Blow, baby, blow – wind energy takes hold
Wind turbines in Iraan, Texas
Out in West Texas on Highway 10, there’s a whole lotta nothin’. I know, because on a family trip to New Mexico and Colorado in August, we had hours to enjoy the scenery. But outside Iraan, Texas, a strange vision arose – the mesas and hills in the distance were lined with wind turbines. If it wasn’t real life, you’d almost think it was Photoshop.
They marched for miles in single file, giant vanes slowly turning in the West Texas wind. There are more than 100 in all, run by the Desert Sky Wind Farm. The turbines produce 160.5 megawatts, enough, according to company information, to provide power to 40,000 homes.
According to Hoover’s First Research, US wind energy installations, mostly situated in the South and West, produce 35,000 megawatts, which can power more than 9 million homes. That’s still a drop in the bucket of the US’s energy needs, but the good news is, price per kilowatt hour is about 5 cents, which makes it competitive with coal or gas-fired power plants.
So why is it still such a small part of the US’s energy resources? Wind energy remains controversial, with critics saying that it can only compete with traditional oil and coal industries because of government subsidies, which hides the true cost of the energy it produces. Environmentalists are concerned about dangers to migratory birds. Neighbors who have to live next to wind farms complain that they are unsightly, noisy, and lower property values. Developers ignore the NIMBY (Not In My BackYard) factor at their peril. But probably the two biggest obstacles to widescale acceptance of wind energy are the hardest nuts to crack: consistency and storage.
Even in West Texas, the wind will stop blowing. When that happens, energy stops flowing to power plants and thence to customers. That’s a nuisance when the energy is going to residences, say. It can be devastating when a hospital loses power. As a result, many utilities that buy wind power will penalize providers when production falls or stops, says First Research.
Consistency would not be as much of an issue if engineers could solve the storage problem. Scientists are working on developing batteries with high enough capacity to store the energy produced by wind farms and solar plants, which have the same problem with consistency.
Remember those subsidies I mentioned above? They lower the cost of wind energy, but developing a wind farm is still expensive. According to First Research, a 50 MW wind farm can cost about $65 million. Duke Energy just pulled out of a proposed North Carolina wind farm due to high costs.
Despite all these issues, wind has a role to play in energy production in this country. Maybe it becomes a regional solution, concentrated on the coasts to capture wind from the sea, or in the middle of the country, like in Iraan, to catch the winds that drive the tumbleweeds in the Old West. We already have separate grids, which turned out to be a good thing in 2003 when the Northeast suffered an epic blackout but the rest of the country was unscathed.
As wind becomes more established, costs per kilowatt hour will continue to drop. Advances in technology, whether in construction or storage, will increase efficiency and production.
And as for the NIMBYs, well, maybe they will become converts. A Connecticut town has just approved home wind turbine regulations, anticipating the day when residents have their own individual turbines.
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