpluses have often been “dumped” at low prices in developing countries with disastrous impacts on national farmers who could not compete with the low prices offered. This was until recently. Demand now seems to have passed the tipping point where it exceeds production, according to several experts.

Another key aspect to consider when trying to understand the food price crisis is drought, which is predicted to increase in frequency and severity as the climate changes. In 2007, prices soared to a large extent due to failed crops in the drought stricken fields of Australia’s food bowl that are central to the worldwide price of grains.

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Gore's Push for Carbon-free Energy Economy Suggests Green Tech Boom

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CafeSentido.com :: The former vice president of the United States, Al Gore, yesterday announced an ambitious goal, which he says the nation can meet, of transitioning its entire domestic energy production to clean resources by 2018. The speech marks a major moment in the process of transition to the green technology boom, which will be the next step in the ongoing economic development of the United States and the world. Gore, however, warned that failing to meet the challenge to date means “the United States of America as we know it is at risk”.

The United States currently consumes roughly one-quarter of all the world’s petroleum, while representing just 4.6% of the world’s population. Experts calculate that global energy production is at or near its peak, and total demand is fast expanding beyond production capacity. In a globalized economy, with major developing nations like China and India expanding GDP by between 7% and 10% per year, this imbalance is untenable. So crude oil prices are shooting up, and the US is increasingly at risk for economic hardship, perhaps already in motion, as a result of coming market corrections.

Mr. Gore opened his address [full text] with a caution to those who fail to perceive the complexity of a new kind of security risk:

There are times in the history of our nation when our very way of life depends upon dispelling illusions and awakening to the challenge of a present danger. In such moments, we are called upon to move quickly and boldly to shake off complacency, throw aside old habits and rise, clear-eyed and alert, to the necessity of big changes. Those who, for whatever reason, refuse to do their part must either be persuaded to join the effort or asked to step aside. This is such a moment.

The fact is, moods are changing, and the political environment has evolved dramatically in the last two years. Gore cites this trend as cause for hope in this moment of economic and environmental peril, and the best reason for calling for this grand infrastructure readjustment. Skeptics who have long cited the “prohibitive cost” of making the adjustment to clean energy technologies are out-argued by the soaring cost of carbon-based fuels: their historic efficiency is no longer guaranteed, and the economy as a whole is being magnetized to new technological opportunities to reduce energy overhead.

Noting the same problem of oil “addiction” Pres. Bush cited in his 2006 State of the Union address, Mr. Gore urged Americans to think with a can-do attitude about how to make fundamental changes to the core energy metabolism of our economy, specifically:

our dangerous over-reliance on carbon-based fuels is at the core of all three of these challenges – the economic, environmental and national security crises. We’re borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that’s got to change.

How does an entire nation come together to undertake such a massive energy overhaul —priced at between $2 trillion and $5 trillion, according to a range of analysts from competing disciplines—, if not by using the levers of democratic political pressures to steer the entire economic output of the nation in a new direction? Moving public awareness can be as unwieldy as steering the ship of state, and in an economy that represents nearly one-third of the entire global economic output, the task is daunting.

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A Generational Challenge to Repower America: Text of Gore Energy Speech, as Prepared

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SPEECH DELIVERED BY AL GORE
17 JULY 2008, AT CONSTITUTION HALL, WASHINGTON, D.C.

Ladies and gentlemen:

There are times in the history of our nation when our very way of life depends upon dispelling illusions and awakening to the challenge of a present danger. In such moments, we are called upon to move quickly and boldly to shake off complacency, throw aside old habits and rise, clear-eyed and alert, to the necessity of big changes. Those who, for whatever reason, refuse to do their part must either be persuaded to join the effort or asked to step aside. This is such a moment.

The survival of the United States of America as we know it is at risk. And even more – if more should be required – the future of human civilization is at stake. I don’t remember a time in our country when so many things seemed to be going so wrong simultaneously. Our economy is in terrible shape and getting worse, gasoline prices are increasing dramatically, and so are electricity rates. Jobs are being outsourced. Home mortgages are in trouble. Banks, automobile companies and other institutions we depend upon are under growing pressure. Distinguished senior business leaders are telling us that this is just the beginning unless we find the courage to make some major changes quickly.

