Dr. Amir Mikhail, Clipper’s senior vice president of engineering, contibuted to the book’s chapter on wind. Clipper Windpower is one of the most visible organizations on Earth in the race to provide solutions that offer utility-scale clean energy. The company strives to advance the technologies and services that make its customers successful in the expansion of wind energy, lessening the impacts of fossil fuel generation.
Despite the current economic malaise and the stalemate over “capping” carbon, the global wind power industry will grow 160% between now and 2014, according to a just-released forecast from the Global Wind Energy Council. China and the US will lead the way. While the obvious investment play here is the wind turbine manufacturing crowd (Vestas, Nordex, Gamesa, etc.), the less obvious play is the group of companies that will have to build thousands of miles of new transmission lines connecting all this wind power to the grid — companies such as Siemens and ABB.
“China missed the first industrial revolution, missed the computer revolution, and the biology revolution – they want to be a leader in the green revolution,” said Steven Chu, Secretary of Energy. (Scientific American, “Is ARPA-E Enough to Keep the U.S. on the Cutting edge of a Clean Energy Revolution?” March 3, 2010).
And indeed they are rushing ahead. From nowhere, they are now the third largest producer in the wind power market and one of the fastest-growing in domestic wind installations. For the fourth consecutive year, says the World Wind Energy Report 2009, China doubled its wind installations, which is no small feat. While the U.S. was number one in world total installed capacity with China number two, China had the most share of new capacity in 2009 (13,800 MW to America’s 9,922 MW). The following chart, courtesy the World Wind Energy Association (WWEA) illustrates new capacity in 2009.
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Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) introduced controversial legislation on March 3, 2010 that could affect renewable energy and specifically wind. He says that stimulus money is going abroad and wants to suspend the program; his legislation wants the law fixed so all funds stay in the U.S. If this legislation passes, stimulus funds will have a “Buy American” clause that applies to any government project that is awarded funding.
Schumer specifically took aim at a large wind farm project in Texas. Announced last October, the project is a joint venture between Texas-based Cielo Wind Power, China’s Shenyang Power Group and the U.S. Renewable Energy Group. Cielo and U.S. Renewable Energy Group own 51% of the joint-venture. The project is expected to cost about $1.5 billion, and would be one of the largest wind farms in the U.S. When complete, the 600 MW project could generate enough electricity for 180,000 homes.
Cielo President Walt Hornaday said the company has not applied for stimulus funds, and that at least 70 percent of each turbine will be manufactured in the U.S. Vice Mayor Yang Yazhou oversees environmental protection and economic growth in the city of Shenyang. He said in a press release on October 29th, 2009 that the project would demonstrate “…how the two countries can share both the risks and the benefits in a huge wind power project.” (Reuters, Washington D.C., October 29, 2009).
On the morning of March 12th, plans were announced that two of the players Schumer has targeted, U.S. Renewable Energy Group and A-Power Energy Generation Systems, Ltd. (a shareholder in Shenyang Power and China’s leading provider of power generation systems) are to build a large wind turbine plant in Nevada along with America Nevada Group. The 320,000 +/- square foot property would employ about 1,000 Nevada workers. It would supply turbines for the Texas Cielo joint venture project as well as supply customers in North and South America. (Las Vegas Sun, “Plant to Bring Green-job Windfall”, by Stephanie Tavares. March 12, 2010). Will this news dampen the firestorm started by Schumer?
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In recent times, there has been a lot of attention being given to usage of green and clean energy. The governments of different nations are bent upon adoption of green and less polluting energy options. The International Energy Agency (IEA), the European Commission (EC) and other national governments back up the economic models of energy policy decisions. In the process, they tend to ignore the risks involved such as fuel price risk, supply risk and political risk.
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I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Amir Mikhail, Senior Vice President of Engineering for Clipper Windpower, in an effort to develop my chapter on wind for my upcoming book on renewable energy. This talk was full of interesting nuances about the physics and engineering aspects of cutting-edge the technology for extracting energy from the wind and converting it to mechanical – and ultimately to electrical energy. And, as suggested by today’s photo, we began with some fascinating history on the subject.
But Dr. Mikhail raised a few basic points about the renewables industry in general that I thought I would share in this post:
The issue of energy storage is – for the US at this point at least – something of a red herring. With 2% overall penetration of clean energy (across all forms of renewables) the fluctuation associated with the intensity of the wind – even locally — is of essentially no consequence to overall energy availability levels whatsoever. Moreover, by the time the penetration rate increases to anywhere resembling that of Europe, we will have developed smart grid technologies that will enable far better real-time control of large sections of the grid. E.g., if the wind is not blowing strong in area A, let’s see what it’s doing in area B, C, or D.
We also discussed the tough choices forced upon us a we migration to renewables. The wind industry takes seriously the issue of environmental damage associated with its farms, and conducts ongoing research to ensure that the size of turbine rotors and the hours of operation are creating a minimum of negative impact. In the early days of commercial wind, the primary issue was large raptors; now, decades later, the focus is on bats, whose tiny lungs cannot handle the differential in air pressure around the turbines. The industry also is making an effort to build farms in areas that already have a significant human footprint, recognizing the imperative to preserve the true wilderness wherever possible.
However, Dr. Mikhail points out that there are no existing clean energy technologies that come with zero environmental impact. We do have to make choices, and each of these choices will represent some level of sacrifice. “The people in a coal mining state back east were offered a choice of either putting wind turbines on a local mountain, or chopping off the top of the mountain, pulling the coal out of it, and burning it. Craig, do you realize that they chose the latter? There are choices. We simply have to make the best ones.”
Again, Dr. Mikhail, thanks for the insights.
On the things I find so fascinating about the migration to renewables is that it represents the confluence of so many different scientific and technological disciplines – especially in the quest to drive down costs. To take an obvious example, wind turbines are rooted in straightforward fluid dynamics as well as electricity/magnetism. But some real cleverness is required to get wind (and the others) to a point at which, as a source of renewable energy, it is cost-competitiveness with fossil fuels. As we’ve noted here numerous times, there’s plenty of renewable energy out there if you’re willing to pay enough for it. The problem is that we’re on a tight budget here, and that’s where this becomes interesting.
Enter materials science as a potential solution. The way we fabricate things out of steel has created a practical limit to the size of a wind turbine; really big units have been fantastically difficult (and thus expensive) to build. But a material called HT Ferro may represent an abrupt change to that.
Ferrocement, meaning the variety of composite materials in which steel (wire, mesh, rebar) and concrete are used, are widely used in building, due to its great strength and economy. HT Ferro, a wild new variation on this theme, is a patented technology owned by associates of 2GreenEnergy based in New Zealand. According to what I’ve been able to learn, it is vastly superior to steel on many important ways, along the following important dimensions:
a) It was developed for marine application, thus wind turbine components made from it are virtually maintenance free — even in the rugged ocean environment.
b) These components will be far less expensive than steel.
c) Most importantly, a unique manufacturing process enables components to be fabricated in enormous sizes.
It appears that this makes possible very large units that will generate 10+ MW apiece.
More on this soon.
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