A new report from the Department of Energy claims that wind turbines could generate 300 gigawatts by 2030, which would power about 20 percent of the US electrical grid.
The forecasting scenario would require tremendous growth in the wind industry, which currently produces about 17 gigawatts of electricity, or a little over one percent of total capacity.
All by itself, such a change could reduce carbon dioxide emissions from electricity generation (think: coal and natural gas plants) by 25 percent and drop water consumption by four trillion gallons. These benefits could be achieved at a cost of about six bucks per person a year, say the report's authors.
"To dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions and enhance our energy security, clean power generation at the gigawatt-scale will be necessary, and will require us to take a comprehensive approach to scaling renewable wind power," said Andy Karsner, the DOE's assistant secretary of energy efficiency and renewable energy in a release.
Currently, fossil fuels generate 85 percent of American energy, and about 70 percent of our electricity. Renewables (outside hydroelectric dams) are only responsible for a couple percent of our current electricity capacity. However, wind power has been expanding rapidly, growing 45 percent in 2007, as its cost has become competitive with traditional fossil fuel sources.
Major business players from General Electric to oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens have gotten behind its deployment. Pickens, for example, is planning a $10 billion, 4-gigawatt peak production wind farm. A major driver of these investments is the price of oil, which is sitting over $120 a barrel, with long-term futures contracts also over $100 a barrel. The cost of natural gas is pegged to the price of oil, so rising oil costs make alternative energy investments more attractive. At the same time, scaling wind technologies is bringing their price down.
But there are major questions about the actual electricity production that wind farms put out. As many wind critics point out, four gigawatts of wind power isn't the same as four gigawatts of coal because the wind isn't always blowing, reducing their average watt ouput. Many grid engineers also think wind is a nightmare because it is so inconsistent, a problem that mass deployment of wind will make more and more apparent.
It's worth noting that while the Department of Energy paid for the 248-page report, it did use information from a Black and Veatch consulting report commissioned by the American Wind Energy Association. The full report is available at 20percentwind.org.
Yet among the current renewable options, wind and solar thermal appear to be the only technologies that could produce power at the utility-scale. Traditional solar photovoltaics have long payback times and are even trickier for the dumb electric grid to handle than wind.
While the report is certainly a milestone for envisioning a cleaner energy future, the US remains many steps away from implementing a cohesive energy policy that would drive major innovation in the systems that produce and deliver energy around the country.
Sure, we need clean power sources, but we need a grid that can handle a more diverse set of power sources. For both solar thermal and wind, that's going to mean new transmission lines, unless a technology like Google-backed eSolar's neighborhood-scale solar thermal plants take off.
We need smart meters that make it easier to install small-scale distributed power for consumers who can make the significant up-front capital investment in solar panels. Then we need a smarter grid overall. I've been speaking with a lot of folks working on this problem.
Last Friday, I heard some exciting ideas from Roland Schoettle, CEO of grid management software company Optimal Technologies . He told me that by optimizing the way that power moves around the grid, utilities could switch off (at least) 10 percent of their power generation. Why? Right now, they have to generate more power than the actual electrical load, just in case. Better visibility into the grid would allow companies to run their operations with less slack. Also, a supply-side efficiency play doesn't require the huge capital investment that new wind farms do.
What's incredible: it's going to take a major overhaul of the electrical infrastructure just to meet rising demand! Add in the need for replacing dirty generation with renewables and you see why prominent investors say that clean tech is going to be bigger than the Internet and the only hope for the US economy.
Image: fickr/Kevin Dooley.
