wind power

Circular 698 caused a momentary pause throughout the business anglo-sino-blogosphere late last year.

China passed a retroactive look-through provision that effectively changed the rules for foreign investment structures in China. The Circular in and of itself is relatively innocuous. It highlights an oft misunderstood Chinese business sensitivity in China’s central economic planning: China for Chinese business only.

As China carries forward its strategy to adapt to and mitigate climate change, foreign owned clean technology businesses need to be aware of China’s position.

The International Energy Agency projects that global energy demand will increase 46 percent by 2030, requiring an investment of $26.3 trillion in energy infrastructure to meet the expected demand.

Revamping our energy system and doing so with more renewable energy will take substantial funding, and while some countries, like China, are investing in the whole cleantech pipeline, from “lightbulb to lightbulb” — from idea to implementation, as Google puts it — the U.S. is investing in cleantech only sporadically.

“We need to invest across that whole spectrum, and we need to make that sustained,” said Bill Weihl, Google’s Green Energy Czar.

Google, for one, is putting its money where its mouth is.

The British Wind Energy Association (BWEA) has unveiled new data on the nation's wind power industry, and it's a mix of good and bad news.

Europe's third largest electricity market passed the 4 gigawatt (GW) milestone for installed wind power capacity. The latest GW was added in less than a year, a big improvement over the 14 years it took to install the first GW.

"Deployment of wind is rapidly accelerating," the BWEA said.

Still, the windiest nation in Europe has a long, long way to go to catch up with competitors on the continent. Germany, which has one of the worst wind resources in Europe, has an installed capacity of 25 GW. No. 2 Spain is at roughly 17 GW.

For now, the BWEA says 12 GW are either operational or in the British pipeline. That puts wind squarely on track to beat out nuclear power in installed capacity by 2012. Another 9 GW worth of turbines is awaiting approval. If they get the go ahead, the UK will be two-thirds of the way to its 30 GW wind energy target by 2020.

That's a big if.

The news that Terra-Gen Power has secured $115 million in wind power funding is an important development: After bumps on the road to better transmission lines, America's largest wind power project is finally moving forward, even as the economy stays cool.

The project is the Alta Wind Energy Center, located in California's windy Tehachapi-Mojave region, about 100 miles north of urban Los Angeles.

The wind farm is expected to eventually comprise 750 turbines spread over 50 square miles – triple the size of any existing U.S. wind project and out-performing the world's current largest wind farm. Eventually it will feed 3,000 MW of clean power into California's power grid.

But first things first: The millions raised by Terra-Gen, the New York-based renewable energy developer, will be used to purchase the facility's first 100 turbines. The GE-made windmills will be deployed at phase one of the project, the 150-MW Alta Wind I site.

Spanish utility Iberdrola Renewables may soon be taking a large leap forward in terms of its U.S. wind power market share.

The global wind giant is seeking a half a billion dollar chunk of the $3 billion expected to flow from the clean energy portion of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

The money would help the world's No. 1 wind developer bring 850 MW of new wind turbines online in the U.S. this year—a 40 percent jump from its current installed U.S. capacity of roughly 3,030 MW.

And that's only a start: Iberdrola is considering investing as much as $6 billion in the U.S. market over the next four years, and eyeing up to $2 billion in government support, Chairman Ignacio Galán told industry analysts in a conference call today.

The company's effort to snatch up stimulus funds highlights the growing influence of foreign companies in the resource-rich U.S. wind market. It also shows how outside developers are viewing the Obama administration's commitment to clean energy as a can't-miss economic opportunity.

"We couldn't be more pleased with the progression of the regulatory environment," said Ralph Currey, CEO of Iberdrola Renewables U.S. operations. "First thing was the stimulus package that was passed very quickly. The second thing was the grant program and the grant procedures.

"We already have bills in front of the House and bills in front of the Senate that are quite positive for our industry.

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Wind unpredictability and variability are preventing wider and more ambitious adoption of the clean power source, or so the thinking goes in some circles. But is that true?

Not according to a new review on wind power, Managing Variability, commissioned by Greenpeace and carried out by energy consultant David Milborrow.

Just because winds do not blow constantly, does not mean the power produced by them cannot be constant, the energy consultant writes. In fact:

"There are no significant barriers to the introduction of wind energy due to its variability."

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As an energy source, the wind holds a lot of promise. It doesn’t pollute, it doesn’t cause climate change, and it doesn’t use or contaminate water.

But wind has a huge drawback: it is unreliable.

More than two dozen states have mandated renewable energy standards stating that a certain percentage of electricity must be generated by renewable sources like wind, and the nation may soon have a similar RES. But in order to meet electricity demand, power generators will have to be able to predict how much power the wind will generate an hour, a day or a year from now.

Stepping in to meet that need is the evolving technology of wind power forecasting.

As the renewable energy sector scrambles to sort out its share of the economic stimulus package, many voices within the wind and solar sector are pointing out a problem: The booming industry faces a startling lack of skilled professionals.

The stimulus bill's injection of about $50 billion for clean energy projects is certain to create tens of thousands of green jobs. But much of the clean energy field is still new and developing, and poor federal funding in education has left many colleges without the resources to develop innovative technical curricula. Only a handful of specialized programs currently exist on college campuses in fewer than two dozen states.

The question college administrators and industry officials are asking now is: Who will train the next generation for the new green economy?

Wind power's tiny footprints don't stop at carbon emissions. A new analysis of the impacts of various energy sources on human health and the environment finds that wind also has the smallest imprint on another, rarely considered but important aspect: land.

Wind power's ecological footprint is so small — a million times smaller than ethanol's — that if all the cars driven in the United States were battery-electric, they could be fueled by wind turbines whose total land footprint, not counting spacing in between, takes up less than 1.2 square miles, Stanford University environmental engineering professor Mark Jacobson found.

To fuel the same number of battery-electric vehicles with cellulose ethanol would require an amount of land equivalent to eight Californias – literally a million times more land and equivalent to the amount of land harvested in the U.S. in 2003.

A detailed cost comparison of nuclear versus wind energy shows that nuclear energy will soon no longer be cost competitive with wind energy if present trends continue.

While nuclear energy is regarded as one of the cheapest sources of power available -- given the enormous amount of energy released from the splitting of atoms -- and wind is considered relatively expensive, analysis of a number of current projects using publicly available data indicates that wind energy has closed the gap in price per kilowatt.

Furthermore, price trends are much less favorable for nuclear projects -- cost estimates of new nuclear plants have doubled and tripled in some instances in just one or two years. Prices for wind power are also rising, but at more pedestrian rates closer to 10% annually.

This is something well worth considering before welcoming a nuclear renaissance -- as ratepayers may be saddled with unaffordable bills and the nation may also end up with a large, unanticipated bill for the hidden cost of nuclear waste disposal.

I've reached this conclusion by crunching the numbers on one recent contract to build a nuclear plant in South Carolina, two proposed nuclear plants in Florida and new vendor estimates of the cost of nuclear construction going forward. I compared that data with a wind farm that would produce a comparable output of energy, relying on cost data from a Department of Energy report published this year.

The prevailing mantra on America's energy future is "let's keep all options on the table." I put two of them on the table and here's what I found. Put your wonk hat on as I take you through the numbers.