The climate crisis, in particular, is getting a lot worse – much more quickly than predicted. Scientists with access to data from Navy submarines traversing underneath the North polar ice cap have warned that there is now a 75 percent chance that within five years the entire ice cap will completely disappear during the summer months. This will further increase the melting pressure on Greenland. According to experts, the Jakobshavn glacier, one of Greenland’s largest, is moving at a faster rate than ever before, losing 20 million tons of ice every day, equivalent to the amount of water used every year by the residents of New York City.

Two major studies from military intelligence experts have warned our leaders about the dangerous national security implications of the climate crisis, including the possibility of hundreds of millions of climate refugees destabilizing nations around the world. Just two days ago, 27 senior statesmen and retired military leaders warned of the national security threat from an “energy tsunami” that would be triggered by a loss of our access to foreign oil. Meanwhile, the war in Iraq continues, and now the war in Afghanistan appears to be getting worse.

And by the way, our weather sure is getting strange, isn’t it? There seem to be more tornadoes than in living memory, longer droughts, bigger downpours and record floods. Unprecedented fires are burning in California and elsewhere in the American West. Higher temperatures lead to drier vegetation that makes kindling for mega-fires of the kind that have been raging in Canada, Greece, Russia, China, South America, Australia and Africa. Scientists in the Department of Geophysics and Planetary Science at Tel Aviv University tell us that for every one degree increase in temperature, lightning strikes will go up another 10 percent. And it is lightning, after all, that is principally responsible for igniting the conflagration in California today.

Like a lot of people, it seems to me that all these problems are bigger than any of the solutions that have thus far been proposed for them, and that’s been worrying me. I’m convinced that one reason we’ve seemed paralyzed in the face of these crises is our tendency to offer old solutions to each crisis separately – without taking the others into account. And these outdated proposals have not only been ineffective – they almost always make the other crises even worse.

Yet when we look at all three of these seemingly intractable challenges at the same time, we can see the common thread running through them, deeply ironic in its simplicity: our dangerous over-reliance on carbon-based fuels is at the core of all three of these challenges – the economic, environmental and national security crises. We’re borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that’s got to change. But if we grab hold of that common thread and pull it hard, all of these complex problems begin to unravel and we will find that we’re holding the answer to all of them right in our hand.

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Al Gore Calls on U.S. to Produce All Energy from Renewables within 10 Years

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Former US vice-president Al Gore is calling on the nation to marshal its resources and divorce itself from the combustible fuels economy. Gore says the US can produce all its energy requirements from renewable resources within 10 years, if concerted action is taken. The bold initiative is designed to drive debate on the topic and move discussions about how to deal with high fuel prices toward the new opportunity they provide for funding renewable infrastructure development.

According to the Associated Press:

Rising fuel costs, climate change and the national security threats posed by U.S. dependence on foreign oil are conspiring to create “a new political environment” that Gore said will sustain bold and expensive steps to wean the nation off fossil fuels.

When Pres. Bush announced he would lift the executive ban on offshore oil drilling and urged Congress to do the same, critics retorted that the science shows the potential energy output is too far off and too small to affect prices, but that new drilling would “enable” the nation’s “addiction” to carbon-based fuels. Pres. Bush himself used the word addiction in a State of the Union address, to describe what could be a crippling reliance on petroleum-based fuels.

Gore’s proposed initiative has been compared to Pres. John F. Kennedy’s promise that the United States could land a man on the moon within the decade of the 1960s. Ecological economist Lester Brown, of the Earth Policy Institute, has long called for the US to treat the climate crisis as a major threat and to begin to overhaul its energy economy “at wartime speed”, referring specifically to how Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt moved the industrial economy of the US to war production to fight and win World War II.

Gore has not shied away from the issue of cost, but points out that the cost is no longer higher than simply filling in gaps in current demand with new output from high-contamination fuel-sources like coal:

The Alliance for Climate Protection, a bipartisan group that he chairs, estimates the cost of transforming the nation to so-called clean electricity sources at $1.5 trillion to $3 trillion over 30 years in public and private money. But he says it would cost about as much to build ozone-killing coal plants to satisfy current demand.

