Can the U.S. achieve 20% wind energy by 2030?

On Monday, May 12, the U.S. Department of Energy released its long-awaited report on wind energy 20 Percent Wind Energy by 2030. Fortunately, two weeks ago the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) accepted my media credentials from epluribusmedia.org, allowing me to attend a special seminar and workshop in Des Moines, Iowa, on the supply chain problems and opportunities of an incipient boom in wind generated electricity.

Wind has the potential to meet most if not all of U.S. electricity needs within the next two to three decade, if - IF - we can surmount significant obstacles caused by the "post-industrial" neglect and withering of the U.S. manufacturing base.

Contrary to the unrealistic beliefs of many who yearn for clean energy, heavy industry is absolutely essential to the development of wind powered electricity generation. For example, 114 tons of steel are required for every megawatt of wind energy installed. In fact, the wind turbines now being developed and brought on line are mammoth industrial projects, that dwarf a Boeing 747 passenger jet in size. But only half the content of a wind turbine can now be made in the U.S. We are at the dawn of a new age of clean, renewable energy, but if we are to realize the full potential of this new era, there is no getting around the need to rebuild U.S. heavy industry and manufacturing.

First, let’s get an idea of the scale we’re talking about. The photo below is of a 1.5 megawatt (MW) wind turbine generator built by Suzlon, a company that began in India not that long ago, in 1995.

Source: Suzlon Energy Ltd., www.suzlon.com

As you can see, these wind turbines are not your grandfather’s windmills. If you look closely, you will see there are two technicians standing atop the nacelle which is a surprisingly large and crowded working space crammed full of heavy machinery, including the actual generators that produce electricity.

The next two pictures are from the presentation by Daniel Laird, of Sandia National Laboratories. They show how wind turbines have grown in size and capacity from the first Kenetech wind turbines developed and deployed in California in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Source: Sandia National Laboratories

Source: U.S. Department of Energy report 20 Percent Wind Energy by 2030

Laird noted that while the modern wind turbine was developed in the 1970s in California, a lack of interest and support by the federal and state governments allowed the cutting edge of wind technology to shift to Europe in the 1980s and 1990s. Encouraged by a more stable investment climate deliberately created by favorable government policies, a number of European companies emerged, which have increased the size of a typical commercial wind turbine from about 20 meters in tower height to 100 meters; from 25-30 meters rotor diameter to 70-100 meters; and from 100 kilowatts (KW) electricity output from to 5 megawatts (MW).

Today, the country with the most installed wind turbine capacity is Germany, with 22,247 MW. By installing a record 5,244 MW of new wind generated electricity capacity in 2007, the U.S. grew to 16,618 MW (just under 17 gigawatts or GW), overtaking Spain’s 15,145 MW to take second place. AWEA is proudly boasting that 2007 is the first year over one percent of U.S. electricity production was wind generated.

Today, the optimum size for land-based wind turbines appears to have settled at 1.5 MW to 2.5 MW, while offshore wind turbines of up to 5 MW are now being developed, deployed and tested. Wind turbines over 2.5 MW are simply too large to be moved and constructed on land.

Jim Walker, Vice President of renewable energy development company enXco and President-Elect of AWEA, noted that if U.S. installed capacity were the same as Germany’s per capita, the U.S. would have 43 gigawatts (GW) of wind turbine capacity installed now, instead of 17 GW. And if the U.S. had the same capacity as Germany per unit of land area, the U.S. would have 320 GW installed now. The state with largest amount installed is Texas, but it is Iowa that leads in proportion of total electricity produced by wind, with 5.5 percent. And if a transmission system would be put in place, Iowa could export four times the total electricity it needs. Montana and the Dakotas alone have enough wind energy potential to supply the entire U.S. demand for electricity.

Source: American Wind Energy Association, www.awea.org

The new U.S. Department of Energy report "20 Percent Wind Energy by 2030," – eagerly previewed by a number of speakers who contributed to it - calls for wind to supply 20 percent of U.S. electricity by the year 2030, a mandate laid down by President Bush's Advanced Energy Initiative announced in the 2006 State of the Union Address. The report pegs the cost at only a two percent marginal difference in the approximately $2.4 trillion the U.S. needs to invest to meet projected electricity demand of 2030.

Jeffrey Anthony, Manager of Utility Programs for AWEA, summarized a study of the national electricity transmission grid that was completed last year by American Electric Power (NYSE: AEP), one of the largest electric utilities in the United States. AEP owns 39,000-miles of transmission lines, the nation’s largest electricity transmission network, and its study focused directly on the possibility of wheeling wind-generated electricity from the windy but sparsely populated high plains states to the densely populated Great Lakes states and further east. The good news is that we do NOT need to build an entirely new electricity transmission system. The bad news is that there is a lot of work that needs to be done, at an estimated cost of $60 billion, and there is a regional patchwork of federal and state regulations and policies that now stand as obstacles because it was designed for the era of centrally located large generation plants. The AEP study was incorporated into the DOE 20 Percent Wind Energy by 2030 report, which states:

When determining whether it is more efficient to site wind projects close to load or in higher quality wind resources areas that are remote from load and require transmission, the WinDS optimization model finds that it is often more efficient to site wind projects remotely. In fact, the model finds that it would be cost-effective to build more than 12,000 miles of additional transmission, at a cost of approximately $20 billion in net present-value terms. Much of that transmission would be required in later years after an initial period where generation is able to use the limited remaining capacity available on the existing transmission grid. Transmission required for the 20% Wind Scenario can be seen in the red lines on the map in Figure 4-10. The red lines represent general areas where new transmission capacity would be needed, in addition to the existing transmission grid illustrated by green lines. As a point of comparison, more than 200,000 miles of transmission lines are currently operating at 230 kV and above.

Source: U.S. Department of Energy report 20 Percent Wind Energy by 2030

It is only since 2005 that the United States has become the world’s largest market for new wind turbine generators. In 2007, the nearly 6 MW of new wind power accounted for 35 percent of all new electricity generating capacity installed in the U.S. (wind was second only to new power plants burning natural gas). To achieve 20 percent wind by 2030, the construction of new wind turbine generators needs to be increased five-fold.

But there simply is not enough manufacturing capacity to build new wind turbines at that rate. Already, crucial manufacturing shortcomings in certain wind turbine components are limiting production and creating a rapidly growing backlog of orders. Randall Swisher, Executive Director of AWEA, told workshop attendees that if you ordered a new wind turbine generator today, you would have to place a sizable deposit in cash, and wait at least two years for delivery. This was confirmed by a number of other speakers.

A small Danish firm, BTM Consult ApS is widely regarded by those within the wind energy industry as having the best analysis of world market demand and global supply chain capabilities and problems.  In 2005, BTM ranked the world’s largest wind turbine makers by megawatts installed:

Source: BTM Consult ApS

In 2007, there were 3,188 new wind turbines installed in the United States, for an additional 5,244 MW capacity. These required 9,564 rotor blades; 17,425 miles of steel rebar, between two and three percent of total U.S. steel production, and 805,000 cubic yards of concrete. The total weight of a wind turbine is 230 to 340 tons. 89.1 percent of that is steel. 5.8% is glass-reinforced plastic (almost all for the rotor blades); 1.6% is copper, 1.3% concrete, and 1.1% is adhesives. The remaining 0.4% is aluminum and various other materials. These ratios are expected to shift slightly as designs are refined and new materials, such as advanced permanent magnets, are introduced.

The cost of a typical wind turbine is 80 to 85 percent equipment; construction 8 to 9 percent; construction labor 1 to 2 percent; and other 5 to 6 percent. The other includes substation, interconnection, and payments to land owners.

A 2006 report by the Renewable Energy Policy Project, Wind Turbine Development: Location of Manufacturing Activity, lists 21 major components for a wind turbine. The report identifies the associated six-digit North American Industrial Classification System (NAICS) code for each component, and provides technical descriptions of each part.

