Wind Energy Plan Released by the Department of Energy

The Department of Energy released a plan to power twenty percent of the nation's electrical needs by the year 2030.¹ This plan is fully detailed in a report that is available for readers by clicking here. The basics of the plan are right up front, and are simple: the United States has plenty of wind energy available for harvest, the technology exists to harvest the energy, and there are sufficient reserves of manpower and materials available to develop the goal. The report also answers a lot of questions about wind power. This article is written with the aim of getting a few of those answers in a single place for readers.

Question One: What about the Cost of Wind Power? Doesn't it cost more to produce?

Wind power does actually cost more to produce than other methods. There are a lot of reports that show wind power costs about seven cents per kilowatt-hour. To put it in practical terms of wallets and dollars, and do a little math: say it takes one kilowatt to roast a turkey in a home oven. That means a home that gets its power from a wind farm just paid seven cents to burn dinner. Not bad for one wallet. Seven cents from wind is only two cents per kilowatt more than from regular power plant sources. But when you put it in terms of dollars, that two cents per kilowatt is actually a forty percent jump in energy costs. How to beat the problem in the short term? The answer to the cost of wind energy is actually already made into a law. The Federal Government has passed a tax credit for wind energy producers.² The amount of the tax credit is a predictable two cents per kilowatt. Now wind energy can compete, with no cost passed directly on to consumers.

Question Two: How can we keep the Wind Farms from killing migratory birds?

Believe it or not, there are serious risks to migrating birds when wind farms are in their way. Considering some of the migratory birds are also endangered, it would not look very good for an environmentally friendly technology to be making mincemeat of birds that are already having trouble trying to survive. There are several treaty-level agencies in the United States and Canada that are addressing the concerns for this issue, and are working to reduce the hazard to birds. It also helps that larger turbines are slower, rotating at 14 turns per minute, and are noisy. Given that most birds already have excellent eyesight, the simple fact that slower blades means more time for the birds to see them. Also, the blades on these things are up to ninety feet long, and most birds are able to resolve the blades at the slower speeds long before they strike the blades. Other methods, such as choosing a site for a wind farm carefully, lower the risk to migrating birds even before the first turbine spins on its tower.³

Question Three: What does "distributed energy" mean? Is that another way of saying wind farm?

Distributed energy actually describes any form of energy that requires a lot of space to generate. The number most power plants try to reach in terms of ability to generate is one gigawatt. That is one thousand megawatts. So, for wind farms to reach this number, using an industry standard machine, rated at 1.5 megawatts, it would take seven hundred wind turbines. That means about four acres per windmill, or about 3000 acres, just for the space to build the towers and put up the farm. So you have all these machines sitting there, spread out - or, distributed all across the site, gathering energy. Then you would have to link all of the machines to the power grid separately, to get their power to market. That is the basic problem with wind energy: one wind farm requires several miles of power lines, just to link all the machines together and get the total energy going to one place. This need for a lot of space, and extra costs associated with it, is the main reason wind energy is seven cents per kilowatt, instead of five.

These questions are just the basic questions members of the public are asking about wind power. Look for more reports about the progress of wind energy and the development of oil-busting technologies from this reporter in the future.

Sources for this article:

1. United States Department of Energy, Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, http://www1.eere.energy.gov/windandhydro/wind_2030.html, Jan. 2009

2. United States Department of Energy, 20% Wind Energy by 2030, Increasing Wind Energy's Contribution to U.S. Electricity Supply, United States Department of Energy, July,2008.

3. Michael Morrison, The Role of Visual Acuity in Bird-Wind Turbine Interactions, California State University, Sacramento, 2000