Gore says his goal is to drive public opinion toward an alternative fuels revolution, noting how this process seems to have begun already as a response to soaring gasoline prices. The fuel-source issue has come to dominate every aspect of current economic analysis, as transport costs are now being blamed for a rise in inflation across the US and for 9-figure losses for at least two major airlines.

No longer a politician, but keenly involved in the political sphere, Gore is now devoted to the complex project of informing and changing attitudes, hoping to “enlarge the political space” where government and the private sector can “deal with the climate challenge.” His words may help spur bolder action by politicians, which would help business make the investment commitments necessary to revolutionize their own infrastructure and/or industrial output.

Last year, consumption of renewable energy actually declined slightly in the US, the fall attributed largely to lower levels of precipitation affecting hydrological energy output. But solar and wind energy are now rapidly expanding their production capacity, and Texas oil man T. Boone Pickens’ personal wind-energy initiative —aimed at building a continent-wide wind-energy corridor to produce over 20% of power-generation needs— is the latest major sign of progress.

New solar technologies that make solar-power generation perhaps 10 times more efficient mean prices for producing renewable energy are coming down dramatically, just as prices for conventional fuel sources are skyrocketing. While both candidates’ energy plans include coal as a viable resource for expanding production, the major progress being made in renewable fuel sources may make such expansion unnecessary before new plants come online.

Critics have often said the renewable resources market is too costly to be implemented in a way that benefits most consumers economically, but this is no longer the case, and what Mr. Gore is pushing for is precisely the kind of national innovation initiative that brings the most efficient clean energy technologies within the economic range of all consumers. Sustaining these clean technologies would be far less costly than cleaning up after high-contamination combustibles, so the long-term gains, added to the economic boom from infrastructure development, will be part of a needed green technology boom. 

Renewable Energy Consumption & Electricity Preliminary 2007 Statistics

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TRANSCRIPT OF ENERGY INFORMATION ADMIN. REPORT ON RENEWABLE ENERGY CONSUMPTION

Data For: 2007
Report Released: May 2008
Next Release Date: May 2009

Renewable energy consumption declined 1 percent between 2006 and 2007 to 6,830 trillion Btu, according to preliminary 2007 data (Table 1 and Figure 1).  In contrast, both total energy and non-renewable energy increased 2 percent.

There was wide variation in the consumption behavior of individual renewable energy sources. Hydro electricity dropped 14 percent in 2007 due to reduced precipitation in several regions of the country. On the plus side, biomass-based energy grew 7 percent and wind-generated electricity jumped 21 percent (Table 3). Major increases in consumption of biomass to produce and use biofuels (ethanol and biodiesel) were almost entirely responsible for the increase in biomass during 2007 (Table 1).

From 2003 through 2007, renewable energy consumption’s average annual growth rate was 3 percent, compared with just 1 percent for total energy consumption. Again, biofuels and wind were largely responsible for the increase, with 5-year average annual growth rates of 25 and 29 percent, respectively.

Just over half of renewable energy consumption occurred in the electric power sector in 2007 (Table 2). The industrial sector was the second-leading consumer of renewable energy, accounting for nearly 30 percent. The transportation, residential, and commercial sectors accounted for 9, 8, and 2 percent, respectively. While the electric power sector currently consumes the most renewable energy (51 percent), its use dropped 8 percent between 2006 and 2007. In 2003, the electricity sector accounted for 59 percent of total renewable energy consumption.

In contrast, transportation sector renewable energy consumption increased 30 percent during 2007, and residential sector consumption grew 12 percent. Residential sector growth was due to healthy increases in all three energy sources: biomass, geothermal, and solar/photovoltaic. Commercial and industrial uses of renewable energy changed little between 2006 and 2007 and have also changed little as a fraction of total renewable consumption since 2003. That could change for the industrial sector if ethanol and biodiesel use continues to grow rapidly resulting in increased feedstock consumption. This is especially significant in view of the fact that the largest biomass fuel consumed in the industrial sector, wood and derived fuels, has grown little since 1989 and appears to have peaked in 1997.[1]

Within the electric power sector, wind energy consumption has grown each year since 1998.[2] From 2003 to 2007, wind’s share of total renewable energy consumption increased from 2 percent to 5 percent. For the first time ever in 2007, wind energy consumption in the electric power sector exceeded geothermal. Hydro electricity accounted for 36 percent of total renewable consumption in 2007, down from 46 percent in 2003. However, hydro consumption is tied mostly to precipitation, which can vary year to year. Few plants are being built or retired.

