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The Great Transition, Part II: Building a Wind-Centered Economy

wind farm along a shoreline

Editor’s note: If you missed part 1 of this series, it’s available here.

By Lester R. Brown

In the race to transition from fossil fuels to renewable sources of energy and avoid runaway climate change, wind has opened a wide lead on both solar and geothermal energy. Solar panels, with a capacity totaling 70,000 megawatts, and geothermal power plants, with a capacity of some 11,000 megawatts, are generating electricity around the world. The total capacity for the world’s wind farms, now generating power in about 80 countries, is near 240,000 megawatts. China and the United States are in the lead.

Over the past decade, world wind electric generating capacity grew at nearly 30 percent per year, its increase driven by its many attractive features and by public policies supporting its expansion. Wind is abundant, carbon-free and nondepletable. It uses no water, no fuel, and little land. Wind is also locally available, scales up easily, and can be brought online quickly. No other energy source can match this combination of features.

One reason wind power is so popular is that it has a small footprint. Although a wind farm can cover many square miles, turbines occupy only 1 percent of that area. Compared with other renewable sources of energy, wind energy yield per acre is off the charts. For example, a farmer in northern Iowa could plant an acre in corn that yields enough grain to produce roughly $1,000 worth of fuel-grade ethanol per year, or he could use that same acre to site a turbine producing $300,000 worth of electricity each year.

Because turbines take up only 1 percent of the land covered by a wind farm, ranchers and farmers can, in effect, double-crop their land, simultaneously harvesting electricity while producing cattle, wheat or corn. With no investment on their part, farmers and ranchers can receive $3,000 to $10,000 a year in royalties for each wind turbine on their land. For thousands of ranchers on the U.S. Great Plains, wind royalties will one day dwarf their earnings from cattle sales.

Wind is also abundant. In the United States, three wind-rich states—North Dakota, Kansas, and Texas—have enough harnessable wind energy to easily satisfy national electricity needs. Another attraction of wind energy is that it is not depletable. The amount of wind energy used today has no effect on the amount available tomorrow.

Unlike coal, gas, and nuclear power plants, wind farms do not require water for cooling. As wind backs out coal and natural gas in power generation, water will be freed up for irrigation and other needs.

Perhaps wind’s strongest attraction is that there is no fuel cost. After the wind farm is completed, the electricity flows with no monthly fuel bill. And while it may take a decade to build a nuclear power plant, the construction time for the typical wind farm is one year.

Future wind complexes in the Great Plains, in the North Sea, off the coast of China or the eastern coast of the United States may have generating capacity measured in the tens of thousands of megawatts. Planning and investment in wind projects is occurring on a scale not previously seen in the traditional energy sector.

One of the obvious downsides of wind is its variability. But as wind farms multiply, this becomes less of an issue. Because no two farms have identical wind profiles, each farm added to a grid reduces variability. A Stanford University research team has pointed out that with thousands of wind farms and a national grid in a country such as the United States, wind becomes a remarkably stable source of electricity.

In more densely populated areas, there is often local opposition to wind power — the NIMBY (“not in my backyard”) response. But in the vast ranching and farming regions of the United States, wind is immensely popular for economic reasons. For ranchers in the Great Plains, farmers in the Midwest or dairy farmers in upstate New York, there is a PIMBY (“put it in my backyard”) response.

Farmers and ranchers welcome the additional income from having wind turbines on their land. Rural communities compete for wind farm investments and the additional tax revenue to support their schools and roads.

Building Transmission Infrastructure for a Wind Economy

One of the keys to developing wind resources is building the transmission lines to link wind-rich regions with population centers. Perhaps the most exciting grid project under development is the so-called Tres Amigas electricity hub, a grid interconnection center to be built in eastern New Mexico. It will link the three U.S. electricity grids — the Eastern, Western, and Texas grids. Tres Amigas is a landmark in the evolution of the new energy economy. With high-voltage lines linking the three grids where they are close to each other, electricity can be moved from one part of the United States to another as conditions warrant. By matching surpluses with deficits over a broader area, electricity wastage and consumer rates can both be reduced. Other long distance transmission lines are under construction or in the planning stages.

