Powering the Future: A Scientist's Guide to Energy Independence

by Daniel B. Botkin

  If two-thirds of truck production were diverted to manufacturing wind turbines, the industry could build ~100,000MW/yr. Thus, it is theoretically possible that the American heavy truck industry could provide 1,000,000 MW in about one decade.

  Clearly one million MW of wind capacity in the United States alone is an ambitious target, but it’s a target worthy of a great nation.9

  The largest wind energy facility in the world is the Horse Hollow Wind Energy Center near Abilene, Texas, owned and operated by Florida Power & Light. It has 421 wind turbines with a total generating capacity of 735 megawatts, enough to meet the electricity needs of approximately 220,000 homes. Figuring an average of about three people per household, this would be enough electricity for all domestic use in Austin, Texas, a city of about 650,000.10 The Horse Hollow wind turbines are spread widely across approximately 47,000 acres, so the land is used for ranching and energy production.11, 12

  FPL states that wind energy installation costs $1.5–2.0 million per megawatt, in the same cost range traditionally estimated for a coal-fired power plant, but about twice the $800,000 cost of electrical generators powered by natural gas.13 (Note, however, that in Chapter 3, “Coal,” I point out that the cost of building coal-fired power plants is increasing rapidly, with estimates as high as $3.50 per installed watt.) Thus wind energy is cheap, working out to about $1.50–2.00 to install each watt of capacity, or about $150–200 to install enough generating capacity to run a 100-watt lightbulb indefinitely. And of course once installed, wind turbines require no fuel purchases, so FPL can produce electricity from wind energy for between 4.5¢ and 7.5¢ per kilowatt-hour. 14,15,16

  U.S. fossil-fuel electrical power plants have a total capacity of 754,989 megawatts. With installation costs of $2 million a megawatt, it would cost about $1.5 trillion to replace all fossil-fuel electrical production with wind energy. But consider this: According to Nobel Laureate Economist Joseph E. Stiglitz, the true cost of the Iraq war will be $1–2 trillion, based on the federal budget office’s acknowledgment that $500 billion has already been spent and taking into account the lifetime health care of severely wounded soldiers, among other factors.17 Thus, for the cost of the Iraq war, the United States could have installed enough wind turbines to produce all the nation’s electricity. I discuss this in greater detail in Chapter 13.

  This, of course, is subject to the major technological constraint on wind energy: that the wind bloweth where it listeth—it isn’t windy all the time. One of the crucial issues is therefore storage and transportation of energy, a problem that also confronts nuclear power plants (which do best if they operate at maximum output all the time), water power, and solar energy. There are solutions, which we explore in detail in Chapter 13. The Beluga Sky Sails points to one solution: Use fossil fuels and nuclear power to even out the energy supply, moving to wind and other alternative sources for the majority of our energy. It is worth pointing out here that the simplest solution is to improve the electrical grid and distribute wind turbines widely, since when it’s calm in one location, it’s likely to be windy in another.

  The answer to the question of whether wind energy can play a major role on the world stage is yes. Since we know it can provide all the electrical energy that the world’s greatest energy user needs, obviously it can be a major player. But here’s some additional information about the status of wind energy worldwide.

  Global wind energy capacity

  Globally, the wind-energy picture is similar to that in the United States, with total wind-generated electrical capacity growing rapidly (Figures 6.4 and 6.5). Wind energy is used in more than 70 nations, with the greatest use in the United States, Spain, and China.18 It provides just 5% of Germany’s electricity, but in some nations it provides 40% of the energy.19 By 2007, the world’s wind-energy generation had reached 93.8 million kilowatts, producing 200 billion kilowatt-hour per year. However, this is only 1.3% of global electricity consumption.

  Figure 6.4 Total worldwide installed wind energy capacity.20 (World Wind Energy Association (WWEA), www.wwindea.org)

  Figure 6.5 Top ten nations in wind power. (Source: World Wind Energy Association website, http://www.wwindea.org/home/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=198&Itemid=43&limit=1&limitstart=3)

  How far along is wind power?