Source: Renewable Energy Policy Project, Wind Turbine Development: Location of Manufacturing Activity

The nacelle houses the following major subcomponents:

1. Low Speed Shaft and High Speed Shaft

2. Gearbox

3. Coupling

4.  Bearings

5. Mechanical Brakes

6. Electrical Generator

7. Power Electronics

8. Cooling Unit

9. Yaw Mechanism and Four-Point Bearing

10. Electronic Controller(s)

11. Sensors

Wind turbine design has generally settled on a rotor with three blades as providing the best balance of high rotation speed, load balancing, and structural and construction simplicity.
The major subcomponents of the rotor are:

12. Rotor Blades

13. Pitch Drive

14. Extenders

15. Hub

The tower includes:

16. Rolled Steel Tubes

17. Flanges and bolts joining each section (in 2007, 1.557 million bolts were required, and each bolt weighs from twenty to thirty pounds)

18. A concrete base serving as a stable foundation for the turbine assembly

Finally, a wind turbine installation requires some components that are not physically part of the wind turbine. These include:

19. Electrical collection system: transformer, switchgear, underground and overhead high voltage cable, and interconnecting substation

20. Control system: control cable, data collection, and wind farm control station

21. Roadway, parking, crane pads and other civil works

A 1999 pdf document by Bonus AG of Denmark,  The Wind Turbine: Components and Operation, also provides an excellent overview of the design considerations and mechanical components involved in wind turbine generators. This is an excerpt, which should give you some idea of the manufacturing processes involved for what is actually one of the simpler components:

The main shaft of a wind turbine is usually forged from hardened and tempered steel. Hardening and tempering is a result of forging the axle after it has been heated until it is white-hot at about 1000 degrees centigrade. By hammering or rolling the blank is formed with an integral flange, to which the hub is later bolted. The shaft is reheated a final time to a glowing red, following the forging process, and then plunged into a basin of oil or water. This treatment gives a very hard, but at the same time rather brittle surface. Therefore the axle is once again reheated to about 500 degrees centigrade, tempering the metal and thereby enabling the metal to regain some of its former strength.

The table below is from the new DOE report, 20 Percent Wind Energy by 2030, which

describes the raw materials required to reach manufacturing levels of about 7,000 turbines per year. This analysis assumes that turbines will become lighter and annual installation rates will level off to roughly 7,000 turbines per year by 2017 and continue at that rate through 2030. Approximately 100,000 turbines will be required to produce 20% of the nation’s electricity in 2030.

Source: U.S. Department of Energy report 20 Percent Wind Energy by 2030

Page 67 of 20 Percent Wind Energy by 2030 is a map and complete list of all the manufacturing facilities in the U.S. that produce components for wind turbines.

Raw materials are not a problem – with one exception, noted below. Just three years ago, only 20 percent of the content of a wind turbine was manufactured in the United States. At the AWEA workshop, speakers noted that the U.S. is now near providing fifty percent of the content. However, there are some components for which the U.S. has no production capacity at all – most notably generators. Even GE Wind Power is importing wind turbine generators from abroad.

In the U.S., the other major production shortages besides generators are:

1. Gearboxes

2. Large Bearings

3. Castings

4. Cranes and trained crew for on site erection and construction

Another major shortage is in skilled personnel. Britt Theisman of AWEA noted that wind turbine generator operations and maintenance service providers have not fully matured yet, and that most turbines are still under the warranty of their manufacturers. Currently, the U.S. has about 2,500 people trained for wind turbine operations and maintenance, but the 20 by 2030 goal will require 70,000.

This shortage of skilled personnel extends beyond wind power to ell power sources in general. 20 Percent Wind Energy by 2030, notes on pages 70-71 that  "One concern is that the number of students in power engineering programs has been dropping in recent years. Currently, U.S. graduate power engineering programs produce about 500 engineers per year; in the 1980s, this number approached 2,000."

Source: U.S. Department of Energy report 20 Percent Wind Energy by 2030

Looking more closely at the manufacturing bottlenecks, gearboxes are a particular problem, no matter who the manufacturer is. A gearbox is required to step up the slow rotation of a wind turbine to a much higher rotation for input into a generator for production of electricity. Direct-drive of the rotor blade rotation requires much larger diameter synchronous-type generators, increasing the total head mass (THM) of a wind turbine, and greatly complicating the transport and installation of the nacelle. (A fuller discussion of this technical trade-off is available in the section "Development of Variable-Speed Technologies and WTG Generators" in the Industry Canada Study of Supply-Chain Capabilities in the Canadian Wind Power Industry.) Presently, wind turbine gearboxes are lasting an average of only five years, rather than the desired design life of twenty years. With low speed and high torque, wind turbines present the exact opposite design problem gear and bearing manufacturers have been faced with for the past 110 years of the automobile age: internal combustion engines have high speeds but relatively low torque. A May 2007 report by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Improving Wind Turbine Gearbox Reliability, found that

Most gearbox failures do not begin as gear failures or gear-tooth design deficiencies. The observed failures appear to initiate at several specific bearing locations under certain applications, which may later advance into the gear teeth as bearing debris and excess clearances cause surface wear and misalignments. Anecdotally, field-failure assessments indicate that up to 10% of gearbox failures may be manufacturing anomalies and quality issues that are gear related, but this is not the primary source of the problem.

SNIP

A major factor contributing to the complexity of the problem is that much of the bearing design-life assessment process is proprietary to the bearing manufacturers. Gearbox designers, working with the bearing manufacturers, initially select the bearing for a particular location and determine the specifications for rating. The bearing manufacturer then conducts a fatigue life rating analysis to determine if the correct bearing has been selected for the specific application and location. Generally, a high degree of faith is required to accept the outcome of this analysis because it is done with little transparency.

Source: National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Improving Wind Turbine Gearbox Reliability

(A personal observation: high torque and low speeds were characteristics of stationary, marine, and railroad steam engines, which used soft metal for bearings before the development of ball or roller bearings.)

Joshua Magee, Research Director of Emerging Energy Research, a leading advisory and consulting firm on new energy technologies, noted that it is unlikely that any bearing manufacturer will devote itself exclusively to designing and manufacturing bearings for wind turbines, and that it is also unlikely that any wind turbine manufacturer will seek to include a bearing manufacturer in any plans for vertical integration. Leif Anderson of Suzlon said that wind turbine manufacturers can no longer expect to simply buy standard bearings. According to BTM Consult ApS, because of the many problems experienced with bearing failures, wind turbine manufacturers are wary of obtaining bearings from other than the two leading suppliers of large bearings, SKF of Sweden, and Schaeffler FAG / INA of Germany. The lead time for delivery of large bearings is up to 12 to 18 months.

In its December 2006 report, International Wind Energy Development: Supply Chain Assessment 2006-2010, BTM Consult ApS forecast world gearbox production capacity to increase from 15,000 MW in 2006, to somewhere between 21,435 and 32,150 MW by 2010. The largest gearbox maker in the world is Winergy, owned by Siemens, with around a third of the market. The next largest, with around a quarter, is Hansen Transmissions, a Belgian firm which was acquired by Suzlon a few years ago. The next two, with about a tenth of the market each, are Moventas (known as Metso Drives until 2005, located in Finland) and Bosch Rexroth, the result of a 2001 merger of a gear division of Robert Bosch GmbH, and Lohmann & Stolterforth, a division of Mannesmann Rexroth AG. The remaining gearbox manufacturers are Eickhoff GmbH (Germany), Echesa (Spain), Hyosung (South Korea), Chongqing (China) and Mitsubishi (Japan). Some of these companies have manufacturing facilities in the U.S., however only seven percent of world gearbox production capacity resides in North America.

