Wind Power

Accord­ing to the U.S. Depart­ment of Ener­gy, can pro­vide more pow­er than the entire nation’s elec­tric­i­ty needs. The plains states (north­ern Texas up to the Dako­tas) have been called the Sau­di Ara­bia of wind. Wind pow­er has become increas­ing­ly cost-com­pet­i­tive with con­ven­tion­al fuels over time, as wind prices drop and depletable fuels get more expensive.

Mod­ern wind tur­bines can pro­duce more and more pow­er (cur­rent­ly, and usu­al­ly pro­duce 1.5 to 2 megawatts each, though some can do much more, espe­cial­ly off-shore turbines.

North and South Dako­ta alone have enough wind ener­gy from its high­est wind speed sites to sup­ply over half of the elec­tric­i­ty needs of the low­er 48 states. A group of 12 states in the mid­sec­tion of the coun­try have enough wind ener­gy poten­tial to pro­duce near­ly four times the amount of elec­tric­i­ty con­sumed by the nation in 1990.

Accord­ing to the Amer­i­can Wind Ener­gy Asso­ci­a­tion in 2014, near­ly 900 util­i­ty-scale wind projects – which rep­re­sent over 60,000 megawatts – are installed across 39 U.S. states and Puer­to Rico.

In Jan­u­ary 2014, accord­ing to the Ener­gy Infor­ma­tion Admin­is­tra­tion, wind pow­er ful­filled 4.8% of U.S. elec­tric­i­ty needs, mak­ing it the 5th largest source of pow­er after coal, gas, nuclear and hydro.

World­wide, it’s been demon­strat­ed the there is enough wind pow­er to pow­er the entire earth­’s population:

• Eval­u­a­tion of glob­al wind pow­er report (Jour­nal of Geo­phys­i­cal Research — Atmos­pheres, Sep­tem­ber 2004) 

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Prob­lems with Indus­tri­al Wind Power

Cor­po­rate con­trol and centralization:

As with oth­er forms of ener­gy, wind pow­er is large­ly done at indus­tri­al scale, with giant ener­gy com­pa­nies con­trol­ling the mar­ket and approach­ing com­mu­ni­ties in unde­mo­c­ra­t­ic ways to build wind at large scale.  Our pref­er­ence is for small­er-scale wind pow­er that is com­mu­ni­ty owned and controlled.

Rare earth met­als in wind turbines:

About two tons of neodymi­um are used for per­ma­nent mag­nets in each wind tur­bine.  The min­ing of this rare earth met­al is tox­ic and dan­ger­ous and most­ly occurs in Chi­na.  Neodymi­um is not essen­tial, how­ev­er, and we should be encour­ag­ing the use of neodymi­um-free wind tur­bines.  For exam­ple, Ener­con has been using wound field rotors and no per­ma­nent mag­nets in their direct dri­ve tur­bines for decades, and they are the most vis­i­ble tur­bines in Europe. 

On the prob­lems with neodymi­um, please read:

• Boom in Min­ing Rare Earths Pos­es Mount­ing Tox­ic Risks (Jan 2013)
• In Chi­na, the true cost of Britain’s clean, green wind pow­er exper­i­ment: Pol­lu­tion on a dis­as­trous scale (Jan 2011)

Bird Kills:

Many have expressed con­cern about bird kills from wind tur­bines. Wind tur­bines kill an aver­age of about two birds per tur­bine per year. To put this in per­spec­tive, the Unit­ed States could get half its elec­tric­i­ty from wind pow­er and the bird fatal­i­ties would be less than 1 per­cent of the num­ber of birds U.S. house­cats kill each year. At sites in south­west­ern Penn­syl­va­nia and West Vir­ginia, how­ev­er, sig­nif­i­cant­ly large num­bers of bats have been killed by wind tur­bines. The indus­try is study­ing the mat­ter to fig­ure out how to pre­vent this.

Amer­i­can Bird Con­ser­van­cy (sup­ports “bird-smart” wind devel­op­ment as an impor­tant solu­tion to glob­al warm­ing, and puts the threats to birds in context)

• Birds and Col­li­sions (shows that wind pow­er, in 2013, killed an esti­mat­ed 573,000 birds, which is 0.05% to 0.12% of all birds killed by the total of wind pow­er, com­mu­ni­ca­tion tow­ers, pow­er lines and buildings/glass)
• Wind Ener­gy Fre­quent­ly Asked Ques­tions (shows that if wind pro­vid­ed 20% of U.S. elec­tric­i­ty needs, it would kill about 1,000,000 birds per year. If 100% of U.S. elec­tric­i­ty was pow­ered by wind, this trans­lates to 1% of all birds killed by the total of wind pow­er, com­mu­ni­ca­tion tow­ers, pow­er lines and buildings/glass, and would still be the small­est of these causes.
• ABC’s posi­tion on glob­al warm­ing and Coal Extrac­tion and Ener­gy Pro­duc­tion Impacts on Birds
• Amer­i­can Bird Conservancy’s Pol­i­cy State­ment on Wind Ener­gy and Bird-Smart Wind Guidelines
• Glob­al Warm­ing Fact­sheet (“Between 20–30% of all species are at an increased risk of extinc­tion if aver­age tem­per­a­tures increase more than 2.5°C.”)