  In recent years an important step was taken in developing wind energy by assessing the wind-energy potential of each area of the United States (see the later Figure 6.6). In the United States in the late 20th century, interest in wind power, as well as the potential for it, was concentrated in California and dismissed broadly elsewhere as another one of those oddball California fads, perhaps talked about on Haight Street in San Francisco or at weekend concerts in Golden Gate Park. Wind energy was believed to be great enough for commercial electrical production only along coasts or in mountain passes that funneled between hot deserts and the cool Pacific in California, Oregon, and Washington. Thus, two of the places where modern wind turbines were first installed, in the 1970s and 1980s, were Altamont Pass, east of San Francisco near Livermore, California, and Tehachapi Pass, east of Los Angeles (Figure 6.3).

  Figure 6.6 U.S. wind resources map (Source: U.S. Department of Energy/National Renewable Energy Laboratory, www.eere.energy.gov/windandhydro/windpoweringamerica/)

  Two start-up companies, Zond and U.S. Windpower (later Kenetech), dominated 1980s wind energy development in the United States, competing with Danish and Japanese machines. Unfortunately, the U.S. approach suffered from three problems. The first was that few people took wind power seriously. Second, the machines were underdesigned, not strong enough for powerful winds and storms. And third, wind power engineers believed that this kind of energy would be limited to coastlines and areas with unusual topographic features that focused the wind, like the canyons mentioned above between the hot deserts of eastern California and the cool Pacific shore.

  Although wind machines of that time looked sleekly modern, the public didn’t realize there was anything else radically different between them and the farm windmills of the Great Depression that pumped water for poor rural people. However, there was a hint of something different at Altamont Pass, where hundreds of large windmills were controlled by a roomful of first-generation Apple computers. Indeed, the potential for wind energy in the modern technological age stemmed as much from computers and solid-state electronic devices—along with some new materials, including fiberglass and carbon fibers—as it did from the conviction of 1980s environmentalists that we had to move away from fossil fuels.

  A serious problem with modern wind machines is that they cannot completely shut themselves down automatically in high winds. They have a complex set of brakes, transmissions, and computers that slow and try to stop the blades when they spin too fast, but it is always possible that the machines will “run away,” meaning that the winds will become so powerful so quickly that the braking mechanisms don’t have time to work. When that happens, the turbines spin faster and faster, destroying the braking mechanisms and eventually blowing themselves and the entire structure apart and scattering their huge blades over the countryside. At U.S. WindPower, when a machine ran away, everybody just cleared out until the machine destroyed itself—it was too dangerous to stick around.

  The problem was well known, but U.S. WindPower nevertheless tried to save money and underbuilt its machines. As a result, too many blew apart at the installations, and by the 1990s the company went out of business. Zond, mostly an installer, not a designer, of wind machines, held on for a while but was bought out in 1997 by Enron, and its demise became part of Enron’s tragedy.21

  After the demise of Zond and U.S. WindPower, no major American company focused on windmills. Boeing and General Electric had a few government contracts and built a few gigantic, unwieldy machines. One on the east coast of Oahu in Hawaii was so huge and heavy that its blades hardly seemed to move—you had to stare at it for a while to be sure they were turning. Understandably, these never led beyond gover
nment research contracts.

  Although wind energy went through a dry spell in the United States, Japanese and Danish companies continued to build and improve the new computer-based, light-material machines, making inroads in the U.S. Once the center of science, engineering, and technological innovation—Fulton’s steamboat, Edison’s lightbulb, Bell’s telephone, the Wright brothers’ airplane, the first atomic reactor, the first windmill to generate electricity, and one of the first large hydroelectric facilities—the U.S. disappeared as a player in one of the great technological opportunities at the end of the 20th century. A growing market, a likely source of profit, was lost to us, in good part because Americans simply did not take wind power seriously. The big oil corporations didn’t help—we can only surmise, not prove, that this was because it was not in their interest for Americans to move away from fossil fuels.

