The AWEA Blog: Into the Wind


1st IEA Clean Energy Progress Report: Continued fossil fuel dominance poses political, environmental risks

Posted: 08 Apr 2011 Tom Gray

The International Energy Agency, which monitors global energy markets and trends on behalf of the industrial countries, issued its first Clean Energy Progress Report Wednesday. Judging from press reports, it appears to have been a sobering, glass-half-empty look at world energy trends, with these takeaway numbers:
 

- 47% of global electricity growth over the past decade was met with coal.  

- During the same decade, global renewable electricity generation grew by 2.7% annually, while global electricity demand expanded by 3% (i.e., renewables are falling behind).


According to


Read more

Hannover, Day 2: The neighbors are talking

Posted: 08 Apr 2011 Anyah Dembling, AWEA Associate Editor

Americans, whether we like to admit it or not, have learned quite a bit from our brethren across the pond.

The Europeans have given us the gift of grapes for wine and the delight of croissants for breakfast.  We have an appreciation for European artists that has transcended our borders and influenced our own cultural identity. Fútbol—the international kind, as opposed to the NFL—has caught on (albeit slowly) in the States, thanks in part to the Europeans who so passionately embrace the “beautiful game.”  We drive their cars and read their books.

Yet Americans remain somewhat suspicious of soccer. And to some, European films seem just too—well, foreign. Still, who could forget, if it ...


Read more

Obama in Philadelphia: ITC and PTC should be 'permanent'

Posted: 07 Apr 2011 Michael Peck at the Gamesa Fairless Hills plant

Candidate Obama first came to the Gamesa Fairless Hills plant in March of 2008 to conduct a town hall meeting with Gamesa's work force represented by the United Steelworkers Union to jump start the Pennsylvania primaries leading to a national election. Yesterday, three years later, President Obama returned to the same factory and work force and reaffirmed his commitment to keep American workers like those at Gamesa foremost in his thoughts every day of his Presidency in his quest to transform America to a high employment, clean energy economy.

 

Gamesa has been referred to in the media as a "model U.S. green economy company" for its high road labor and business practices. The President acknowledged this in his remarks today, talking about the inter-connectivity of the ...


Read more

Even before the turbines turn, jobs roll in

Posted: 07 Apr 2011 Tom Gray

The planned completion of the first turbine in E.On Climate & Renewables' $300-million, 150-MW Settlers Trail Wind Farm in Iroquois County, Ill., was delayed due to high winds (an auspicious sign), but as the Daily Journal's Robert Themer writes, the "real milestone" for the county had already occurred.

It came in the form of some 200 workers, many of them local, who had been ...


Read more

Further analysis of bizarre New Scientist article on wind power

Posted: 07 Apr 2011 Michael Goggin, AWEA Manager-Transmission Policy

Two days ago, we posted a short note about a truly strange article in New Scientist magazine (see "New Scientist 'scoop': Wind power is not renewable").

A reading of the article and the scientific journal submissions on which it is based reveals some additional grounds for criticism beside those enumerated by Dr. Joe Romm and others.

First, the study's wind resource estimate is based on a series of ...


Read more

Excellent video: Wind power's impact on one Kansas city

Posted: 07 Apr 2011 Tom Gray

From Siemens Energy, via the U.S. Department of Energy's website, comes this moving description of how a new wind turbine nacelle assembly plant has changed the lives of workers in the heartland city of Hutchinson, KS.

It's an inspiring combination of quality production values and clean energy production values. Hats off to those responsible.

 

 




Read more

Hannover, Day 1: What a Messe!

Posted: 06 Apr 2011 Anyah Dembling, AWEA Associate Editor

By 10 a.m. local time Tuesday morning, I had (beginning 14 hours earlier) ridden the Metro to Virginia, taken a bus shuttle to Dulles International Airport, flown across the ocean with a delightful Scandinavian Airways crew, traveled through three countries, and gotten my first airborne peek at an offshore wind farm in the cool, gray waters near Copenhagen.

But the wind farm siting was just a bonus tucked into my travel day. A short hour and no fewer than three wind farms later, I arrived in Germany, where markers indicating the annual Hannover Messe conference speckled airport signs as soon as I got off the plane.


Read more

Researcher: Claim that offshore wind causes beached whales 'bad reporting'

Posted: 05 Apr 2011 Tom Gray

I saw it on Twitter (which, by the way, could use a good fact checker, dream on) a few days ago--something about offshore wind farms in Europe causing whales to beach themselves. Like many anti-wind claims, it seemed farfetched--whales have been beaching themselves in recent years in many locations that are nowhere near offshore wind farms--so I didn't pay too much attention.

It turns out that the original source of the report, the United Kingdom Daily Telegraph newspaper (a frequent critic of wind power) issued a correction two days after it published the March 15 article, but other outlets forwarded the false information along, including Newsweek magazine, which included it in a short wind-bashing piece in its March 20 issue.

The media watchdog group


Read more

New Scientist 'scoop': Wind power not renewable

Posted: 05 Apr 2011 Tom Gray

Gosh, there is a lot of shoddy alleged reporting going around these days. This example comes from the United Kingdom's New Scientist magazine, which carried the following headline in its March 30 issue: "Wind and wave energies are not renewable after all." Stop the presses. Please.

VERY briefly, the story concerns a scientific journal article which (erroneously) claims that the impact of installing a mere 68 million megawatts (MW) of wind power, or just 350(!) times as much as is installed around the world today, would have the same climatic effects as a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide.


Read more

Unconventional wisdom: Wind power is not expensive

Posted: 04 Apr 2011 Tom Gray

One of the latest entries in the "conventional wisdom" series of articles on today's energy policy options comes from Gerard Wynn and Alister Doyle of Reuters and is carried in the New York Times. According to Wynn and Doyle, political support for oil and nuclear power appears to be holding steady despite the obvious challenges of climate change and nuclear safety.

Why not renewable energy? Well, it's lumped in with unconventional oil and gas and nuclear, all of which are deemed more expensive than fossil fuels, according to Richard Heinberg, author of "Peak Everything," a 2007 book that forms much of the framework for the article: “The real upshot is — the strong likelihood is--we’ll have less energy in the future, and it will be more expensive energy. We’re really looking ...


Read more