Electricity generation from renewable sources fell 9 percent in 2007 to 351 billion kilowatthours (kWh), largely due to reduced precipitation (Table 3). Excluding hydro electricity, however, renewable electricity generation grew 7 percent. This gain was led by a 21 percent increase in electricity from wind and moderate increases in electricity from biomass waste. There has been little change in generation from the largest non-hydro renewable electricity source, wood and derived fuels, since 2003.

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Transparent Dyes Allow Windows to Act as Super-powerful Solar Panels

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Special transparent dyes coating glass or plastic panes concentrate the Sun’s rays, guiding them to solar-voltaic cells lining the edges, allowing a window to act as a solar panel with 10 times the electricity generation capacity of solar cells, by current standards. The ‘organic solar concentrator’ (OSC) system also reduces cost, by reducing the surface area that needs to be coated by solar-voltaic cells and by eliminating the need for large concentrating mirrors and sun-tracking mechanisms.

According to the journal Science, where the findings were published:

Light is absorbed by the coating and reemitted into waveguide modes for collection by the solar cells. We report single- and tandem-waveguide organic solar concentrators with quantum efficiencies exceeding 50% and projected power conversion efficiencies as high as 6.8%. The exploitation of near-field energy transfer, solid-state solvation, and phosphorescence enables 10-fold increases in the power obtained from photovoltaic cells, without the need for solar tracking.

The Economist is using the term ‘luminescent solar concentrator’, and notes that the work reported by Michael Currie and Jonathan Mapel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is being researched elsewhere as well, and is related to the standard functioning of fiber optic technologies, which concentrate light and contain it within a conductive glass or plastic fiber. The OSC system conducts light toward the edges of the glass or plastic pane, trapping photons within the pane, causing it to seek out the high-efficiency solar-voltaic cells at the panel’s edge.

There are technical complications with perfecting the OSC system for harvesting solar energy. The dyes capture and concentrate the incoming sunlight, but an excess of dye molecules may prevent a quantity of light from reaching the circumferential solar cells, either by re-absorbing the light or by allowing heat to accumulate and losing the energy through that concentration of heat on the dyed surface.

The EE Times reports that the “edge-mounted” solar cells could receive light concentrated as much as 40 times. With the extreme heightening of efficiency, and the attendant reduction of costs, related to the new panels’ lack of need for mirrors or solar tracking mechanisms, the MIT advance could revolutionize the role of solar power in the global energy economy.

The dye-based solar concentrators could be on the commercial market within three years, distributed widely and helping homeowners and businesses establish productive capacity in linking up with the spreading renewables grid. Consumers with solar and wind-generation capacity can earn money on energy fed back into the local electricity grid.

The solar concentrating dye-coating can also be applied to exiting solar cells, heightening their light-capturing capability by as much as 30%, according to the MIT team. Marc Baldo, an MIT engineer, says “We think that ultimately this approach will allow us to nearly double the performance of existing solar cells for minimal added cost.”

While obstacles to containing and harvesting the full amount of energy captured by the dyes are an issue, Baldo’s team went far beyond previous attempts at increasing the efficiency of solar cells with the dye-retransmit method, by coating only the surface of a glass pane with the dyes, mimicking techniques used to improve the efficiency of lasers, which also contain and bounce light to intensify the retransmission of light at the other end of the contained space.

Oilman T. Boone Pickens Wants to Create National Wind-energy Network in the US

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T. Boone Pickens has started what USA Today reports will be “the biggest public policy ad campaign ever” to promote a national economic shift from oil to renewable fuels, primarily wind. The campaign is centered on the PickensPlan website, which shows the oil tycoon explaining how and why the US can and must break its dependence on foreign oil —for which American consumers pay $700 billion per year— by transitioning to an energy economy founded on exploiting the massive wind resources of the Great Plains.

The Texas oil baron uses information about the wind resources available across the world to declare that the United States is “the Saudi Arabia of wind”. If we look at other studies that have been done, rooted in a US-government study published in 1991, just three midwestern states possess enough wind to power the entire US economy, with total aeolic development potentially leading to the US becoming a wind-energy exporting powerhouse.

