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I had the luxury of working on software in support of wind turbines a few years back. I loved it. I was very proud of the work we were doing and the value we added to the space. I would love to continue working in the wind energy space if the opportunity arose again.
What companies are doing the software? Who's the leader in the field?
Best news is that cost of these installations is now quite low: less than $1.5 per watt peak.
What about capacity utilisation factor of newly installed turbines? Does it trend downwards? Which means, are we close to exhausting potential of wind?
PS: It's not, it's actually trending a bit up. Which is explainable because average capacity of a turbine trends up -> the turbine is bigger and taller -> wind blows faster and more consistently on higher altitude.
Capacity utilization factors on land are 0.26 to 0.52.
They are around 0.5 on offshore installations.
The short answer scaling heavily favors huge turbines. The taller they are the larger swept area of the blades. More are more wind energy captured. (Good old area = distance squared) And higher up the more consistent the wind, higher the average wind speed, and thus higher capacity factor.
The move to offshore is another big factor as wind there is more consistent and its a bit easier to spread them out.
Theres a lot of other small things contributing to the capacity factor increases too: computer modelling of how the wakes of different turbines interact with each other and the labdscape, energy market changes to penalise slow reacting coal plants and or reward flexible demand, better weather prediction, grid and battery integration, HVDC, marginal engineering and business process improvements as you get companies, technicians and tools dedicated to this industry.
Having said all that, I'm not sure how useful a number it is, but nice that it's going up as generally it tracks the price going down as fixed costs get spread further.
But if the price is low enough, then low capacity factors still make sense. Not sure if theres a stat that captures both of those things at the same time though and also considers the full system costs.
There's almost certainly times and places that a low capacity factor producer that hits your system peak is going to be the best option. Demand response, for example, could be modelled as very low capacity factor generators that only supply when you actually need the extra power.
Also, how useful is peak wind power? Often is it not peak?
Turbines are being built in slower wind-speed areas but are producing more power because they're bigger and taller.
Does that figure factor in the eventual heavy cost of de-installation?
False and misleading.
First, it only refers to the US, while the headline makes no such qualification.
Second, this refers only to electricity generation, which is roughly 25% of US energy use, or 20% if you include energy embedded in imports, mostly fueled by fossil fuels in China.
Third, this refers only to gros capacity. For those who have been asleep, the effective energy capacity is far lower for renewables than for stable power sources due to intermittency.
inb4 By referring to facts you have shown you are clearly on the wrong team.
The first two lines of the article, emphasis added:
> The Land-Based Wind Market Report: 2021 Edition provides an overview of developments and trends in the U.S. wind power market.
> A record 16,836 megawatts (MW) of U.S. wind capacity was installed in 2020, bringing the cumulative total to 121,955 MW.
Asking a US government to put in the headline that the report is about US stuff is a bit surprising.
> First, it only refers to the US, while the headline makes no such qualification.
Yes the title should be "Land-Based Wind Market Report: 2021 Edition Released" but it still won't say US cause it's not in the title.
> Second, this refers only to electricity generation, which is roughly 25% of US energy use, or 20% if you include energy embedded in imports, mostly fueled by fossil fuels in China.
Of course it's only about electricity generation?
> Third, this refers only to gros capacity. For those who have been asleep, the effective energy capacity is far lower for renewables than for stable power sources due to intermittency.
That's what you usually mention when you build something that generates energy. Nothing unusual here either.
> inb4 By referring to facts you have shown you are clearly on the wrong team.
What's with this unhealthy polarization? What teams are you talking about?
>First, it only refers to the US, while the headline makes no such qualification.
The url gives you a good hint.
> Wind power installations outpaced those in solar power for the first time in several years and represented $24.6 billion of investment
So wind is number one and solar is the next one? That's great news!
I have to scroll this far to read that someone is as happy as I am about the news!
