In Perspective - Wind Power

Since it has gotten cold and the north wind is chilling our bones I thought it might be time to mention wind power. Though I joke that we could stop global warming if we could shut off the hot air from Washington or if we tapped the wind from the blowhards in politics, the serious point is that wind energy is a real source of power. The most important factor for wind power is location, location, location. There are places in the U.S. that are ideal for wind energy while others places are not as good, but can still produce energy. As an example North Dakota has the highest potential for wind power with a projected 1,210 billion KWh/yr while New York ranks 15^th with a potential of 62 billion KWh/yr. The top 20 states have the potential of producing 10, 470 billion KWh/yr or to put a substantial dent into our energy consumption.

Another advantage to wind power is the possibility of creating jobs. Jobs depleted industries such as the auto, aerospace, construction, and even the appliance industry can be revived to produce turbines, infrastructure and maintenance needs. Not only is it a national job creator, but could be an international job creator. The possible wind generation around the world is massive. The U.S. needs to catch up with the European Union in wind turbine manufacturing before we lose any competitive edge.

One of the concerns is the payback on building a wind turbine. Several studies have looked at this question over the years. These studies have concluded that wind energy has one of the shortest energy payback times of any of the energy technologies. A wind turbine takes only a few months, depending on the average wind speed at its site, to return the energy needed for its fabrication, installation, operation, and retirement. Not only is the ROI quick, but the time to install wind turbines is short. While nuclear plants can take up to 10 years just to build, wind turbines can be up and running in less than a year.

One other thing that makes wind power appealing is the turbine sizes. There are wind turbines that start at less than $1,000 that generate about 300 watts making them easily affordable for residential use. But the disadvantage is the NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) effect. There are stories that the wind turbines create sound waves that drive people crazy. Most of these articles can be traced to one informal study by a Nina Pierpoint and there hasn’t been any peer reviewed studies to substantiate the claims.

Another complaint of the wind turbine is the impact on birds, but studies show that most wind farms have little impact on bird populations. As a matter of fact, many more birds are killed by reflection from windows in buildings than are killed by the turbines.

The big criticism of wind is its consistency. Technology has addressed this issue with a variety of storage devices. A couple of the simpler technologies are pumping and flywheel storage. Pumping storage takes the wind energy and uses it to pump water to a high elevation of storage or use it to compress air and then the water or compressed air is used to generate power. The flywheel is similar, it uses the wind energy to turn a very large flywheel and then the flywheel motion is used to generate power. There are also other technologies such as using the wind energy to create hydrogen and then the hydrogen is burned to create power. Chemical storage is also being developed, battery technology on a very large scale.

Wind is a viable energy source that is inexpensive, pollution free and sustainable. Though it may not be the answer to all of our energy needs, it does provide an opportunity to reduce our need for fossil fuels while providing much needed jobs. In some cases it even allows us to become independent of large utilities while reducing our dependence on imported energy.

http://www.awea.org/faq/

http://www.nrel.gov/wind/