Wind power project with Vestas turbines

Written by G.F. Klein

In the remote northwest Kansas farming county of Wichita, where a dwindling population of 2,400 people produce corn and wheat, one thing is constant: the wind.
And the wind will transform Wichita County.

This month an international energy company, the Danish-based Vestas-American Wind Technology Inc., will begin constructing 33 towers, each more than 200 feet high, spread through Wichita County’s farmland. Each tower holds a three-bladed wind turbine that can produce three megawatts of electric energy.

When it is completed this year, the wind farm will produce enough energy to power 65,000 homes, provide thousands of dollars to farmers who lease their land for the turbines, bring in 130 short-term construction jobs and several long-term, high-paid workers to service the towers, and add nearly $250,000 a year in additional tax revenue for the county government.

And it will do it all without burning any fuel that produces greenhouse gas pollution or nuclear waste.
“Last year, close to a third of new electricity generation built in the United States came from wind,” said Jens Soby, head of Vestas’ North American operation. “An investment of close to $8 billion created tens of thousands of new jobs. The driver for this is the same the world over – the rapid need for new clean and cost-efficient energy. Wind is delivering on that.”

With a 23 percent market share, and 35,000 wind turbines installed, Vestas is the world’s leading supplier of wind power solutions.

In the just the past few years, wind energy has taken off around the world. Last year was the third in a row that new records were set for new wind production. More than 20,000 megawatts was installed worldwide, up from 15,000 in 2006.

Last year, the United States, China and Spain led the way in new production. Now, with nearly 17 megawatts of capacity, the United States is the second largest producer of wind energy, trailing only Germany, which produces 22 million megawatts.

Yet the United States still only produces 1 percent of its electric energy by wind. Tiny Denmark gets about 20 percent. That leaves a lot of room for growth.

Xcel Energy, one of the nation’s largest electric utilities, provides power in Minnesota, Texas, Colorado, Michigan, Wisconsin and New Mexico and is a leader in wind power, using it to produce 7 percent of its electric power.

“Our shareholders wanted us to address global warming,” Mark Stoering, an Xcel vice president, said. “So did our regulators and our customers.”

Now the company is producing 2,700 megawatts with wind, and it has an additional 3,400 megawatts on the drawing board. It also is exploring alternative ways of delivering wind energy, including how to store it in batteries and how to use it to produce hydrogen fuel.

“It’s amazing how this industry is exploding,” said Randall Swisher, executive director of the American Wind Energy Association. “We may have had a big year in 2007, but it’s nothing to what is coming down the pike.”

The growth has come, he said, even though Congress has not yet addressed global warming with programs that will increase the cost of carbon-based fuel. When that happens, he said, wind will be even more economically attractive.

Just how much wind energy will be produced in the United States is still uncertain. While there is enough potential wind energy to supply all of the nation’s electric demand, Swisher said, five key constraints on the industry’s growth still must be overcome before wind provides a substantial percentage.

1. The federal government needs to create a stable, consistent policy on how it will encourage wind power. Now, a tax credit gives the impetus for investors to consider wind energy production. But the credit expires every couple of years. Right now Congress is considering a new energy tax plan that would renew it again. While a wind energy tax plan has broad support on Capitol Hill, the outcome of the energy tax plan is still uncertain. Failure to renew the tax credit could stop the industry’s rapid growth

2. Wind energy is plentiful far from population centers. But transmission lines to carry that power are limited and new construction is controversial as people complain about unsightly high tension wires. The United States has not invested in transmission infrastructure. A nationwide high voltage transmission system capable of delivering 400 gigawatts of wind energy to the country would cost about $60 billion.

3. Wind is not reliable. If it is not blowing, turbines are not turning. A utility company that wants to generate 20 percent of its power from wind must be plugged into a large power grid of hundreds of generators that can quickly offset the loss of power if the wind dies. That probably means having a lot of small natural gas- powered generators or hydroelectric power that can be activated quickly.

4. Generating a large percentage of power from wind means building a lot of huge wind turbines – perhaps more than 100,000. In places like the Great Plains or Texas with huge agricultural expanses, people usually don’t mind turbines in remote areas. But try putting towers in highly populated or scenic areas, such as New England mountaintops, and objections quickly arise. The nation needs to have a rational regulatory permitting process. Wind producers will need to work closely with community groups to alleviate problems, and they need to work with wildlife groups such as the Audubon Society to mitigate the damage of wind generators to migrating birds.

5. Building a lot of wind generators will require new industry to construct the gear boxes, drive trains and nuts and bolts required for the construction. While that could give a boost to American manufacturing, quality control will be key.

“If we can overcome these constraints, then watch out,” Swisher said.
For the short term, wind-energy advocates are watching what Congress does in extending the production tax credit. It is a key component to developing wind’s potential, they say, and every time Congress lets it expire, production plummets.

Now it is tied up in an energy tax bill that has had difficulty garnering the necessary 60 votes in the Senate. At issue is not whether wind production should get a tax credit, but whether tax breaks for the oil and gas industry should be cut to pay for it.

“Without that extension a lot of investment will not happen,” said Vestas’ Soby.

An economic study by Navigant Consulting released in February found that more than 116,000 jobs in the United States and $19 billion in investment could be lost in just one year if Congress does not extend renewable energy tax credits. About 76,000 of those would be in the wind industry and the rest in solar.
Soby said his company is opening a blade manufacturing plant in Windsor, Col., that will employ 600 workers directly and hundreds more in companies that supply it. The United States has some of the best wind resources in the world, he said, yet investment here is still limited.

“It is amazing the opportunity in the US,” he said, “yet we have not gotten the full political support.”
Several Midwestern states are going after wind energy as a way to promote economic development. Texas, which has seen its oil production dry up threatening the existence of many small towns, now produces 3 percent of electricity with wind.

Last month Michigan Gov, Jennifer Granholm complained that her state was “a backwater” in promoting renewable energy and urged the state legislature to approve quickly a bill requiring the state to generate 10 percent of its electric power from renewable resources by 2015.

And that reliability question? Wind may be free, but it does come and go. On hot, still summer afternoons when demand for energy is highest, production may be at its lowest.

Big public utilities say they can plan for that variability in wind, and some of them are turning to a Minnesota-based research company, Windlogics, for help.

Windlogics uses supercomputers to give wind production companies and electric utilities a better idea of where to build turbines and what to expect their output to be on a yearly, daily and even hourly basis.
Six years ago, this was not even a business for the company that specializes in weather information. Now wind projections consume 95 percent of its effort. The company can crunch a hundred years of weather data to look at wind trends.

“Wind is influenced not just by geographic location, but by the terrain, the land cover, even the roughness of the trees,” said Windlogic’s Mark Ahlstrom. “It’s a big issue. The difference in putting a turbine in a place where the wind speed is on average one mile per hour faster than another place is about 30 percent of your annual revenue.”

Back in Wichita County, economic development director Sharla Krenzel sees this as the hope for the county’s future.

“We have rich soil and we can grow corn and wheat,” she said “Now we can harvest the wind.”