At the AWEA workshop, Lars Moeller of Broadwind Energy (which began as TowerTech Holdings) described his firm’s recent acquisition of eight-decade old Brad Foote Gear Works, of Cicero, Illinois, and highlighted Broadwind’s goal of becoming the premier supplier of components for wind energy in North America. On April 22 Broadwind Energy announced that Brad Foote Gear Works had signed a three year contract with GE Transportation to provide gear sets for use in wind turbine gearboxes built in Erie, Pennsylvania. The announcement noted that the gearing components will be produced in Brad Foote's new 270,000 square foot facility, which nearly doubled Brad Foote's manufacturing space to about 600,000 square feet.

A surprisingly large number of gearbox failures have been traced back to design and manufacturing problems. The Steel Wind project, built on a former Superfund site of a decrepit steel mill in Lackawanna, New York, just south of Buffalo, produces a total of 20 MW, with a series of 2.5 MW Liberty turbines, produced by Clipper Wind, a subsidiary of the British company Clipper Windpower Plc. Each Liberty turbine has four generators in the nacelle, behind a very complex gearbox. These turbines were manufactured in late 2006 at Clipper Wind's new 330,000-square-foot facility in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and placed in operation at the Lackawanna shore of Lake Erie in April 2007, according to Clipper's Web site. Problems with the turbines’ gear boxes have already resulted in Clipper temporarily shutting down all but two of them. Clipper found that the problems resulted from incorrect timing of the gear sets, and has made the necessary quality control corrections to its manufacturing process.

Cut-away drawing of the drive train and four generators in the nacelle of the Clipper 2.5 MW Liberty Wind Turbines.
Source: Clipper Windpower Plc, http://www.clipperwind.com/...

The following two pictures are from the special Wind Turbine Photo Gallery web page of The Gear Works, a gear manufacturing facility specializing in precision gear products and power transmission services in Seattle, Washington since 1946. These photos show the scale of the industrial operations involved in manufacturing and rebuilding wind turbine components. And these are relatively small gearboxes, for wind turbines rated in the hundreds of kilowatts, compared to the gearboxes used in the larger megawatt-rated wind turbines.

Overhaul of gear train from US Windpower KVS-33 spindle assembly. Source: The Gear Works’ Wind Turbine Photo Gallery web page

Re-machining of Howden 330 KW gearcases. Source: The Gear Works’ Wind Turbine Photo Gallery web page

Bosch Rexroth has a particularly excellent picture of the internal components of a wind turbine on its web page of Gear Technology and Hydraulics for Wind Turbines. I recommend spending a few minutes there clicking on some of the components in Bosch Rexroth’s Flash presentation.

At present, the U.S. imports all its generators for wind turbines. 70% of the world’s generators for wind turbines are produced in Europe, and the remainder in Asia. None are produced in the United States, not even by General Electric, which, according to BTM Consult ApS, buys them from VEM Sachsenwerk GmbH of Germany, and Winergy / Loher GmbH, also of Germany. Of all the wind turbine makers, only Vestas and Enercon produce their own generators.

Source: The Wind Turbine: Components and Operation, by Bonus AG

Don McDivott of Spanish wind turbine maker and operator Acciona noted that the metallurgy of ductile iron in large castings has proven to be a great challenge. The hub, to which are bolted the rotor blades, and the mainframe of the nacelle, to which are bolted the gearbox, generators, supports for the mainshaft, electronic control panels, and so on, are two large components that must be cast. For a 1.5 to 2.0 MW wind turbine, the hub and the mainframe each weigh eight to ten tons.

The writers of the DOE report on 20 percent wind by 2030 are optimistic that the U.S. can easily mobilize the industrial capacity to meet the needs of this program, based on how successfully Toyota was able to build and grow auto manufacturing capacity in the U.S. Using Toyota as an example is an interesting irony, because as the five-year study of the world auto industry conducted in the mid-1980s by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, showed, Toyota had very unique management characteristics that are not shared by its U.S. industrial counterparts. Led by James Womack, the MIT study was released as the national bestseller The Machine That Changed the Word: The Story of Lean Production, and it showed that because Toyota and Japanese auto makers in general were much more respectful of their employees and suppliers, they benefited greatly from suggestions that originated on the factory floor.

By contrast, the management of U.S. auto makers were aggressively hostile toward their workers and suppliers, and scoffed at the notion that workers on the factory floor could offer any meaningful contribution other than their brute, raw, physical labor.  One statistic tells it all: U.S. workers at Chrysler, Ford, and General Motors plants in the U.S. submit 0.4 suggestions per worker per year; U.S. workers at Japanese plants in the U.S. submit four times as many, or 1.6 suggestion per worker per year. But each Japanese worker in a Japanese car plant in Japan submits an astonishing 64 suggestions per year. In other words, the Toyota system of production is 160 times more efficient than U.S. mass production at mobilizing the creative powers of human ingenuity at the lowest level of production. Workers may suggest small, incremental changes, but over time and given a large enough number, they can make for impressive results: at the time of the MIT study, Toyota could produce over 50 cars per employee each year, compared to only the 10 or 15 cars produced per each employee per year by U.S. automakers, and Toyota’s defect rate was one third that of the U.S.

U.S. automakers have striven mightily to catch up to Japanese levels of efficiency, productivity, and quality, but some two decades later, still lag behind. For over 20 years, U.S. automakers and U.S. industry in general have tried implementing a number of facets of the Toyota "lean production" system, such as just-in-time inventory control and concurrent design and production, but they have stubbornly refused to do anything but give lip service to "valuing their human assets." If anything, the United States economy and society have become more stratified and more ossified since the MIT study, with the arrogance and disdain of top management readily evident in the multi-million pay packages executives extract even while they drive their companies into the ground. It is doubtful that U.S. manufacturing capacity can be ramped up as rapidly and as easily as the DOE report writers would like to believe, without a serious attempt to honestly confront the anti-worker and anti-industry prejudices of U.S. managers, financiers, and environmentalists.  

This touches on the one great weakness of AWEA and the supply chain workshop: the failure to recognize that its greatest enemy is the grasping power of Wall Street and hedge fund financiers and usurers who have grown accustomed to double-digit returns on "investments." John Bogle, founder and retired CEO of The Vanguard Group of mutual funds, has estimated that the U.S. financial system is actually subtracting $540 billion in value from the U.S. economy (See Bogle’s discussion on Bill Moyers Journal.)

In a July 2003 paper, The Neoliberal Paradox: The Impact of Destructive Product Market Competition and Impatient Finance on Nonfinancial Corporations in the Neoliberal Era James Crotty, Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts / Amherst explains how the financialization of the U.S. economy – today, the equivalent of total U.S. Gross Domestic Product is traded in financial markets once every two to three days, compared to once every nine months in the early 1960s – has overwhelmed "patient" finance and allowed impatient financial markets to raise real interest rates, forcing nonfinancial corporations (NFC) to pay an increasing share of their cash flow to financial agents, drastically changing managerial incentives, and radically shortening NFC planning horizons. The result has been that over the past three decades, over half of NFC cash flows have been redirected to payments to financial markets, forcing industrial companies to rely on debt for expansion rather than self-financing.

Source: Source: James Crotty, in Financialization and the World Economy, edited by Gerald A. Epstein, 2005, p. 99.

Warren Buffett makes exactly the same point in his 2006 letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, where he relates the little parable about the Gotrocks, showing how the financial system continues to grow and grow eating up more and more of the real economy.

