Showing posts with label wind power. Show all posts

Written by fatih al-farahat in ,


NYT: Wind Power Grows 39% for the Year

Wind Power Grows 39% for the Year

Turbines outside Sweetwater, Tex. Wind power was helped by the stimulus package passed a year ago, but growth may slow.(Brian Harkin for The New York Times)
by JAD MOUAWAD, New York Times, January 26, 2010 
 
 Despite a crippling recession and tight credit markets, the American wind power industry grew at a blistering pace in 2009, adding 39 percent more capacity. The country is close to the point where 2% of its electricity will come from wind turbines.


While that is still a small share, it is up from virtually nothing a few years ago. Continued growth at such a fast pace could help the nation lower its emissions of the gases that cause global warming.

The American Wind Energy Association, in its annual report to be released on Tuesday, said the amount of capacity added last year, 9,900 megawatts, was the largest on record, and was 18% above the capacity added in 2008, also a banner year.

The group said the growth of wind power was helped by the federal stimulus package that passed a year ago, which extended a tax credit and provided other investment incentives for the industry.

But the group warned that the growth could slow. Much of the wind development in 2009 was caused by momentum from 2008, as huge turbines ordered then were delivered to wind farms. In 2009, the recession idled many manufacturers and new orders weakened, which could portend an installation slowdown this year.

“The U.S. wind industry shattered all installation records in 2009, and this was directly attributable to the lifeline that was provided by the stimulus package,” said Denise Bode, the trade association’s chief executive. “The second half of the year was extraordinary. But manufacturers didn’t see much growth because they had built up so much inventory.”

About as much new power-generating capacity came from wind as from natural gas last year, Ms. Bode said. Together, new wind and natural gas projects accounted for about 80 percent of all new generating capacity added in the country.

The wind industry has undergone rapid growth in recent years. Since 2002, the country’s installed base of wind turbines has jumped almost sevenfold.

Even so, the American industry has lagged behind Europe, which gets about 5% of its electricity from wind. The European Commission has set an ambitious mandate to achieve 20% of electrical production from wind and other renewable sources by 2020. Denmark has essentially achieved that goal already, and sometimes produces more wind power than it can use.

Last year, China also outlined plans to more than double the country’s wind capacity by the end of this year by investing $14.6 billion, with rapid growth planned through the end of the decade.

Concerns about global warming have sparked interest in renewable power in the United States and spurred the creation of a domestic manufacturing industry that now employs 85,000 people. Today, about half the components used in wind farms are made in the United States, compared with 25% in 2004, the trade group said.

Much of the growth is attributable to state laws that mandate that a portion of the local power come from renewable sources. But many hurdles remain in getting to 10 or 20% wind power nationally.

Wind investors have called for long-distance transmission lines between the nation’s wind-intensive regions, mostly in the Great Plains and Texas, and its biggest population centers, mostly on the coasts. The lack of such transmission is seen as a major obstacle to further expansion.

“It is not a question of lack of resources,” said Tim Stephure, an analyst at Emerging Energy Research, a consulting firm in Cambridge, Mass. “Unlike the federal highway system or the national gas system, there is a huge lack of federal oversight for electricity. This is something that will take time, while the need for the industry is now.”

Still, the potential for wind is enormous. Mr. Stephure said that by 2020, wind’s installed capacity could be five times higher than it is today, reaching about 180,000 megawatts.

The industry has also called on Congress to pass a federal mandate requiring that a certain percentage of power come from renewable sources. Such mandates are already in place throughout the European Union and in China. In the United States, 29 states have adopted such a renewable power standard.

“The wind manufacturing sector has the potential to employ many more Americans in green jobs, but without a renewable electricity standard to provide a long-term market, the sector will be slow to grow,” the trade group said in its report.

The nation’s wind turbines generate enough electricity to power the equivalent of 9.7 million homes, according to the report. Last year, Texas consolidated its lead as the nation’s top wind producer, with a total capacity of 9,410 megawatts, about three times more than the second-largest producer, Iowa. They were followed by California, Washington and Minnesota.

Link:  http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/26/business/energy-environment/26wind.html

Written by fatih al-farahat in , ,


Not So Windy

Not so fast folks. Here again a sketchy bit of data is tagged and allowed inferences that are at best self serving. Do you really think that had the speed increased that it would not also be seen as positive evidence of global warming?

They have discovered that the present set of data collection devices show a range of variance that may justify investigating the placement of the devices and their wind exposure history and significant cultural changes over the past thirty years. Did the trees also grow?