In 2003, the Earth Policy Institute reported that:

In 1991, a national wind resource inventory taken by the U.S. Department of Energy startled the world when it reported that the three most wind-rich states —North Dakota, Kansas, and Texas— had enough harnessable wind energy to satisfy national electricity needs. Now a new study by a team of engineers at Stanford reports that the wind energy potential is actually substantially greater than that estimated in 1991.

The new estimates showed that “Wind power can meet not only all U.S. electricity needs, but all U.S. energy needs.” Since the mid-1990s, wind has been the fastest-expanding form of energy-extraction on the planet. The 2003 EPI report noted that “Rising from 4,800 megawatts of generating capacity in 1995 to 31,100 megawatts in 2002, it increased a staggering sixfold.” Since 2002, it jumped another 333%, reaching 100,000 megawatts in March 2008, according to Jonathan Dorn, also of EPI.

Pickens notes that “”Nixon said in 1970 that we were importing 20% of our oil and that by 1980 it would be 0%. That didn’t happen. It went to 42% in 1991 with the Gulf War. It’s just under 70% now. Where do you think we’re going to be in 10 years when our economy is busted and we’re importing 80% of our oil?” He notes also that, while other problems such as healthcare costs are vital to the nation’s economic future, “If you don’t solve the energy problem, it’s going to break us before we even get to solving health care and some of these other important issues.”

And wind is a booming business in the state of Texas, ranked 2nd among US states in potential wind resources. According to USA Today:

Were it a country all by itself, Nolan County, Texas, would rank sixth on the list of wind-energy-producing nations, says Wortham. Year-round wind conditions, the terrain, low land prices and a small population make it an ideal location for wind farms. It already produces more wind-generated electricity in a year than all of California.

Pickens’ plan to speed the adjustment, even as infrastructure development is getting underway for a national wind-energy network, aims to move a significant percentage of automotive fuel to natural gas, while replacing the non-automotive power generation achieved by use of natural gas to wind energy, which can expand more rapidly than carbon-fuel extraction due to zero necessary refinement and simpler extraction process.

While the plan may go a long way to helping free the United States of its reliance on foreign oil, Pickens’ plan does not necessarily break the addiction to combustible carbon-based fuels, and so does not do enough to cut into damaging carbon emissions. Pushing US development of wind energy will, however, be a watershed moment in the transition to a clean, green economy.

Wind Power Set to Become World's Leading Energy Source

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Lester R. Brown, EPI :: In 1991, a national wind resource inventory taken by the U.S. Department of Energy startled the world when it reported that the three most wind-rich states —North Dakota, Kansas, and Texas— had enough harnessable wind energy to satisfy national electricity needs. Now a new study by a team of engineers at Stanford reports that the wind energy potential is actually substantially greater than that estimated in 1991.

Advances in wind turbine design since 1991 allow turbines to operate at lower wind speeds, to harness more of the wind’s energy, and to harvest it at greater heights —dramatically expanding the harnessable wind resource. Add to this the recent bullish assessments of offshore wind potential, and the enormity of the wind resource becomes apparent. Wind power can meet not only all U.S. electricity needs, but all U.S. energy needs.

In a joint assessment of global wind resources called Wind Force 12, the European Wind Energy Association and Greenpeace concluded that the world’s wind-generating potential —assuming that only 10 percent of the earth’s land area would be available for development— is double the projected world electricity demand in 2020. A far larger share of the land area could be used for wind generation in sparsely populated, wind-rich regions, such as the Great Plains of North America, northwest China, eastern Siberia, and the Patagonian region of Argentina. If the huge offshore potential is added to this, it seems likely that wind power could satisfy not only world electricity needs but perhaps even total energy needs. (See data http://www.earth-policy.org/Updates/Update24_data.htm)

Over the last decade wind has been the world’s fastest-growing energy source. Rising from 4,800 megawatts of generating capacity in 1995 to 31,100 megawatts in 2002, it increased a staggering sixfold. Worldwide, wind turbines now supply enough electricity to satisfy the residential needs of 40 million Europeans.