In the DOE report on 20 by 2030 there is a notable absence of any consideration of financing. The series of financial derivative market collapses which began last summer have led many people realize that unbridled financial markets are not really self-correcting, and may create more risks than benefits for the real economy. A concerted national political effort is required to force financial actors to cease expecting double-digit returns before we can achieve financial flows into industry and infrastructure at the levels required – trillions of dollars. We must also overcome the financial "portfolio" view of industrial organizations that sees companies as mere assets that can be broken apart, and bought and sold, rather than a complex web of relations between managers, employees, suppliers, and customers that must be carefully built and nurtured over many years. The recent announcement by Owens Corning that it is closing the 330-acre Vetrotex America glass fiber plant in Wichita Falls, Texas (which Owens Corning recently acquired from Saint-Gobain SA of France) – which eliminates nearly one fifth of North American capacity for producing fiberglass - should serve as a wake up call. According to Bob Lacovara, Senior Director of Technical Services for the American Composites Manufacturers Association, Owens-Corning will be able to easily replace the lost capacity of Vetrotex Wichita Falls by increasing production at its other facilities. But can we as a nation truly afford to shrug off such matters given our need to really begin a serious national effort to reduce our dependence on imported energy? As Sterling Newberry pointed out in his very prescient October 2007 piece, $100 a Bungle for Oil,

While the Arab world is far far behind the US now, a generation of sending them all our money can equalize things. There is no reason in genetics, society or science that the Arab world cannot become technically and economically capable of destroying the West, given enough money and time.

BTM Consult ApS forecasts the world’s cumulative installed wind turbine electricity capacity to triple from 59,264 MW in 2005 to 148,794 MW by 2010, with the strongest growth in Asia, particularly India and China. AWEA and others are keen to point out that continued growth in the United States depends on Congressional approval of Production Tax Credits (PTCs) for building wind turbine generators. Unlike Europe and Asia, the growth of U.S. wind power has been uneven and subject to severe downturns that have made manufacturers wary of investing in expanded production capacity. The dramatic collapses in new capacity installed for the years 2000, 2002, and 2004, seen in the graph below, shows the results of lack of government support. In those three down years, Congress allowed PTCs for wind energy to lapse without renewing them.

Source: U.S. Department of Energy report 20 Percent Wind Energy by 2030

David Drescher, vice-president of John Deere Wind Energy, a subsidiary of John Deere & Co. that develops major wind energy projects, told the AWEA work shop that PTCs account for one third of the revenues generated by a wind project in its beginning years. Drescher and a number of other speakers pointed out that in the U.S., PTCs for wind energy merely "level the playing field," given the extensive government support enjoyed by the oil, coal, gas, and nuclear power industries.

The current PTC, which has given us two historic annual increases in wind power capacity, will expire on December 31, 2008, and partisan conflict in both the House and Senate over how to pay for a new PTC are preventing movement forward. Here is another weakness of AWEA and the wind energy: the failure to squarely face the fact that the conservative ideology behind the Bush / Norquist tax cuts are bankrupting the country by grossly distorting financial rewards and flows, making it near impossible to plan for and implement goals and objectives of national importance. Perhaps one of the most important things an individual can do is to contact his or her Congressman and Senators, and demand a new Production Tax Credit for wind energy that will cover more than just one or two years, thereby providing some incentive and assurance for wind turbine manufacturers and the component manufacturers to begin vastly expanding their production capabilities.

Many speakers also emphasized the importance of Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS), which mandate that by a certain date a specified percentage of electricity must come from renewable sources such as wind. So far the federal government has not adopted a RPS, but over half the states have, with California, Texas, and Iowa leading.

What amount small wind, also called, distributed wind technology (DWT), that an individual homeowner or farmer might want to install? U.S. producers dominated the world market for these small wind turbines, which generally produce 1 to 1,000 KW. The basic problem with small wind is that the costs per kilowatt simply cannot compete with the massive, megawatt scale  wind turbines, because the construction costs must be amortized on one machine. As the DOE 20 by 2030 report notes, "For a 1-kW system, hardware costs alone can be as high as $5,000 to $7,000/kW. Installation costs vary widely because of site-specific factors such as zoning and/or permitting costs, interconnection fees, balance-of-station costs, shipping, and the extent of do-it-yourself participation."

In addition, distributed wind technology is limited by the heights it can reach. The power of a wind turbine is related to wind speed cubed, and the higher the altitude you can reach, the higher the wind velocity you find, and the bigger the power payoff you therefore achieve. Low altitudes in particular are a problem, because vegetation, topography, and man-made structures have enormous negative effects on wind at low altitude when it comes to generating power.

AWEA is holding its premier event, the WINDPOWER 2008 Conference & Exhibition, June 1-4 2008, in Houston, TX.

Note: I would like to thank Professor Ahmad Hemami and Program Director Al Zeitz of the Wind Energy and Turbine Technology Program at Iowa Lakes Community College in Estherville, Iowa, for taking the better part of an afternoon to introduce me to the technical fundamentals of wind industry. It was Professor Zeitz who told me about the American Wind Energy Association special supply chain seminar and workshop.

Wind Energy and Turbine Technology Program Director Al Zeitz, standing in front of a wind turbine hub and blade on the campus of Iowa Lakes Community College, April 2008

•  tips, flames, rants

  tip jar

  by NBBooks on Wed May 14, 2008 at 02:13:44 PM PDT

  •  Just in case anyone is wondering

    I'm not for getting to 20% wind energy by 2030.

    I'm for getting to 100%.

    Yeah, it'll cost $5 trillion or so. But the money is there. We just need to take it away from Wall Street and the hedge funds.

    I'm pretty tired of politics as usual. Cram the program down their throats. What have Wall Street and the hedge funds done for us, anyway?!

    by NBBooks on Wed May 14, 2008 at 02:22:40 PM PDT

    •  Good stuff, thanks for the post

      Thanks for taking the time to investigate this in such detail.

      Regards,
      Tom Gray
      American Wind Energy Association
      www.powerofwind.org
      www.awea.org

      by tomgray on Wed May 14, 2008 at 02:39:28 PM PDT

      •  Question to Tomgray and NBBooks

        or anyone here who is crazy enough to have gone through all this data and remained starry eyed to the end ;)
        what can i say, after line 2, i went brain dead, and i resorted to just look at the pictures.
        anyway, my husband and i have been looking for a wind turbine for domestic use for several years now - unsuccessfully.
        i found a company in England that ships such units, but i wouldn't even know what specs would work for our home, and all those other mundane yet crucial points that matter only until you're ready to install.
        my husband, the engineer, said that he saw a helio type wind turbine recently on t.v. off course, he couldn't remember where he saw it. we live on a mountain, surrounded by trees, solar panels wouldn't do much here.
        do you have any ideas of where i might look. what companies in America makes turbines for domestic use, if any. and what would i need to look for. we want to use it for electricity.
        thanks for the mind-numbing article. my husband will read it and droll over every bit of information, so really, thank you, and for any info. you or anyone else can help us with.

        by ladygreenslippers on Wed May 14, 2008 at 03:01:42 PM PDT

        •  Small turbines

          I suggest doing some homework--we have a very extensive site on small turbines at www.awea.org/smallwind .  Questions can be sent to [e-mail] and we will try to cope with them from there.

          Regards,
          Thomas O. Gray
          American Wind Energy Association
          www.powerofwind.org
          www.awea.org

          by tomgray on Wed May 14, 2008 at 03:04:55 PM PDT

        •  small wind - resources

          Chelsea Green Publishing has some good books on small wind, especially Paul Gipe's books Wind Power: Renewable Energy for Home, Farm, and Business
          and Wind Energy Basics: A Guide to Small and Micro Wind Systems
          http://www.chelseagreen.com/...

          The Small Wind page of the American Wind Energy Association is at
          http://awea.org/...
          There's a lot there, including a list of manufacturers.