Slowing wind speed, if real, may explain the increase in tornados for example as convection cells have less chance to dissipate.

In the event we are trying to explain variances in huge macroscopic atmospheric flows that also have shown a decadal scale movement whose drivers are not fully understood. Thus my own musings about atmospheric heat masses in order to maintain some perspective in the real scales applied.

The Northern hemisphere did warm up over at least two decades and maintained heat content for another decade and has now begun cooling. Those three simple assertions appear reasonable and uncontroversial. Applying any of that to the detail is instantly controversial.

Not so windy: Research suggests winds dying down

6/10/2009, 5:26 a.m. ET
SETH BORENSTEIN
The Associated Press

http://www.cleveland.com/printer/printer.ssf?/base/national-3/124463459133860.xml&storylist=washington

(AP) — WASHINGTON - The wind, a favorite power source of the green energy movement, seems to be dying down across the United States. And the cause, ironically, may be global warming-the very problem wind power seeks to address.

The idea that winds may be slowing is still a speculative one, and scientists disagree whether that is happening. But a first-of-its-kind study suggests that average and peak wind speeds have been noticeably slowing since 1973, especially in the Midwest and the East.

"It's a very large effect," said study co-author Eugene Takle, a professor of atmospheric science at Iowa State University. In some places in the Midwest, the trend shows a 10 percent drop or more over a decade. That adds up when the average wind speed in the region is about 10 to 12 miles per hour.
There's been a jump in the number of low or no wind days in the Midwest, said the study's lead author, Sara Pryor, an atmospheric scientist at Indiana University.

Wind measurements plotted out on U.S. maps by Pryor show wind speeds falling mostly along and east of the Mississippi River. Some areas that are banking on wind power, such as west Texas and parts of the Northern Plains, do not show winds slowing nearly as much. Yet, states such as Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Kansas, Virginia, Louisiana, Georgia, northern Maine and western Montana show some of the biggest drop in wind speeds.

"The stations bordering the Great Lakes do seem to have experienced the greatest changes," Pryor said Tuesday. That's probably because there's less ice on the lakes and wind speeds faster across ice than it does over water, she said.

Still, the study, which will be published in August in the peer-reviewed Journal of Geophysical Research, is preliminary. There are enough questions that even the authors say it's too early to know if this is a real trend or not. But it raises a new side effect of global warming that hasn't been looked into before.

The ambiguity of the results is due to changes in wind-measuring instruments over the years, according to Pryor. And while actual measurements found diminished winds, some climate computer models-which are not direct observations-did not, she said.

Yet, a couple of earlier studies also found wind reductions in Australia and Europe, offering more comfort that the U.S. findings are real, Pryor and Takle said.

It also makes sense based on how weather and climate work, Takle said. In global warming, the poles warm more and faster than the rest of the globe, and temperature records, especially in the Arctic, show this. That means the temperature difference between the poles and the equator shrinks and with it the difference in air pressure in the two regions. Differences in barometric pressure are a main driver in strong winds. Lower pressure difference means less wind.

Even so, that information doesn't provide the definitive proof that science requires to connect reduced wind speeds to global warming, the authors said. In climate change science, there is a rigorous and specific method-which looks at all possible causes and charts their specific effects-to attribute an effect to global warming. That should be done eventually with wind, scientists say.

Jeff Freedman, an atmospheric scientist with AWS Truewind, an Albany, N.Y., renewable energy consulting firm, has studied the same topic, but hasn't published in a scientific journal yet. He said his research has found no definitive trend of reduced surface wind speed.

One of the problems Pryor acknowledges with her study is that over many years, changing conditions near wind-measuring devices can skew data. If trees grow or buildings are erected near wind gauges, that could reduce speed measurements.

Several outside experts mostly agree that there are signs that wind speed is decreasing and that global warming is the likely culprit.

The new study "demonstrates, rather conclusively in my mind, that average and peak wind speeds have decreased over the U.S. in recent decades," said Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University.

A naysayer is Gavin Schmidt, a NASA climate scientist in New York who said the results conflict with climate models that show no effect from global warming. He also doubts that any decline in the winds that might be occurring has much of an effect on wind power.

But another expert, Jonathan Miles, of James Madison University, said a 10 percent reduction in wind speeds over a decade "would have an enormous effect on power production."

Pryor said a 10 percent change in peak winds would translate into a 30 percent change in how much energy is reaped. But because the research is in such early stages, she said, "at this point it would be premature to modify wind energy development plans."

Robert Gramlich, policy director at the American Wind Energy Association, said the idea of reduced winds was new to him. He wants to see verification from other studies before he worries too much about it.