Wind is popular because it is abundant, cheap, inexhaustible, widely distributed, climate-benign, and clean–attributes that no other energy source can match. The cost of wind-generated electricity has dropped from 38¢ a kilowatt-hour in the early 1980s to roughly 4¢ a kilowatt-hour today on prime wind sites. Some recently signed U.S. and U.K. long-term supply contracts are providing electricity at 3¢ a kilowatt-hour. Wind Force 12 projected that the average cost per kilowatt hour of wind-generated electricity will drop to 2.6¢ by 2010 and to 2.1¢ by 2020. U.S. energy consultant Harry Braun says that if wind turbines are mass-produced on assembly lines like automobiles, the cost of wind-generated electricity could drop to 1-2¢ per kilowatt hour.

Although wind-generated electricity is already cheap, its cost continues to fall. In contrast with oil, there is no OPEC to set prices for wind. And in contrast to natural gas prices, which are highly volatile and can double in a matter of months, wind prices are declining.

Another great appeal of wind is its wide distribution. In the United States, for example, some 28 states now have utility-scale wind farms feeding electricity into the local grid. While a small handful of countries controls the world’s oil, nearly all countries can tap wind energy.

Denmark leads the world in the share of its electricity from wind —20 percent. In terms of sheer generating capacity, Germany leads with 12,000 megawatts. By the end of 2003, it will have already surpassed its 2010 goal of 12,500 megawatts of generating capacity. For Germany, this rapid growth in wind power is central to reaching its goal of reducing carbon emissions 40 percent by 2020.

Rapid worldwide growth is projected to continue as more countries turn to wind. In addition to the early leaders —Denmark, Germany, Spain, and the United States— many other countries have ambitious plans, including the United Kingdom, France, Brazil, and China.

In densely populated Europe, the off-shore potential for developing wind is also being exploited. Denmark is now building its second off-shore wind farm, this one with 160 megawatts of generating capacity. Germany has some 12,000 megawatts of off-shore generating capacity under consideration.

Wind power is now a viable, robust, fast-growing industry. Cheap electricity from wind makes it economical to electrolyze water and produce hydrogen. Hydrogen is the fuel of choice for the highly efficient fuel cells that will be used widely in the future to power motor vehicles and to supply electricity, heating, and cooling for buildings. Hydrogen also offers a way of storing wind energy and of transporting it efficiently by pipeline or in liquefied form by ship.

With the wind industry’s engineering know-how and manufacturing experience, it would be relatively easy to scale up the size of the industry, even doubling it annually for several years, if the need arose. If, for example, crop-shrinking heat waves raise food prices and generate public pressure to quickly reduce carbon emissions by replacing coal and oil with wind and hydrogen, it will be possible to do so. If the need arises to shift quickly to hydrogen-fueled automobiles, this can be done by converting
gasoline-burning internal combustion engines to hydrogen with inexpensive conversion kits.

For energy investors, growth in the future lies with wind and the hydrogen produced with cheap wind-generated electricity. Solar cell sales are growing at over 30 percent a year and are likely to supply much of the electricity for the 1.7 billion people who are still without electricity, most of them living in developing country villages. But solar cells are still too costly to supply the vast amounts of energy required to power a modern economy.

World coal burning peaked in 1996 and has fallen 2 percent since then. It is a fading industry, not an exciting investment prospect. Nor is oil particularly promising, since world production is not likely to expand far beyond current levels. Production of natural gas, the cleanest and least climate-disruptive of the fossil fuels, is likely to continue expanding for a few more decades, fortuitously developing an infrastructure that can be adapted for hydrogen. Nuclear power generation is expected to peak soon, when the large number of aging plants that will be closing down will exceed the small number of plants that are under construction.

The energy future belongs to wind. The world energy economy became progressively more global during the twentieth century as the world turned to oil. It promises to reverse direction and become more local during the twenty-first century as the world turns to wind, wind-generated hydrogen, and solar cells. Wind and wind-generated hydrogen will shape not only the energy sector of the global economy but the global economy itself.

Originally Published: June 25, 2003
(http://www.earth-policy.org/Updates/Update24.htm)
Reproduced here by Permission of Earth Policy Institute
Copyright © 2003 Earth Policy Institute