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| 20 Nov 2009 03:24:01 pm |
 RFK Jr. Spreads the message on renewable energy |
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Quote : Last year, America achieved a milestone, building more wind power generation than all new oil and coal generation combined. We have led the world in wind installations for several years, and the wind industry already accounts for more American jobs than coal mining. At one point the U.S. enjoyed global domination of wind turbine manufacturing with great prospects for job creation. Yet today, of the five leading wind turbine manufacturers, only one is American. While Congress dawdles, China is clobbering us. Shenyang Power Group recently inked a deal to be the exclusive supplier of turbines to the largest wind project in the United States, a 36,000 acre, 600 megawatt development in west Texas. The project will create 2,800 new jobs -- 2,400 in China, but only 400 in the United States. As Lu Jinxiang, chief executive of Shenyang's controlling shareholder noted, "This is just the beginning ... [the United States] is an ideal target." China is likewise poised to take away our lead in batteries and electric cars, and has already pulled far ahead of America in automobile fuel efficiency.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
There have been times when all factions of the green movement did not seem to agree on all aspects of policy. But the quote above from a recent column by Robert Kennedy Jr. in The Huffington Post ties all the pieces together perfectly. |
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Category : AWEA News
| By : Chris Madison |
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| 19 Nov 2009 07:26:17 pm |
| Notes From Orlando: Wind industry decisions not made in DC |
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By Guest Blogger Carl Levesque
While AWEA’s Wind Energy Fall Symposium is taking place in a lush, tranquil resort setting in Orlando, Fla., themes emerging here underscore the hard-knocks nature of the industry: Wind power's success is dependent on dynamic market forces and business decisions occurring on the ground and in the field.
Take transmission, one of the most crucial issues confronting the industry. Decisions that control the fate of new transmission lines are being made far away from Capitol Hill and the offices of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). “The action is not taking place in Washington,” said Don Furman, AWEA's President. “It’s taking place at the [independent system operators]. It’s taking place in the states.” The same goes for siting, he noted. And then there are property taxes, which can make or break a project’s bottom line and therefore determine whether or not it will get built at all.
So if the challenges are on the ground, where will the solutions come from? You guessed it—the same place. Toward that end, Furman urged Symposium participants to get involved with their regional advocacy groups.
Just as Furman argued that all siting is local, the session titled “Inside the Supply Chain” underscored the real-world, nuts-and-bolts nature of the industry as well as the complexity of the supply chain. Presenter Cheryl Richards’s company, PPG Industries, manufactures a host of products for the industry, including fiberglass and coatings. Such products get sent to component manufacturers, who then pass their finished product on to the turbine producer. It really is a "chain."
The experience of Kevin Hazel, Siemens Vice President of Supply Chain Management. illustrates that complexity as well. As a turbine manufacturer, he said, he gets inquiries all the time from potential suppliers who don’t realize they’re barking up the wrong tree. A coil producer, for instance, might approach him and express interest in producing products for the wind industry and Siemens in particular. Hazel’s inevitable answer: that’s great, but “go talk to someone who makes generators.”
In a fast-growing industry, you better know what you are looking for, where the decisions are made, and what role you are ready and able to play. |
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Category : AWEA News
| By : Chris Madison |
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| 19 Nov 2009 04:08:16 pm |
| Wind Myths: Busted |
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Yesterday, I referred to a recent special issue of Power & Energy on wind energy. Power & Energy is the magazine of the Power Engineering Society (PES) of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and in recent years, it has devoted one issue every two years to assembling many of the foremost experts in the field to examine the status of wind technology and its use by electric utilities.
The magazine's editors have been kind enough to provide free access to two articles from the special issue here. Most significantly, one of the two is "Wind Power Myths Debunked," by Michael Milligan, Kevin Porter, Edgar DeMeo, Paul Denholm, Hannele Holttinen, Brendan Kirby, Nicholas Miller, Andrew Mills, Mark O’Malley, Matthew Schuerger, and Lennart Soder.
The Milligan et al article looks at a variety of mythic questions (e.g., "Doesn't wind power need backup generation?") and addresses them in detail with appropriate graphics. I'm not going to go through them here, but I do want to call attention to the article's conclusions, which I am going to list here in a modified, bulleted format for clarity:
- "Although wind is a variable resource, grid [utility system] operators have experience with managing variability that comes from handling the variability of load [customer electricity demand]. As a result, in many instances the power system is equipped to handle variability.
- "Wind power is not expensive to integrate ...
- "...nor does it require dedicated backup generation or storage.
- "Developments in tools such as wind forecasting alo aid in integrating wind power.
- "Integration wind can be aided by enlarging balancing areas and moving to subhourly scheduling, which enable grid operators to access a deeper stack of generating resources and take advantage of the smoothing of wind output due to geographic diversity.
