Blowing wind energy

Houston Chronicle:

The U.S. could dramatically boost electricity generated from wind by investing in research on lighter turbines, taller towers and more efficient generators, energy experts from New York and Texas told a House panel Tuesday.

For wind power to play “a more prominent role in the nation's energy mix,” there must be financial support for research aimed at improving “performance and reliability,” said John Saintcross, a program manager with the New York State Energy Research and Development Corp.

Andy Swift, the director of the Wind Science and Engineering Research Center at Texas Tech University, said federal spending to develop more efficient technologies could combat the reliability and cost problems that have limited wind power.

Although the Department of Energy has estimated that wind resources on and off U.S. shores could power the country several times over, wind energy now accounts for just 2 percent of the nation's electricity supplies.

The Energy Department last year predicted that wind could provide 20 percent of the nation's electricity portfolio by 2030, assuming that the capital costs of wind energy projects decreased by 10  percent and turbines become more efficient.

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One of the biggest obstacles to wind power is the nation's aging electrical transmission grid, which was designed to accommodate power generation at centralized plants close to the urban customers they serve. Earlier this month, billionaire investor T. Boone Pickens said he was delaying his plans for a $10 billion wind farm in West Texas until a new transmission line is complete.

I am not an opponent of wind energy, though I some times sound like it because I post about its shortcomings. The shorcoming suggest that wind will not be the answer to an attempt to switch from carbon based energy. It is not as efficient and it costs considerabley more. Even with the significant subsidies it gets it still costs much more and it needs additional subidies for transmission lines just to get its electricity to where it is needed.

For wind energy to be viable the costs need to come down through a mechanism other than government and utility subsidies. In other words it needs to be more efficient at producing and delivering energy than it currently is. If it can be competitive without subsidies then it will have a chance. But the post blow about the closing of plants producing the turbines and the unrealistic plans for putting more into use suggest how unrealistic some government forecast are.

For the carbon phobes this is a serious problem, because wind is way ahead of solar in the alternative energy universe. This lack of efficiency is leading their proponents to manipulate the market for carbon based energy driving up the cost of energy for everyone through so called cap and trade. I think there will be a voter rebellion against those who push this manipulation.