          The major problem with small wind, as I understand it, besides the cost (how many people have 10,000 bucks laying around?) is getting the turbine blades high enough to capture some good wind. It really needs to be at least 30 feet high, minimally. Height really makes an huge difference. There's also a noise issue, but my understanding is that the newer machines have solved most of that problem with careful design of the rotor tips. Then there's the question of getting permits (big turbines require up to 100 different permits from various local, state, and federal government authorities). Last but not least, there is your local electric utility and how willing they are to do the special hook up if you're hoping to sell surplus electricity into the grid.

          by NBBooks on Wed May 14, 2008 at 09:33:31 PM PDT

    •  what do you have against solar?

      ramping up should be faster for solar, since it's a semiconductor process and work is in process for factories that will use a lithographic print process to mass produce cells.

      downside - doesn't work at night. but wind turbines don't work on windless days, either.

      i favor mixed wind-solar at this point and tying the regional grids into a national one. while there are load-balancing problems with intermittent power, we're a long way from the point where that can be an issue in the us.

      by alizard on Wed May 14, 2008 at 02:51:51 PM PDT

      •  Absolutely...

        ...there's no reason we can't do both.

        by Rex Manning on Wed May 14, 2008 at 02:57:34 PM PDT

      •  They're complementary

        We're going to need a quiver full of arrows of very different shapes to nail the targets we'll need to nail.

        Electricity can be priced according to availability at time of day. Cheapest will be around dawn, when the sun first becomes available at the same time that the ocean/land wind interchange is peaking.

        by nicteis on Wed May 14, 2008 at 03:01:06 PM PDT

      •  This diary was getting much too long

        so there were many matters and issues that I left out. The people in the wind energy industry are quite forthright that wind alone is not a solution. Wind can only be part of a portfolio of energy alternatives.  I used the 100% in my comment to my tip jar as a polemical device, because I get so pissed at the lack of vision in this country.

        by NBBooks on Wed May 14, 2008 at 09:41:08 PM PDT

    •  Well. ... 100% by 2030 ...

      Seems extreme, even to me.  No silver bullet solution ...

      How about 20x20 and 40x30?

      And, within this path, we are also looking to major introduction of CSP (both CSTP (concentrated solar thermal power) and CPV (concentrated photo-voltaiics)), improved/more efficient hydro, ocean power, biomass (some), etc plus major investments in enabling elements, such as a smart grid with a major HVDC background for moving power across the country efficiently.  

      At the same time, moving as much of transportation system into electricity to have clean transport and other potential paths for increased electricity demand.

      BREAK ...
      Extremely valuable diary / discussion.  Very well done. Thank you very much.

      by A Siegel on Thu May 15, 2008 at 03:21:21 AM PDT

  •  I'd post the photos of Iran's massive wind farm

    that I took a few weeks ago, but Photobucket & I are not on speaking terms.

    Iran has several square miles 'planted' in windmills in the desert near Yazd.  I was told that Iran has also made an extensive commitment to solar technology, but I didn't see any of that.

    by SolontoCroesus on Wed May 14, 2008 at 02:24:55 PM PDT

  •  Wow

    Tipped and rec'd so I can read through this in more detail later. Thanks for putting in the time to share this. Really.

    Here's a related article on a how-to turbine building project on a much smaller scale, originally via Make Magazine (actually, now that I look at it, it is not the article I was hoping to find, but still related).

    by Trips on Wed May 14, 2008 at 02:30:26 PM PDT

  •  Tour de force.

    Thanks so much.

    I will give this some study.

    by XOVER on Wed May 14, 2008 at 02:36:01 PM PDT

  •  Wonderful diary NBBooks

    I have been eyeing a little chunk of land in WV just over the Virginia border.  
    Imagine how happy I was when I looked at your map and saw that bright red spot surrounded by orange right where I am looking.  A viable wind powered home may just be in my future!!

    by ScienceMom on Wed May 14, 2008 at 02:56:07 PM PDT

•  Thanks NBBooks! This is very cool.

  Us gadget freaks appreciate the detail. I saw the blades for one of these on some trucks going down the highway in OK a few weeks ago. Holy crap, these things are huge.

  by dallasdave on Wed May 14, 2008 at 02:16:54 PM PDT

•  Near Waupun, Wisconsin

  they have acres of turbines.  The sheer size of them stunned me as they were much larger than others I have seen elsewhere in the nation.

  Hotlisting, so I can read more thoroughly later!  Great work.

  by Pithy Cherub on Wed May 14, 2008 at 02:19:12 PM PDT

•  National security implications too--

  it'd be nice to have some skilled machinists left over here along with manufacturing capability just in case something like a freaking war happens.

  by dallasdave on Wed May 14, 2008 at 02:25:58 PM PDT

•  Good work

  I expect a showdown between you and Stranded Wind any day now,  :-)

  I'm wondering if gear bearings might help out with the gear box issue.  I'm not an M.E., nor do I play one, so I can't properly evaluate their use in this application.  While they've originally been targeted at speed reduction, given the typical configuration it appears to "simply" be flipping the assembly 180.

  by wondering if on Wed May 14, 2008 at 02:27:05 PM PDT

  •  Actually

    it was one of Stranded Wind's diaries on EuroTrib.com through which I learned of the leading role Iowa Lakes Community College has in training wind energy technicians.

    by NBBooks on Wed May 14, 2008 at 02:33:50 PM PDT

•  very informative

  I'm hanging on to this diary! Worth 100 political diaries!

  by walden on Wed May 14, 2008 at 02:27:09 PM PDT

•  Are y'all aware that site of Flight 93 crash

  is less than 1/2 mile from Pennsylvania's wind farm at Somerset.

  And that less than 1/4 mile from the crash site is a coal strip-mining operation.  In fact, it's likely that the flat field where Flight 93 landed became flat as a result of mountaintop mining.

  I find that significant, somehow.

  by SolontoCroesus on Wed May 14, 2008 at 02:28:55 PM PDT

  •  I doubt it (nt)

    by bernardpliers on Wed May 14, 2008 at 02:37:37 PM PDT

  •  Worked with a guy

    from around there... he said the land 93 came down on was stripped down and worthless, like you say. But the kicker is that it's owned by one of the rich families from the area, who my friend described as rich hypocritical republican a-holes... they were trying to sell the land to the gov for a memorial at some crazy price per acre ($100,000 per?) even though the land was useless... there is a memorial there, but the land is still owned by this family, who has put up a donations box right at the memorial for 9-11 families or something, but pockets the money to this day. Unsourced and unchecked, but this is what I was told about that little stretch of land. Ironic if true. Doesn't have much to do with windmills though.

    by Trips on Wed May 14, 2008 at 02:41:40 PM PDT

•  Distributed Wind....

  Hey - the big wind farm turbines are not the only development here.  There are other players emerging who make small roof-top turbines that "big-box" retailers (eg. Costco, Wal-Mart, etc...) have begun to install on a trial basis.  Like Solar, the paradigm may be shifting somewhat from Centralized Generation-> Transmission to massively distributed power generation.  If we put turbines on the rooftops of many buildings (what's more unsightly than a big HVAC unit?), we can supplement the big wind-farm strategy and get much closer to 100% electricity generated by wind and solar.  

  Go here for one example: http://www.marquisswindpower.com/...

  by vipersdad on Wed May 14, 2008 at 02:31:19 PM PDT

  •  Proplem with that is that

    you need to get up above ground level roughly 10 meters to get fairly linear stable air flow.  While you can get power at lesser elevations, it falls off sharply as you get nearer to the ground.

    The other things is that power collected is proportional to the square of the radius (or diameter), this becomes important when the fixed costs of the system are considered.

    A third aspect is the grid control. To put power on the grid the voltage and frequency must be tightly controlled. The cost of the control is roughly order ln(N), bigger, more centralized is cheaper up to a point.  

    All this means that 4 turbines producing X kilowatts each cost more, be that in terms of money, materials, or energy input, than one larger turbine with twice the blade radius producing 4*X kilowatts.