  Then an amazing thing happened. Wind energy turned out to be cheap, its electricity economically competitive even with coal-fired power plants. And engineers found, to their surprise, that California did not have a corner on windiness in North America, nor did coastal areas. If they’d been talking to ranchers and farmers in the Dakotas and Texas, they would have realized sooner what all the ranchers and farmers knew—that the western Great Plains are a windy place. Farmers could have told them the old story that it’s so windy in North Dakota that when the wind stops all the chickens fall over. Specifically, new studies showed that wind energy is also high in the western states just east of the Rocky Mountains—eastern Montana, Nebraska, Colorado, and New Mexico—and in the Midwest, especially Minnesota, North and South Dakota, Missouri, Oklahoma, and the Texas panhandle (Figure 6.6 and Table 6.1).

  Table 6.1 The Top Ten Wind Power States (Megawatts Capacity)

  Between 1999 and 2008, wind power generation capacity in the United States increased sixfold to more than 16,000 million watts.22 More than 30 states have wind turbine installations, and some of the largest of these are in Texas. The two largest are the Horse Hollow Wind Energy Center, in the countryside near Abilene, Texas, with a capacity of 735.5 megawatts, and the recently completed Roscoe Wind Farm near Roscoe, Texas, with a capacity of 781.5 megawatts. The Sweetwater Wind Farm in the southern end of the panhandle has about two-thirds the capacity of Horse Hollow. Other large ones in Texas are the King Mountain, and Desert Sky.

  California also continues to have some of the biggest wind installations, including the Tehachapi Pass Wind Farm (690 MW); San Gorgonio Pass Wind Farm, almost as big, in Palm Springs (which claims to be the only major wind farm that offers tourists a guided tour); and the famous Altamont Pass Wind Farm near Livermore.

  New York State has one very large installation, the Maple Ridge Wind Farm (198 MW) in Lowville, west of the Adirondack State Park, east of Watertown and Lake Ontario.23

  Many European nations are committed to wind energy, including Britain, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, and Sweden. Denmark, where many of the world’s wind turbines are manufactured, has some of the world’s largest installations, including Nysted Wind Farm, a joint Danish–Swedish project, the largest offshore wind farm in the world, and Horns Rev (160 MW).24 Also impressive is Spain’s use of wind energy. A major milestone was reached for world wind energy on April 19, 2008, when wind produced more than one-third of Spain’s total electricity production; nuclear power was second.25 Germany generates 5% of its electricity with wind turbines.26 Elsewhere, Australia has a large installation, the Waubra Wind Farm,

  In sum, the technology is ready to harness the Earth’s cheapest alternative energy source, and installations are increasing, but there is a long way to go before wind becomes one of America’s and the world’s major sources of electricity. The potential is there, waiting for investments.

  Wind power for rural areas, for the poor, for single-family homes, and for less-developed nations?

  With all the concern about global climate change and the need to find global solutions, the usefulness of alternative energy sources for the rural and the poor is often forgotten. But people in many parts of the world lack the easy access to energy that those who live in industrial nations take for granted—as someone has said, “The people in that country were so poor, they didn’t even have cell phones!” (And to think, on top of that, they didn’t have easy access to electricity either.) As I discuss in the Chapter 9, “Biofuels,” many African nations lack such access, and obtaining energy for cooking and heating and for minimal healthiness is difficult and time-consuming. Wind energy is rescuing some of these individuals.

  In rural Malawi, 20-year-old William Kamkwamba used diagrams he found in an old book to build three windmills, using plastic pipes that he flattened for blades, a basic structure of wood from local trees, and moving parts from bicycles (Figure 6.7).27 One of his windmills was 39 feet high, as high as a four-story building. It powered ten small lightbulbs, a TV set, and radio, all of which made a major change in his life and his family’s. Not only could his sisters study for school late into the night, but his windmills became a local attraction and have taken him from a hobby to his primary work. He went on to build a windmill large enough to pump water for his village of 60 people and another to provide electricity for the local school. At his home he then added a manufactured windmill and photovoltaic solar panels, and he is putting another manufactured windmill in Lilongwe, Malawi’s capital.