It's great......when the wind blows. In the UK we have about 15GW of installed wind generating capacity, but it's very rarely fully utilized. The variability means it's balanced out by other sources mostly gas powered Combined cycle turbines. During summer there have been weeks where wind and solar were negligible and gas was providing nearly 60% of the electricity generated. Nuclear is reliable, but we only have about 5GW of capacity, we can import another 6GW from Europe and other sources such as biomass and hydro are about 3GW. There's higher wind capacity utilisation in Winter but there are still days when it's very still and we have to rely on fossil fuels. French nuclear and British gas turbines help to balance out demand across Europe when the winds are still, but it's variability is a real issue. Would more installed capacity help?
> Would more installed capacity help?
Yes, as well as country interconnects so that excess wind generation in one region can be distributed elsewhere.
Sadly, the help is rather limited. All of Europe often shares the same environmental conditions. Energy storage is the only real solution.
Isn't this only for US? Can you please change the title?
This is (somewhat poorly) implied by the fact that TFA is hosted by energy.gov, AKA the U.S. Department of Energy.
(Kind of a bummer that only U.S. agencies of government can use .gov)
This is good news. As wind increases on the grid we really need to move towards shiftable-load specific submetering so that an EV, water heater, etc can exploit their ability to shift demand to take advantage of times of excess renewable supply and lower prices. In CA there was a pilot of this for EVs but it seems to have fizzled out.
With today's rate structures in CA you have to choose between a plan that is optimal either for your EV or for your house but the load profile of these are very different from each other. Without 2 separate utility meters, you can't have separate rate plans.
Do you know if any fossil fuel consumption was reduced as a result of this new wind? Or are we just using more energy?
How much fossil fuel consumption was reduced as a result?
Almost as much probably. Basically wind and solar deployments currently take up the market growth and things like coal and oil plants as they are being retired. Of course gas plant share is also still growing, although at an increasingly lower pace. Proportionally, coal has already been pretty much wiped out relative to say five years ago in a lot of places. Most remaining plants have closure dates looming over them in the not so distant future.
In the US, there was more coal power generation in 2021 than 2020 because 2020 was an abormally low year of power consumption. If we skip over the pandemic, there was less electricty generated from coal in 2021 than 2019.
Coal in the US has been in long-term decline since around 2008. Natural gas seems to be holding fairly stable at the moment.
Depending on source, it looks like the US retired some 9 to 11 GW of coal power plants in 2020. However, China is attempting an energy-intensive recovery from the pandemic and put 38 GW of coal plants into operation in 2020.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-coal/chinas-new-coa...
https://www.spglobal.com/platts/en/market-insights/latest-ne...
This is an ill-posed question.
What about, how have recent changes affected the carbon intensity of the US electricity grid?
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/the-u-s-electric-power-s...
Is there a plan to eliminate coal and gas as big elements in USA's eletricity production?
If Form Energy (or Ambri or other sub 50$/khw battery system) succeeds, gas and coal are done. Even combined cycle LNG can’t compete with wind/solar + multi day storage on cost. If it looks like one of the major grid scale battery projects will work, gas plant financiers will not risk new projects as their assets will get stranded before they pay off.
I think that natural gas plants will be a significant part of power grids for a long time. Maybe they will not be primary generators, but they certainly will stay as backup. At the very least until the grid-scale storage problem will be properly solved (i.e. you need to store at least several days of consumption, ideally several weeks). I don't think that any kind of chemical batteries is the solution to this problem. Personally, I hope that hydro pumped storage in artificial underground cavities will become mainstream one day.
California stopped renewing contracts for coal fired electricity. They are probably still buying it on the spot market though.
I think you guys need gas as peak power long time but coal is now in borrowed time. At least Germany is started moving towards power to hydrogen but it takes like 10+ years to build truly big industrial scale production for P2H. Same for grid scale batteries eg which are moving right direction but not there yet.
If it’s cloudy and an extended period of calm wind, it’s unacceptable for me to not have electricity, and neither is it for hospitals or nursing homes. We will always need some form of petro backup unless our queasiness with nuclear is solved.
I am surprised. I thought the solar capacity being installed was far greater. At least that is certainly true of India. With extensive 'open' coastlines in the US, this might prove to be better.
Am I correct to assume that wind is a more indirect source of power than solar?
In my mind, solar energy creates wind by heating up the surface of the earth, which then heats up the air above it, which then moves around to even out the temperature differences.