    Also note that for much of the country the wind potential is not very good.  You're going to have to haul power in there from elsewhere, and big turbines in windy locations produce much more power per unit of investment than the same capacity of rooftop units.  Given the nature of wind, you need geographic diversity to allow for the regional conditions at any given time; which means you're still building long distance transmission lines.

    by wondering if on Wed May 14, 2008 at 02:45:02 PM PDT

•  3 cheers for big blow jobs!

  Hey we're talking wind energy aren't we.
  Nice jog laying out the info.

  by Clzwld on Wed May 14, 2008 at 02:39:34 PM PDT

  •  Job

    Yep can't spell when thinking about getting Blown for money.

    by Clzwld on Wed May 14, 2008 at 02:47:44 PM PDT

•  What triggered the report

  I have this sneaking suspicion that what triggered this report is that T Boone Pickens, the oil magnate who issued the hunting license that Cheney was carrying when he shot that fellow, has gotten into wind in a big way.

  by silence on Wed May 14, 2008 at 02:42:54 PM PDT

  •  The Trigger

    No, not really.  It's been in the works for two years.    The President talked about energy a couple of times in 2006 and mentioned that wind could supply 20 percent of U.S. electricity.  A collaborative effort started after that.

    Regards,
    Thomas O. Gray
    American Wind Energy Association
    www.powerofwind.org
    www.awea.org">www.awea.org

    by tomgray on Wed May 14, 2008 at 02:50:12 PM PDT

    •  Just because its the right thing

      Just because its the right thing to do doesn't that the Bush administration is doing this for the right reasons.

      Based on Texas hunting license records, T Boone Pickens met with Cheney on Nov. 26, 2005.  That's just far enough back that it could be when things got started.

      by silence on Wed May 14, 2008 at 03:04:55 PM PDT

      •  Hunting pals

        Not impossible, but I know that many other folks worked on making this happen also.

        Regards,
        Thomas O. Gray
        American Wind Energy Association
        www.powerofwind.org
        www.awea.org

        by tomgray on Wed May 14, 2008 at 03:07:54 PM PDT

    •  How Will You Overcome...

      The lawsuits and resistance from the "not in my backyard" people like Ted Kennedy?

      by in the Trees on Wed May 14, 2008 at 04:06:19 PM PDT

      •  We Shall Overcome

        We'll work through the normal siting, planning, legislative and regulatory processes.  We may not win them all, but we'll give it our best shot.

        Regards,
        Thomas O. Gray
        American Wind Energy Association
        www.powerofwind.org
        www.awea.org

        by tomgray on Wed May 14, 2008 at 07:57:58 PM PDT

•  On December 7, 1941...

  ...the US didn't have the manufacturing capacity to produce large numbers of advanced fighter planes, bombers or battle tanks.

  By 1943 we had ramped up to produce enough of them that we could out produce every other nation on the planet combined.

  By 1945 we were by far the most powerful and dynamic industrial power the world had ever seen.

  Four years. Producing wind turbines? No problem.

  by Rex Manning on Wed May 14, 2008 at 02:52:29 PM PDT

  •  Completely wrongheaded

    In 1941, the US had ample adaptable manufacturing capacity to make things like tanks and aircraft, in the form of thousands of fully equippped factories which were geared up to make automobiles, tractors and locomotives.

    And also in 1941, the US had a huge industrial workforce with metalworking and other technological skills which ported directly over into war manufacture.

    Neither one of those conditions obtain today.

    The majority of the factories have been shut, and in many cases their capital equipment has been crated up and moved offshore. What part of "gone" did you not understand?

    The old industrial workforce is mostly of Medicare age now, and the kids in the pipeline behind them don't have the skills because it didn't make sense to train such people up for jobs that were going to be offshored anyway.

    And if you think you can wave a wand and get competent modern machinists out of an overnight shake and bake course, starting with contemporary American high school grads who can't even do fractions, there is no help for you even in medicine.

    In brief, you don't know what the fuck you're talking about. This is a "clap louder" solution if ever there was one.

    People like your faithful correspondent spent decades jumping up and down trying to get people's attention onto the deindustrialization problem, shouting "WE ARE GOING TO NEED THIS STUFF ONE DAY!"

    Now the day is here. And the capacity is not.

    For Pete's sake, Boeing can't even get the 787 out the door, and aerospace manufacturing is (or was supposed to be) one of America's remaining bastions of industrial competence. Res ipsa loquitur.

    --

    by marquer on Wed May 14, 2008 at 04:45:06 PM PDT

    •  No.

      Sorry.

      Fact is most of that industrial capacity was sitting idle because of the depression. There was little technical innovation because there was no market for innovative products.

      The idea that the US was an industrial powerhouse churning out huge quantities of high tech products in 1941 is just flat out wrong.

      It took two to three years to ramp up production which included building factories and training workers and engineers to produce high quality, high tech products like fighter planes, bombers, ships and even M1 rifles.

      Go back and read the history.

      by Rex Manning on Wed May 14, 2008 at 04:56:29 PM PDT

      •  I was evidently not clear

        
        Fact is most of that industrial capacity was sitting idle because of the depression.
        
        Inarguable.

        But, idle or not, there WAS CAPACITY.

        There no longer is.

        In a similar manner, there were many workers with industrial skills at that time. Many were unemployed or underemployed at the start of the war, but THOSE SKILLED WORKERS EXISTED.

        They no longer do.

        Your argument is one which von Braun had pegged: that since one woman can produce a baby in nine months, by putting nine women on the job, you'll have the baby in a month!

        Doesn't work that way. Sorry. Manufacturing on a large scale cannot be jumpstarted from scratch overnight -- and in many ways the US is back to scratch -- unless you are willing to use the methods which Stalin used to flash-industrialize the USSR. I don't think that any of the wind power partisans are willing to go that far.

        --

        by marquer on Wed May 14, 2008 at 05:21:40 PM PDT

        •  "Overnight"?

          Who said that?

          Let me guess, you're either a nuclear power advocate or a nuclear industry representative.

          by Rex Manning on Wed May 14, 2008 at 05:25:22 PM PDT

          •  Overnight

            I'll give you a metric for it. In manufacturing terms, "overnight" was what the US managed in the early 1940s.

            Which we were able to do because the manufacturing capacity existed in other forms in this country at that time. In this country, at this time, it no longer does.

            We can't domestically even make enough steel plate armor or ammunition for Iraq. Boeing can't get enough locally sourced screw and bolt fasteners to put their jetliners together. These are real symptoms of a real underlying disease: industrial dystrophy.
            
            Let me guess, you're either a nuclear power advocate or a nuclear industry representative.
            
            Wow! That didn't take long. Straight to the ad hominem. Or it would be if there was anything wrong with either.

            I'm an advocate for nuclear. And solar. And wind. And tidal. And fusion research. And solar power satellites. And radical conservation. And gerbils running on freaking Habitrail wheels.

            What precisely the ultimate mix will turn out to be is a function of careful analysis and planning. Reliance, as in your suggestion, on things that aren't there any longer, like an American industrial base, reflects no such care. It is the sheerest folly and the worst sort of magical thinking.

            The ultimate problem with rapid renuclearization is that we have exactly the same problem there that we have with wind: the manufacturing capacity is GONE.

            America used to be able to make the precision stainless steel pressure vessels for pressurized water reactors. We can't do that any more. The only place that we can get them now is from a facility in Japan. Which is booked up for the next couple of years because smarter countries got in the queue ahead of us first.

            --

            by marquer on Wed May 14, 2008 at 05:43:46 PM PDT

            •  So we're finished.

              Game over.

              The USA is dead.

              So is the planet. Global warming can't be stopped because it will take ten million years for the US to implement industrial production to make wind turbines, solar panels and other new power technologies, if the US can even do it at all.

              Damn.