  Figure 6.7 William Kamkwamba and a windmill he built in Malawi. (© 2009 Tom Reilly, www.movingwindmills.org)28

  Kamkwamba describes how he built the first windmill. “My problem was that I didn’t have much money to buy parts to construct the windmill. Over time, I found materials that had been discarded by other farmers or by the nearby tobacco plantations, and I bought a few parts with money I scraped together: 500 Kwacha (Malawian currency) or $2.75 (US $1=145 Kwacha) for two bearings; 500 Kwacha for a bicycle dynamo (the kind that powers a bike’s light when you ride the bike); 400 Kwacha for a fan belt; 800 Kwacha for a bicycle frame.” In sum, he spent about $15.

  This is the kind of self-help project that economists concerned about development want to see. Thinking back to Chapter 4 on water power and the 20th-century emphasis on large, expensive, and centralized hydroelectric dams, you might ask why the World Bank, whose stated purpose is to alleviate poverty and promote economic development, isn’t spending its money on these relatively inexpensive local projects initiated by individuals, rather than on large projects such as the Nam Theun 2 hydroelectric dam in Laos. That dam, you will remember from Chapter 4, is displacing local residents rather than helping them and is primarily going to provide electricity not for Laotians but for export.

  I asked that very question back in the 1980s when I was a consultant to the World Bank concerning biological diversity. I was told by a Bank official that it had a problem dealing with small projects since its staff couldn’t get job promotions if they were bogged down handling a lot of small stuff that didn’t amount to much on their resumés. What did they consider a small project? Anything under $100 million.

  Mr. Kamkwamba has been getting some help from a comparatively small entrepreneurial group that calls itself Technology Entertainment Design. His story, although unusual and impressive, is not unique. Wind and solar energy offer remarkable new potential for self-help in undeveloped nations.

  And don’t count the United States out of the market for small wind turbines—less than 100 kilowatts. In 2005, small windmills provided a total of 30 megawatts generating capacity (only about half a percent of the total generating capacity of fossil fuels). In 2007, 6,807 small windmills were sold in the United States, adding a total generating capacity of 17 MW. Buyers paid a total of $56,082,850 for these, an average of $8,239 each, or $3,197 per installed kilowatt.

  This market is growing 14–25% a year. The payback period—how long it takes for the value of the energy generated to equal the amount invested in purchase and installation—varies from 6 to 30 years for small wind turbines, depending
on how good the location is for wind energy, the costs of purchasing energy commercially, permitting costs, and the energy efficiency of the turbine. Naturally, the cost per kilowatt-hour is greater for small wind turbines than for larger machines on large wind farms since the latter benefit from economies of scale. Current costs of generated electricity for these small wind turbines are about 10¢ to 11¢ per kilowatt-hour—about twice the cost of electricity produced on one of the large wind farms.

  According to the American Wind Energy Association, the major markets for small wind turbines in the United States are in California, New York, Vermont, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas, Maine, and Arizona.

  [These states have favorable] policies, regulations, and incentives [that] are conducive to making small-wind installations practical, cost-effective, and simply feasible. Costs of traditional electricity and wind resource quality are also important factors....However, without conscientious zoning, permitting, and grid-interconnection regulations in place, rebate and incentive programs have no platform upon which to grow the market and streamline production. Small Wind is poised to play an important role globally to supply clean, affordable, and local power to end-users, and Small Wind’s long history shows that the industry is capable of overcoming obstacles it faces. Geopolitical, climatic, and economic forces ... will continue to drive demand, but the industry’s maturation and accelerated growth are largely dependent on U.S. policy at the national, state, and local levels. As the U.S. lags behind world competitors in other renewable energy technologies, Small Wind remains the only major U.S.-dominated clean energy technology. With the right policies in place, Small Wind could lead the U.S. into a stronger position in the global energy paradigm.29