Bats, on the oth­er hand, have been a seri­ous prob­lem.  The indus­try is find­ing ways to min­i­mize harm to bats.

• Wind Tur­bines Kill More Than 600,000 Bats A Year. What Should We Do? (Pop­u­lar Sci­ence, Nov 2013)
• 8 Ways Wind Pow­er Com­pa­nies Are Try­ing to Stop Killing Birds and Bats (Moth­er Jones, Jan 2014)

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More on Wind Ener­gy and its Potential

• Clean Ener­gy Solu­tions (links to stud­ies show­ing how we can meet all of our ener­gy needs with con­ser­va­tion, effi­cien­cy, wind, solar and ener­gy storage)
• Amer­i­can Wind Ener­gy Association
• U.S. Depart­ment of Energy: 
  • Wind Pow­er­ing America
  • Wind Maps of the U.S. (old­er maps here)
  • Nation­al Wind Tech­nol­o­gy Cen­ter (Nation­al Renew­able Ener­gy Laboratory)
    
    
    
  • Could wind pow­er ever meet the world’s ener­gy needs? (Wash­ing­ton Post, Sept 2012) 
    • Geo­phys­i­cal lim­its to glob­al wind pow­er (2012 study cit­ed by above article)

From: An Assess­ment of the Avail­able Windy Land Area and Wind Ener­gy Poten­tial in the Con­tigu­ous Unit­ed States (Pacif­ic North­west Lab­o­ra­to­ry, 1991) ” Esti­mates of the elec­tric­i­ty that could poten­tial­ly be gen­er­at­ed by wind pow­er and of the land area avail­able for wind ener­gy have been cal­cu­lat­ed for the con­tigu­ous Unit­ed States. The esti­mates are based on pub­lished wind resource data and exclude windy lands that are not suit­able for devel­op­ment as a result of envi­ron­men­tal and land-use con­sid­er­a­tions. Despite these exclu­sions, the poten­tial elec­tric pow­er from wind ener­gy is sur­pris­ing­ly large. Good wind areas, which cov­er 6% of the con­tigu­ous U.S. land area, have the poten­tial to sup­ply more than one and a half times the cur­rent elec­tric­i­ty con­sump­tion of the Unit­ed States. Tech­nol­o­gy under devel­op­ment today will be capa­ble of pro­duc­ing elec­tric­i­ty eco­nom­i­cal­ly from good wind sites in many regions of the country. …To pro­vide 20% of the nation’s elec­tric­i­ty, only about 0.6% of the land of the low­er 48 states would have to be devel­oped with wind tur­bines. Fur­ther­more, less than 5% of this land would be occu­pied by wind tur­bines, elec­tri­cal equip­ment, and access roads. Most exist­ing land use, such as farm­ing and ranch­ing, could remain as it is now.”   From: Wind Ener­gy Resources (Nation­al Wind Coor­di­nat­ing Com­mit­tee, Jan 1997) “The Unit­ed States is for­tu­nate to pos­sess one of the largest wind ener­gy resources in the world. The amount of ener­gy the­o­ret­i­cal­ly avail­able for use has been esti­mat­ed at as much as 40 times the cur­rent U.S. ener­gy con­sump­tion. Of course, only a small frac­tion of this poten­tial could be used because of con­straints on avail­able land for wind pow­er plants, lim­its on the effi­cien­cy of ener­gy extrac­tion, cost, sit­ing issues and oth­er fac­tors. Even after tak­ing these fac­tors into account, var­i­ous stud­ies sug­gest nonethe­less that wind has the poten­tial to sup­ply any­where from 10 per­cent to 40 per­cent of U.S. elec­tric­i­ty needs. …They found that the windi­est areas (class 5 and above) could sup­port enough wind pow­er capac­i­ty to pro­vide 18 per­cent to 53 per­cent of the elec­tric­i­ty con­sumed in 1993. The low­er fig­ure rep­re­sents the most severe assump­tions of land use exclu­sion, while the upper fig­ure rep­re­sents no exclu­sions at all. Most of the prospec­tive sites in these class­es are con­cen­trat­ed in the Great Plains states. In con­trast, class 3 and 4 areas are dis­trib­uted much more wide­ly around the coun­try and, accord­ing to the study could sup­ply from 1.7 to 6 times the cur­rent U.S. elec­tric­i­ty demand.