The American Wind Energy Association said recently that U.S. wind energy installations now exceed 10,000 megawatts in generating capacity, producing enough electricity on a typical day to power the equivalent of over 2.5 million homes.
The growth in wind power is driven by demand for the energy source and concerns over fuel price volatility and supply. A renewal of the production tax credit (PTC), a federal incentive extended in the Energy Policy Act signed a year ago by President Bush, has also played a major role. The credit had been allowed to expire three times in seven years, and the uncertainty discouraged investment in wind turbine manufacturing in the U.S., the AWEA said.
“Wind energy is providing new electricity supplies that work for our country’s economy, environment, and energy security,” said AWEA Executive Director Randall Swisher. “With its current performance, wind energy is demonstrating that it could rapidly become an important part of the nation’s power portfolio.”
The first commercial wind farms were constructed in California in the early 1980s, and after reaching 1,000 MW in 1985, it took more than a decade for wind to reach the 2,000-MW mark, in 1999. Since then, installed capacity has grown fivefold (for a chart showing historical cumulative capacity, see http://www.awea.org/faq/instcap.html). Today, the industry is installing more wind power in a single year (3,000 MW expected in 2006) than the amount operating in the entire country in 2000 (2,500 MW).
Wind was the second-largest source of new power generation in the country in 2005 after natural gas, and is likely be so again in 2006, according to the Energy Information Administration. Wind turbine manufacturing companies have recently opened facilities in Iowa (Clipper Windpower), Minnesota (Suzlon), and Pennsylvania (Gamesa), and wind turbine orders are creating jobs all the way down the supply chain, sometimes in areas that do not have a large wind resource, such as Louisiana.
Meanwhile, the AWEA says today’s 10,000 MW of wind power keeps 16 million tons of carbon dioxide out of the air every year. If the same amount of electricity as that generated by America’s 10,000-MW wind turbine fleet were instead produced using the average utility fuel mix, it would emit 73,000 tons of sulfur dioxide and 27,000 tons of nitrogen oxide per year, as well as other pollutants such as mercury.
Of course, wind power is no stranger to controversy. The energy source has long grappled with opposition from environmentalists and land owners who would have to look at the humongous structures every day.
One of the more contentious wind-farm propositions is in Cape Cod, where discussions are ongoing about the construction of 130 turbines in the shallow waters of Horseshoe Shoal.