Therefore I suspect that in the long run (10 years? 100 years?) solar energy will be more common than wind energy. Similar to how solid state drives are overtaking spinning drives.
What do you guys think?
Solar is indeed long term cheaper to install but subject to periodic down-time. Wind blows at night and when it is cloudy. Also the nature of our atmosphere is that there is always some wind somewhere. So, they are complementary.
Right now everybody is focused on getting to 100% carbon neutral. However, the question must be asked: why stop there and not go to something like 500 or even 1000% energy generation.
There will be plenty of things we can do with the excess energy. I think this will play out over the next few decades. Mass produced solar will go on any available surface just because we can. There are already some lower efficiency but potentially very cheap to produce solar systems based on e.g. organic materials that can be printed on flexible surfaces (i.e. not glass). Having that stuff put all over the place is going to make an impact.
Solar is already regularly creating surpluses regularly. It's a huge problem for energy providers because they have to shut down more expensive to manage production when that happens. Any time you see a wind mill not spinning, don't assume it is because it is broken and instead consider that there might be too much wind power temporarily.
A structural surplus will create supply of very cheap (often negatively priced even) energy. There are all sorts of valuable things we can do with that.
Most of our energy sources (except nuclear and geothermal) are forms of solar. Wind, hydro, and fossil fuels are all just stored solar energy!
The fact that they’re stored energy is what makes them particularly useful, though. If we were exclusively using solar directly then we’d need to store it ourselves, or build a global distribution grid to move energy from where it’s sunny to where it’s needed.
Both seem useful in different places. There are very windy locations that get very little sun, and very sunny locations that get very little wind.
Yes, but the advantage wind has is that the solar energy gets stored for a while in the surface and atmosphere before you harvest it.
They are complementary. You tend to have more wind when there's no sun, like during storms and some places are very windy at night.
The problem with wind is dealing with the huge uptick in energy coming down the pipeline during a major wind event. Last I checked, this was still not a solved problem but I haven't been keeping current like I used to.
So in practice they shut down some windmills during major wind events to protect the system. The other issue both wind and solar have is storage. Though we've seen substantial gains in battery storage in recent years, so there is good news but I don't know if we are really "there" yet.
I think solar energy will ultimately be cheaper than wind energy and that will make it the leader in total installed capacity. But both resources are freely available so the fact that sun produces wind isn’t relevant to this question.
For wind you're harvesting the solar energy baked over a vast area while on solar panels you're only harvesting the solar energy directly reaching the small surface area of the panel.
You're technically right that wind is an indirect form of solar energy. You're not right that this would imply that solar is any "better".
The wind will blow whether you use its energy or not. You're not "more efficient" if you use solar instead of wind. You're just making use of energy at another place in the system where it would otherwise go unused.
More generally on the Wind/Solar question: They complement each other quite well. Most of the time when there's a lot of sun there isn't a lot of wind and vice versa. Therefore building up both reduces your needs for flexibility and storage compared to only using one. Also of course there's a bit of location dependance, there are places where wind works better and places where solar works better (sunny). But still in almost all places you can use both, but you probably want a different mixture depending on the location.
Wind acts like a battery (or capacitor) that smooths out fluctuations in solar energy. Radiant solar being more "direct" really has nothing to do with which is the better option.
That's a great thing. A singular advantage of wind over solar is that solar has a strong time dependence over the day and seasons. And the time for high solar presence is not that correlated with the consumption time. While seasonality is present over wind as well, wind can blow all through the day reducing dependence on energy storage.
Wind energy blows, rotors are not recyclable so they just get buried. nuclear energy is the greenest energy, as long as they are built in safe places.
What I’m more worry about those Renewables stuff is their ressource footprint , when you look at how much « rare earth » « composite » material is needed to build just one its seems like a nonsense to use wind their are many documentaries on this topic. Today the vast majority of those turbines are not recycled.
On top of that wind being intermittent you need gas power plant to provide.
France power provider RTE estimated that if the country moved to 100% renewable it would need 12 times its gas capacity or 10% of ALL lithium available on earth for battery.
1st gen renewable are far from a panacea.