Into the Wind - the AWEA Blog

The wind power industry paused recently to mourn the loss of Elliott Bayly, the pioneering small wind technology innovator and entrepreneur, who died January 20.

Constantly on the go with startups and technology innovations, Bayly was founder and president of Duluth, Minn.-based Ventera Energy Corp., which builds small wind turbines. The inventor, electrical engineer and one-time professor, who began building wind turbines at the dawn of the modern turbine era in 1974, was surprised in 1999 to see turbine sales at his company at the time, World Power Technologies, take off as the nation prepared during the run-up to “Y2K” (i.e., the advent of the new century) for potential computer-related power failures. Prior to that, sales of the new technology had largely been to ...

Read more

American Electric Power subsidiary Southwestern Electric Power Co. (SWEPCO), based in Louisiana, said in a press release that it has signed long-term power purchase agreements for a total of 358.65 megawatts (MW) of renewable energy from wind projects in Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas, and that it expects the agreements to reduce the cost of electricity to its customers.

SWEPCO said it estimates the decrease will average about 0.1 cents per kilowatt-hour over the next 10 years starting in 2013.  The announcement is the third in recent months in which a utility in the Southeast has announced plans to purchase wind from the Plains states and said that the economics of the purchase are favorable.  SWEPCO also accounted for one of the other purchases, while the third was by Alabama ...

Read more

Over at the fossil-fuel-funded Heritage Foundation today, Emily Goff takes a swipe at wind energy jobs and incentives.  I've discussed this topic a lot in recent weeks, so I'll just hit a few highlights here.

Why is the Heritage Foundation, in these difficult economic times, standing staunchly in support of a job-killing targeted tax increase on an emerging, job-creating industry that is a recognized source of new American manufacturing jobs? Does that square with its other positions on taxes? Keeping taxes low on wind power makes sense: past experience tells us that when taxes are low, development increases; when taxes increase, development drops at least temporarily by 70-90 percent. That is something that would be disruptive to any industry, let alone one that has been ...

Read more

Today's Washington Times carries an opinion column by chemist and environmental consultant Rich Trzupek with some erroneous statements about wind power. Here are the facts on wind's cost and its integration into electric utility systems, the two wind-related issues on which Mr. Trzupek is misinformed.

The cost of wind-generated electricity is very low.  A steady stream of technological innovations has driven wind energy costs below those of most other generation sources.  Wind is close to cost-competitive with new natural gas generation even at today’s unsustainably low natural gas prices.

A recent report from the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) found that the trend of declining wind energy costs is ...

Read more

A closer look at a recent Dutch report, from the Clingendael International Energy Programme (CIEP), referenced in a recent Forbes.com article critical of wind indicates that many of the report's conclusions are not valid for the U.S., and some of the conclusions are not even valid for Europe. When these errors are corrected, it is clear that wind energy is a cost-effective means of reducing fossil fuel consumption and the harmful pollution that results from burning fossil fuels.

1. Wind power output much higher in the U.S.:

The electricity output of wind plants in the U.S. is about 20% higher than assumed in the report. The report assumes an average output of 25-30% capacity factor, while in the U.S. the average capacity factor of a wind plant ...

Read more

Latest video segment shows impact of a wind farm on local Utah tire shop

With employment opportunities hard to come by in Milford, Utah, a few years ago, Mike Mayer took matters into his own hands. He created his own job.

Opening up “Mike’s Tire and Oil” shop “basically on the flip of a coin” because the area’s economy was failing to provide adequate employment options, Mayer, a lifelong resident of the area, ended up getting a boost from a newcomer in town: wind power. The story of how First Wind’s Milford Wind project has impacted Mayer’s auto shop and other local businesses is the subject of the latest segment on WindTV, the American Wind Energy Association’s (AWEA) vehicle to ...

Read more

Here are some facts about wind that are omitted from this recent Wired article:

1) Wind is close to cost-competitive with new natural gas generation, even at today’s unsustainably low natural gas prices, and has positive offsetting benefits.

Adding wind farms to a power system helps lower fuel prices and electric rates and make them more stable and predictable.  For example, the Colorado Public Utility Commission recently approved a 25-year, 200-megawatt (MW) power purchase agreement between Xcel Energy subsidiary Public Service Co. of Colorado and NextEra Energy for power from the Limon Wind 2 project. The Colorado ...

Read more

Wind energy got a clean bill of health this week from a panel of independent experts established by the Massachusetts departments of Environmental Protection and of Public Health, which issued a definitive scientific analysis Jan. 18 that refutes several myths perpetuated by opponents of wind energy.

Read more

Robert Bryce, serial attacker of wind power, had another column in his lengthy series in yesterday's Wall Street Journal. The following was posted as a comment on the WSJ website.

While Mr. Bryce may not have his facts straight, he at least gets credit for persistence. This piece is nearly identical to another piece by Mr. Bryce that ran in the New York Times seven months ago, a piece that has been widely rebuked by dozens of journalists and others for its numerous falsehoods as well as its failure to disclose that Mr. Bryce's employer, the Manhattan Institute, receives large amounts of funding from major fossil fuel industry players like ExxonMobil and the Koch brothers.
 
Unfortunately for Mr. Bryce, repeating a falsehood does not ...

Read more

Latest video segment highlights how wind power, PTC drive construction business

The construction sector has long been a key ingredient to a strong American economy, and these days it’s getting a boost from wind power.

That fact comes through in full color in the latest segment on WindTV, the American Wind Energy Association’s (AWEA) vehicle to highlight how wind works for America. The segment features two Iowa-based employees from Mortenson Construction, which builds wind farms around the country.

On the video segment, meet James Bulman, the enthusiastic construction superintendent at the Rolling Hills wind project in southwest Iowa, and Ryan Januszenski, the ...

Read more