              Oh well, thanks for letting me know.

              by Rex Manning on Wed May 14, 2008 at 05:54:53 PM PDT

            •  In my judgement,

              Rex Manning is 1/3 correct, and marquer is 2/3 correct. I was writing on industry and finance 15 to 20 years ago, when the Volcker nightmare nearly finished off U.S. manufacturing (how it chaps my ass that Volcker is being trumpeted these days as some sort of great financial sage).

              There are three bedrock industries for any advanced economy: steel, auto, and machine tools. Of the three, machine tools is the smallest, and gets the least attention, but is by far the most important, because it is machine tools that make the production equipment that make everything else. Steel is, well, steel. Try and imagine what your life would be like without steel rebar in the concrete under your house.

              Auto is probably the most controversial to include as the most important three industries, because it's become rather clear that we as a society have failed miserably at honestly tallying the true, hidden costs of a transport sector dominated by autos. I mean the whole anti-surburbia schtick as laid out by James Kuntsler and friends. But the undeniable fact is that it was automobiles that moved the U.S., Europe, and Japan off of economies based on steam and coal.  

              But the really crucial industry is machine tools. No economy can do nothing if it cannot produce its own machines. Gotta have them. Which means you need to have skilled machinists. Now, I have been surprised to learn at how much capability and skill still resides in the U.S. in this area. But as marquer insists, quite correctly I believe, what we have left now is a mere shadow of what once was. I know of retired tool and die makers in their 80s who have  gone back to work because tooling companies simply cannot find any young Americans with the required skills. Tool and die makers are probably the most highly skilled machinists there are. I know that entire school systems have shut down their industrial arts programs and sold off the machine tools generations of American machinists once trained on. I know, because I've been to the auctions and sales, and I've dealt with the people who buy and sell the equipment. It probably takes at least ten to fifteen years to get a machinist skilled enough to do precision prototype work or tool and die making. And we just don't have them. Another big problem is that a lot of machining done today is CNC (computer numerically controlled) and the people operating them really do not hone the skills of machining. They probably know and understand the basics of machining, but since they use CNC equipment all the time, they are not building up the skill sets required to become advanced machinists.  

              Anyway, it's an interesting question, and I look forward to us as a country rolling up our sleeves and getting to work answering it.

              I do want to throw this in - the managers and financiers and economists who pushed all this free trade and free market theory are basically the people most responsible for the situation we're in now. For them I have nothing but contempt. The irony, of course, is they're the bastards who have made the millions these past 20 years. There's a debate now about how much to re-regulate the financial system, with the Wall Street types threatening that if it gets too heavy-handed, they will move overseas. I say, fine, the sooner they go screw up someone else's economy, the sooner we can get ours straightened out.

              by NBBooks on Wed May 14, 2008 at 06:41:14 PM PDT

              •  Sigma, summa, QED

                
                There's a debate now about how much to re-regulate the financial system, with the Wall Street types threatening that if it gets too heavy-handed, they will move overseas. I say, fine, the sooner they go screw up someone else's economy, the sooner we can get ours straightened out.
                
                The first candidate who says that in those words gets my money, my vote and my volunteer hours. I sadly haven't heard that yet from any of 'em.

                I have mixed feelings about Volcker. He was up in front of the National Press Club a few weeks ago, and was asked, "What do we do if we get in a dollar crisis?"

                He said, "You're in one."

                --

                by marquer on Wed May 14, 2008 at 07:48:25 PM PDT

              •  Crafts rely upon guilds

                
                Tool and die makers are probably the most highly skilled machinists there are. I know that entire school systems have shut down their industrial arts programs and sold off the machine tools generations of American machinists once trained on. I know, because I've been to the auctions and sales, and I've dealt with the people who buy and sell the equipment. It probably takes at least ten to fifteen years to get a machinist skilled enough to do precision prototype work or tool and die making. And we just don't have them.
                
                We might be able to get the training curve a bit more flat, but you're totally correct that these skillsets require a lot of accumulative learning.

                It used to be that there were apprenticeship systems whereby kids at the high school level were able to begin to pick this stuff up early. And who were able by their late twenties to begin to make the sort of steady, family-sustaining money that built the midcentury middle class in America.

                All that's been torn down and burnt up and will have to be rebuilt before we can do anything else.

                I caught a comment recently from someone who remembers working at Boeing in the 1950s. Many of the engineers there at that time had not been to engineering school! They had started as apprentices, then been machinists, then gone through a second apprenticeship and in-house training program to get certified as engineers.

                Astonishing. And that was the generation which gave us legendary Boeing aircraft like the 707 and B-52.

                But it took time. And we're really short on time.

                --

                by marquer on Wed May 14, 2008 at 07:55:56 PM PDT

•  The U.S. can achieve 20% of anything with attn--

  I'm going to breeze past the science for a minute, and just note that we have so much wealth and health and resources that we can produce amazing things, if we just get on board.  

  I hope our new administration ASKS us to do a few things, and to sacrifice a few things, and to work toward things together.  If Hilary can get $5 million over a weekend (as one example), we have a deep bench as a nation, and deep pockets--heck, just with the mayonnaise jars of change in the kitchen--ask us to do something, especially since we seem to have consensus on power issues, and it's as good as done.

  Thanks for the tutorial!

  by gazingoffsouthward on Wed May 14, 2008 at 02:52:59 PM PDT

•  Grew Up Along Lake Erie in the 50's-60's

  We had wind, and everything needed to make these things back then.

  I just Google-earth'd the western Cleveland Harbor where the great iron ore unloaders used to run seemingly around the clock. All gone. Akron, rubber capital of the world, gone.

  Yes there are about 20 million reasons we need to restore a significant amount of manufacturing. The whole band can't be drum major.

  by Gooserock on Wed May 14, 2008 at 02:58:42 PM PDT

•  great diary

  I'm sure that if we actually committed ourselves as a nation to developing wind power on a major scale and made some sacrifices that we could do a lot better than 20% by 2030. Why not 100% like you say?

  Also, why not focus on ramping up solar too? We've got enough space out in the SW desert to provide a huge portion of US energy needs through solar. Why not build some solar banks out there and wind farms up north?

  You're also quite right about needing to bring back manufacturing. IMHO a major effort at rebuilding the US manufacturing capability might go a long way towards helping resolve some current issues - unemployment, economic weakness, etc. Once we start building things for ourselves, we can build up enough to actually - OMG! - EXPORT things again and works towards paying off our national debt. Creating green jobs, etc. also a plus if we go about it right.

  But it's going to take a major change of direction in this country, ones the corporations and hedge fund managers might not like since it means cutting into their golden parachutes. What we really need is some kind of "Green Deal," I think.

  Tips.

  by StudentThinker on Wed May 14, 2008 at 03:15:13 PM PDT

•  Thank you for this

  I especially liked the map with the wind on it.

  Looks like west virgina should be exporting power - not coal.

  by red 83 on Wed May 14, 2008 at 03:16:33 PM PDT

  •  On this

    you might enjoy Blowin in the mountains ...

    by A Siegel on Thu May 15, 2008 at 03:32:47 AM PDT

•  great diary -- needs to be on rec list (nt)

  by kingjames23tx on Wed May 14, 2008 at 03:17:07 PM PDT

•  Excellent Diary! n/t

  by Meteor Blades on Wed May 14, 2008 at 03:28:23 PM PDT

•  I'm curious...

  I've read alot on the peak oil websites, and I know that they're drinking their own very special flavor of Koolaid.

  Still, they make a strong point. Once you factor in the energy it takes to smelt steel, for instance, to make the turbines, the energy output goes down considerably.

  With all those things factored in, what is the net energy that a turbine will deliver over its maintainable lifespan?

  Also, even if all that is bullshit, and wind turbines are the best thing ever... what happens to weather on the local scale with those huge monstrosities sucking that much energy out of the atmosphere? Will microclimates be affected?

  by NoMoreNicksLeft on Wed May 14, 2008 at 03:32:16 PM PDT

  •  EROEI all over the map

    Wind EROEI is all over the map, depending on turbine design and location.  See this article for something of a summary.