- "Continued improvements in new conventional-generation technologies and the emergence of demand response, smart grids, and new technologies such as plug-in hybrids will also help with wind integration." |
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Category : AWEA News
| By : Tom Gray |
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| 18 Nov 2009 10:11:55 pm |
| The controversy that wasn't such a controversy |
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About two weeks ago, a U.S. company, U.S. Renewable Energy Group, caused a stir when it announced it was forming a joint venture with a Chinese company, A-Power Energy Generation Systems, to build a wind farm in Texas. The turbines would come from China, and one participant said the project wouldn't have been possible if Congress had not passed a program of grants to encourage development of renewable energy.
The deal was criticized by some labor groups and by Sen. Charles Schumer of New York because it suggested using economic recovery funds to buy wind turbines manufactured by Chinese workers at a time when Americans need the jobs.
This week, the two companies issued another announcement about a separate deal to build a turbines manufacturing plant in the United States. They also said that in the case of the earlier deal, the intent had always been to import some parts of the turbines, and to manufacture other parts in the United States.
Sen. Schumer applauded the second announcement. “This is exactly what stimulus funding ought to do: create and strengthen green manufacturing jobs in America...We still maintain no stimulus money should be used to manufacture wind turbines in China.”
Was this a manufactured controversy, a PR effort gone haywire or simply mixed signals? There is no way to tell. But it does illustrate how much is still misunderstood about the U.S. wind energy industry, especially its manufacturing arm. And how easy it is to say the wrong thing at the wrong time in Washington.
The Obama Administration managed to stay above the fray. In the publication Green Energy Reporter, Matt Rogers of the Department of Energy was quoted today as saying, "Basically it's a non-issue. "
As Rogers pointed out (and AWEA has stressed repeatedly), the U.S. wind energy is increasingly manufacturing key components in the United States--over 50% now, up from about half that just a few years ago. But it takes time to build a manufacturing base, and there has to be a reliable domestic market for the goods. One reason the wind industry has been pushing so hard for a strong renewable electricity standard is that it would create an incentive for turbine manufacturers to locate here. That would mean more wind energy, and fewer carbon emissions, and more jobs.
"We all want to create more jobs here in the U.S.," said AWEA CEO Denise Bode in a statement this week. "One hundred percent of the ARRA funding for the wind sector has gone to projects that are installed and operate here in the U.S., spurring new wind farm development and supporting thousands of local jobs. What’s more, we have made great strides in U.S. wind turbine and turbine component manufacturing production--up 12-fold from 2004. "
As for the statements coming from U.S. Renewable Energy Group, wind industry analysts were puzzled. The joint venture for a U.S. manufacturing plant has been in the works for some time; why didn't they announce it at the time they announced the Texas wind farm project? And if they always planned to install U.S. -made blades and towers at the Texas wind farm, with only nacelles coming from abroad (not an uncommon configuration), why didn't they announce that, too? Why start an unnecessary controversy?
Surely, it was not just an effort to make Sen. Schumer look good. |
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Category : AWEA News
| By : Chris Madison |
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| 18 Nov 2009 09:42:49 pm |
| Wind Integration: Notes from an Expert |
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Today I'm attending the Utilities & Wind Power Seminar at AWEA's Fall Symposium in Orlando, and just took in a talk on wind integration by Charlie Smith, Executive Director of the Utility Wind Interest Group.
Lots of interesting info in this presentation by one of the true experts in the field--Charlie just co-edited, for the third time in a row, a special issue of Power and Energy magazine on wind energy. Power and Energy is published by the Power Engineering Society of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).
Here are a few nuggets:
- "It's all about dealing with variability and uncertainty." Utilities are used to dealing with variability--customer demand for electricity is constantly changing throughout the day, but adding wind introduces some further variation into the system.
- You manage variability with flexibility. Sources of flexibility? In rough order of increasing expense: the electricity markets; flexible generation (mostly gas turbines); traditional storage (hydro, pumped hydro, gas storage); wind curtailment; and new energy storage.
- There seems to be a surprising amount of flexibility in existing electricity markets. Studies from three different regional power systems show that if a market is set up to allow 5-minute-ahead purchasing of electricity supply, the price per unit of electricity (megawatt-hour, MWh) is about the same as a market that only allows day-ahead purchases. This means that a utility with wind on its system could improve its capability to deal with wind's variability if a 5-minute-ahead market were set up--the output of a wind farm is very predictable over short time periods.
- Gas storage is also an interesting option. One utility that has a high percentage of gas-fired generation improved its flexibility at a very low cost by simply adding gas storage tanks--where gas can be stored while the wind is blowing, then burned to generate electricity when the wind dies down.
- Short-term utility reserve requirements (to deal with changes in the readily available electricity supply) are often unaffected by adding wind. Why? Because their size is driven by how much supply it will take to deal with the instantaneous loss of the largest power plant on the system, not relatively small variations in wind generation.
- What about energy storage? It's a "valuable component of a power system, can provide many benefits." However, "Integration studies do not show need for [energy] storage at 20% wind except possibly on small, isolated systems."
Two articles from the IEEE magazine mentioned above are available here. Especially recommended: "Wind Power Myths Debunked" by Michael Milligan et al. We'll have more to say about this in the future. |
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Category : AWEA News
| By : Tom Gray |
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