Into the Wind - the AWEA Blog

You may have read recently about U.S. Treasury Department inspector general auditors flagging excess payments to an Illinois wind farm under the federal 1603 tax credit program. To clear up the uncertainties, let’s state the facts of the case.

Fact #1: These preliminary reports have a history of being corrected and resolved once auditors get a better understanding of the expenses involved. As a recent Bloomberg story states (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-10-26/clean-energy-developers-reaped-excess-aid-under-u-s-program-auditors-say.html), during an earlier round of audits:

“Inspectors reversed initial decisions questioning $1 ...

Read more

As another international conference on climate change gets underway in Durban, South Africa, Paul Faeth, a senior fellow at Washington, D.C.-based think tank CNA, points out that the state of Texas is succeeding both at conserving water and reducing greenhouse gas emissions through greater use of wind power.

Comments Faeth in an article on the "Oil and Glory" blog of Foreign Policy magazine, "Facing its worst single-year drought ever, Texas is demonstrating synergies that accompany the extensive use of wind power, which requires no water and tamps down the need for water-guzzling coal-powered electric plants. The southwestern U.S. state ...

Read more

A new review of scientific literature on wind turbine sound and human health has found no direct link between the sound of wind turbines and human physical health.

The review was conducted by Drs. Loren D. Knopper and Christopher A. Ollson of the Canadian consulting firm Intrinsik Environmental Services, Inc., and their findings appeared in an article published in the Journal of Environmental Health (Knopper and Ollson: "Health effects of wind turbines: A review of the literature," Environmental Health 2011, 10:78). Intrinsik frequently performs analyses of wind turbine sound for wind farm developers.

In the abstract to their article, the authors comment that "People interested in [the ...

Read more

Despite being over 3800 miles from home, the message I heard at this morning’s opening session of The EWEA Offshore conference sounded very familiar.  The Conference kicked off this morning with over 7,500 key stakeholders descending upon Amsterdam to discuss the pressing issues facing the offshore wind industry in Europe.  EWEA kicked things off by releasing their latest analysis of all existing offshore wind projects in 17 EU member states.
 
Their findings are impressive, with over 141 gigawatts of offshore wind energy capacity built, under construction, consented, or planned in Europe: enough to power 130 million average EU households.
 
Ian Marchant (CEO of SSE ...

Read more

This article by John Feehery was cross-posted from his blog, The Feehery Theory.  Mr. Feehery is President of Communications and Director of Government Affairs for Quinn Gillespie and Associates, a Washington, D.C., public affairs firm.

All-of-the-above is officially the mantra for Republicans when it comes to energy security.

Republicans understand that electricity generation is extraordinarily important to American progress. Without electricity, we can’t play with our iPads, air condition our homes, cook our breakfasts, watch television, get money from the ATM, shop for ...

Read more

Venture capitalist Nathan Myhrvold, a former chief technology officer at Microsoft, has a Bloomberg opinion article extolling the virtues of, not surprisingly, research and development (R&D) of new energy technologies.

While R&D definitely has a valuable place in the energy arena, it's no replacement for the stable tax policy the wind energy production tax credit (PTC) provides to businesses and consumers. Mr. Myhrvold's article overlooks some important facts:

Government incentives are successfully lowering the cost of wind power: This has been made clear by two recent studies of the wind power industry, one from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and a second from Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

Read more

Tyrell Quantrell has found a promising career in the wind energy industry, and he found it right at home in the Pacific Northwest. Quantrell now works as a wind turbine technician, thanks to an exciting industry that with the right policies can keep expanding, as well as a local community college program developed as a result of that industry.

Perhaps most of all, of course, credit Quantrell’s own hard work. His story is captured in the latest installment of WindTV, the American Wind Energy Association’s (AWEA) new vehicle to highlight how wind power works for America.

Now employed by Granite Services and working on GE wind turbines, Quantrell studied at Columbia Gorge Community College in Oregon, where ...

Read more

Columnist Dawn Stover has an intriguing, but ultimately misleading, article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists arguing that no energy source is "renewable"--because the equipment to harvest them is not also renewable, or because they are imperfect in some other way.

Permit me to disagree. Here's a hint: "renewable energy" means "renewable energy sources."

Let's examine the difference between an exemplary renewable energy source--the kinetic energy of the wind that is used to generate electricity or for other purposes--and a typical fossil energy source.

Ms. Stover might have argued that all energy sources are renewable--the only difference is time scale. Ultimately, the fossil fuels that we retrieve by mining ...

Read more

Minneapolis-based utility Xcel Energy set a world record early on the morning of Oct. 6, with 55.6 percent of the electricity on its Public Service of Colorado (PSCo) system between the hours of 4 and 5 a.m. coming from wind, according to the Denver Post.

The Post's Mark Jaffe quoted AWEA's Manager of Transmission Policy, Michael Goggin, as saying that the previous record of 53 percent was achieved in Spain in 2009. According to the article, "Improved wind forecasting, energy trading and grid operating improvements are allowing more wind power to be used, Xcel executives said."

Wind power has faced skepticism for many years (though most of it has come from, or been funded by, competing ...

Read more

Cross-posted from National Journal's Energy & Environment Expert Blog.

If clean energy is headed for a crisis in America, it will be a crisis of our own making. Wind energy is humming along right now, creating one of the fastest growing manufacturing sectors and accounting for more than a third of all new electric generating capacity across the U.S.

The key to that growth is the stability of the federal Production Tax Credit (PTC). Congress now has a chance to extend that key incentive for wind and avert this crisis before it ever happens.

It’s clear that the PTC, which was intended to stimulate demand for ...

Read more