    I'm not aware of any local climate impact from the turbines; the big environmental drawback is that in some locations, they kill a lot of birds.

    by silence on Wed May 14, 2008 at 05:02:46 PM PDT

    •  The bird thing shoud be negligible.

      Especially as size is scaled up, I would think that bird fatality goes down (bigger, slower moving blade, instead of a puree-creating blur).

      But it has to effect the microclimate, even if it only does so a little... we're basically tapping atmospheric energy here. I would think that with the big ones, downstream wind speeds are slowed, and depending on the location this will either increase or lower temperatures.

      by NoMoreNicksLeft on Thu May 15, 2008 at 07:05:10 AM PDT

  •  No worries

    
    Also, even if all that is bullshit, and wind turbines are the best thing ever... what happens to weather on the local scale with those huge monstrosities sucking that much energy out of the atmosphere? Will microclimates be affected?
    
    No. There's so much energy in the wind, and so little of the wind gets intercepted by the turbines, that this should not be an issue.

    Go stand downwind of a big wind farm and see. You will not be noticeably becalmed.

    However, while turbines don't change microclimate, microclimate change can and does affect turbines. Given that global climate is changing, which inevitably alters constituent microclimates, there is a certain unquantifiable risk that some sites which are currently good for wind may cease to be.

    --

    by marquer on Wed May 14, 2008 at 05:09:39 PM PDT

  •  This diary was getting much too long

    so there were many matters and issues that I left out. The people in the wind energy industry are very clear that wind can only be part of a portfolio of energy alternatives. Wind alone is not a solution. I used the 100% in my comment to my tip jar a a polemical device.

    Regarding this:

    Once you factor in the energy it takes to smelt steel, for instance, to make the turbines, the energy output goes down considerably.

    I think the argument is a red herring. We're going to have to build something, and whatever it is we end up building, it is going to require making and processing a lot of steel. With wind, though, once you have the turbines built and online, there are NO fuels involved. None. Nada. Zip. That is wind's huge advantage.

    Another great aspect about wind I did not include is how much water it saves compared to nuclear or coal or gas electricity generating plants. The DOE report on 20 by 2030 has a  whole section on the water saved, and it is very, very, VERY substantial.  

    by NBBooks on Wed May 14, 2008 at 06:52:12 PM PDT

    •  Not sure that's quite true.

      You say no fuel at all, once it's built. But these things require regular maintenance, and I imagine lubrication. Not so much that pure synthetic oils are difficult, but still. They require new parts, over a 20+ year lifespan.

      The water use, or lack thereof, might actually make this preferable, even if the other numbers never get closer to an ideal.

      We're going to have to build something, and whatever it is we end up building, it is going to require making and processing a lot of steel.

      This isn't necessarily true. We will want to build something, I agree, but we don't have to. If the stuff about peak oil is even remotely true, things could go sour in such a way that we end up not building something, even though we wanted to, even though we could have.

      I dunno. I just don't ever see this nailing much more than 2-3% of our electrical need. That's pretty healthy, mind you... but we want so much of the damned stuff. It feels like bus fare to the future is $100, and we have a pocket full of nickels.

      by NoMoreNicksLeft on Thu May 15, 2008 at 07:11:56 AM PDT

      •  Wow

        "we don't have to."?

        The history of man can be boiled down to ever increasing control of the spectrum of energy. From simple open flames, to the concentration of heat in a steam engine cylinder, to the use of photolithography to manufacture integrated circuits. Without increasing our mastery over an expanding part of the spectrum of energy, we plunge humanity into a thermodynamic state of entropy, meaning millions, nay, billions, of people perish. If that is what you desire, at least have the common decency to honestly say you are for global depopulation.

        But I would greatly desire that you take a day or two to read and ponder this: we now hurtle toward a choice of either a progressive century, or a reactionary one.

        Yes, yes, I've read Jared Diamond. What he misses is the simple understanding that energy is NOT limited - our understanding and mastery of it is. If energy is not limited, e=mc2 tells us neither are resources. Yes, there are societies that fall into collapse, but what Diamond misses is that it is because of a limitations of a particular mode of technology and the way it uses available resources. The proof is that the human species continues to survive despite the collapse of countless societies. There is a greater organizing principle to human existence than any one society. Our society now is stuck in a mode of technology that will get us all killed, probably within the lifetime of most of those who read this. Our challenge is to make the correct choices in the period looming before us, to finally move off of a fossil fuel mode of technology: we now hurtle toward a choice of either a progressive century, or a reactionary one.

        by NBBooks on Thu May 15, 2008 at 10:54:36 PM PDT

        •  And I want to add

          If the financial system has become an obstacle to shifting to a new mode of technology (and I think it has) then I would much rather sacrifice the financial system than let the society perish.

          Which, I guess, is just a fancy way of saying, yes, it is class war.

          by NBBooks on Thu May 15, 2008 at 11:09:06 PM PDT

•  May want to take a look at

  this article on the transmission grid:

  Quite a few people believe that if there is a decline in oil production, we can make up much of the difference by increasing our use of electricity--more nuclear, wind, solar voltaic, geothermal or even coal. The problem with this model is that it assumes that our electric grid will be working well enough for this to happen. It seems to me that there is substantial doubt that this will be the case.

  The U. S. electric grid: will it be our undoing? (Originally from The Oil Drum)

  by terabytes on Wed May 14, 2008 at 05:06:17 PM PDT

  •  This is a major issue

    I've seen the figures on grid shortfalls and they are at best unnerving. At worst they're terrifying.

    Some solutions patch right around this. SPS costs a mint, but it does away with a whole lot of grid. Which should be part of any long-run calculations.

    Terrestrial solar quits working when the clouds get thick or the sun goes down. Terrestrial wind works when the wind blows strongly, which can be null for a lot of the time. SPS is the Energizer Bunny: keeps going and going and going. Day, night, good weather, bad weather.

    --

    by marquer on Wed May 14, 2008 at 05:31:57 PM PDT

•  Excellent job

  And yet I wonder if the most important part is towards the end. I don't think many people realize how parasitic (and profitable) the nonproductive side of the economy is. If we are to make it through the next few decades I think we'll need not just smarts and skills but financial regulation and a more progressive fiscal policy.

  by alefnot on Wed May 14, 2008 at 05:34:31 PM PDT

•  Wow! Did I just read a book?

  Great diary - thanks!

  I had to giggle a bit - I live in Kentucky, which - according to the posted map - has no wind. However, I live on a farm with tall hills and nice wind. I'd love to be able to build some windmills to generate at least some of our power, but I have the technical expertise of cat food and the mechanical abilities of - well, let's just say that when I was a teenager, eons ago, it took someone 2 hours to teach me how to fold a pizza box. And I wasn't even high at the time.

  I'll look at that "small windmills" site. Does anyone know if there are tax breaks for building one's one windmills? Or, for that matter, for installing a bunch of solar panels to go with the windmills? And do any companies make small windmills that come with instructions - Windmills for Dummies?

  by SciMathGuy on Wed May 14, 2008 at 06:48:53 PM PDT

•  RE Wind map?

  At what altitude is that map derived from in terms of wind quality resources?  50 feet? 50 meters?  What I understand is that new mapping at 100 meters (the larger wind turbine heights) is showing vastly more extensive resources.  (See this discussion re  Ohio and how remapping changed its wind resources.)  

  In addition, my understanding is that there are major differences within micro regions that are especially important in mountainous areas.  There are areas in WVA, as I understand it, that are mapped at lower quality due to the size of the grid, but that there are high quality micro-spots (valley heads, such) within the larger marginal quality areas.

  Again, an excellent discussion.

  by A Siegel on Thu May 15, 2008 at 03:27:03 AM PDT