U.S. Department of Energy Releases Wind Energy Report

The U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory released its Wind Energy report today in which the organization shares the results of its latest study into issues regarding increased wind energy integration into the energy grid. Based on the results of the study, Americans may soon start to see increased attention surrounding wind energy projects.

According to the report, researchers see "no fundamental technical barriers to the integration of 20 percent wind energy into the electrical system." However, the lab not only studied technical issues, but also operational and economic factors that could impact increased wind energy integration.

While there are no fundamental technical barriers, researchers found that "transmission planning and system operation policy and market development need to continue to evolve in order for these penetration levels to be achieved." In other words, increased wind energy integration could be costly and an operational nightmare.

The good news is that the increased costs of energy transmissions from wind sources to the power grid could be paid for by the resulting reduced expenditures on fossil fuel costs. Moreover, increased wind energy could displace carbon-based fuels, which would result in a reduction in harmful carbon dioxide emissions. Studies already indicate that carbon dioxide emissions are declining as wind generated energy is added to the energy supply.

Strong outlook for wind energy farms

While the construction of personal wind turbines may be a potential energy-saving option for many Americans, the DOE report suggests that the true future of wind energy lies in wind turbine farms, such as wind turbine farms that speckle the American Midwest and western states, as well as nations in northern Europe.

The development of wind turbine farms could not only provide a localized and predictable source of wind energy, but wind farms could also help to make interconnection costs more manageable;

Interconnection-wide costs for integrating large amounts of wind generation are manageable with large regional operating pools, because increasing the geographic diversity of wind power projects in a given operating pool generally makes the aggregated wind power output more predictable and less variable, while also reducing the variation in load and increasing the number of generation assets that can be committed and dispatched. [source: http://www.greenchipstocks.com/articles/doe-wind-report/725]

Aggressively adding wind energy sources to the current power grid will be a significant expense, but, researchers say, these expenses comprise only a small amount of the total annual power system costs.

How this applies to you

If you are not able to build your own wind turbine, there are a number of other ways that you can begin to use more renewable energies. In addition to wind energy, there are other technologies becoming increasingly more available to consumers that are have the potential to replace fossil fuels and create cleaner, more sustainable energy solutions. These technologies include solar, geothermal, and biofuel solutions.

Sources:

http://www.greenchipstocks.com/articles/doe-wind-report/725