We know that rapid growth in wind generation is possible. U.S. wind generating capacity expanded by 45 percent in 2007 and 50 percent in 2008. If we expanded world wind generation during this decade at 40 percent per year, the 238,000 megawatts of generating capacity at the end of 2011 would expand to nearly 5 million megawatts in 2020. Combined with an ambitious solar and geothermal expansion, along with new hydro projects in the pipeline, this would total 7.5 million megawatts of renewable generating capacity, enabling us to back out all of the coal and oil and most of the natural gas now used to generate electricity. (See data.)

In addition to the shift to renewable sources of energy, there are two other critical components of this climate stabilization plan: rapidly increasing the energy efficiency of industry, appliances, and lighting, and restructuring the transportation sector, electrifying it as much as possible while ramping up public transit, biking and walking. (With this latter component, we would be able to back out much of the oil used for transportation.)

This energy restructuring would require roughly 300,000 wind turbines per year over the next decade. Can we produce those? For sure. Keep in mind that the world today is producing some 70 million cars, trucks, and buses each year. Many of the wind turbines needed to back out fossil fuels in electricity generation worldwide could be produced in currently idled automobile assembly plants in the United States alone. The plants would, of course, need to be modified to shift from automobiles to wind turbines, but it is entirely doable. In World War II, Chrysler went from making cars to tanks in a matter of months. If we could do that then, we and the rest of the world can certainly build the 300,000 wind turbines per year we now need to build the new energy economy and stabilize the climate.

For the first time since the Industrial Revolution began, we have an opportunity to invest in alternative sources of energy that can last as long as the Earth itself. The choice is ours. We can stay with business as usual, or we can move the world onto a path of sustained progress. The choice will be made by our generation, but it will affect life on Earth for all generations to come.

Adapted from “Exciting News about Renewable Energy,” by Lester R. Brown, in the October/November 2012 issue of Mother Earth News.

Lester R. Brown is President of Earth Policy Institute and author of Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity.

Data and additional resources at www.earth-policy.org

Image credit: lawmurray via photopin cc

9 comments
  1. Ceal Smith

    The reason wind is so popular is because it requires natural gas backup and is driving a rapid conversion to natural gas in all sectors. It’s now known that natural gas produces 30% more co2 emissions than coal when the whole production cycle is accounted for. Industrial wind has a massive footprint and kills hundreds of thousands of birds and bats each year. Take a look at the scale of the projects being proposed on BLM lands in the West, there is nothing benign about industrial wind.

  2. Ceal Smith

    Let me restate that first sentence…..wind is popular because it requires natural gas backup and fits into energy industry plans to convert our economy to natural gas. Similarly, the big solar industry is adding natural gas generation to its massive remote industrial solar power plants in CA. We are destroying desert ecosystems when we could be installing massive distributed generation in the VAST urban environment already devoted to meeting human needs.

  3. Jeff McIntire-Strasburg

    Ceal – I’d be really interested to know why wind (or any renewable energy source) required natural gas backup. Or, are you arguing that some kind of backup is required, and natural gas is what’s being used now (because of its costs)? And how would distributed networks (which I’m also a fan of) avoid the need for some kind of backup?

    On the issue of bird/bat deaths: no doubt this is an issue… and one that the industry working on. Keep in mind, though, that other forms of human activity kill many more birds/bats. http://www.nature.com/news/the-trouble-with-turbines-an-ill-wind-1.10849

    I’m sympathetic to your positions, but I’m also concerned that you’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater…

  4. Steve

    It all reallys sounds good, doesn’t it? Free energy from wind! If we could only tap into the political hot air…but that is another story!
    If it was that easy, don’t you think it would have been done by now?!! Without some cheap, reliable form of energy storage (no, not batteries…if you don’t understand, go do some research) wind will never be the “holy grail” of energy. Energy transmission is very inefficient, very costly, and kils lots more birds! Wind mills don’t kill birds…if they did, where are all the bodies?
    “Show me the money!” the movie says, and they are right. No money, no energy. If you think it is that easy, I encourge you to go off the grid for 6 months. Blog by candle light! In a month, you will be back because you can’t watch your TV.
    Why do you think connection fees for wind turbines is going to sky high? Why do you think solar panel mfrs are in the red? Why are wind turbine sales down double or triple digits in the past year?
    THERE IS NO MONEY THERE!! You can scream and cry and jump up and down and sing Kumbaya all you want, but if there is no money, it won’t happen.
    Get real, go hug a tree or kiss a bird. Or, as I saw happen one time, get in your luxury SUV and drive 100’s of miles to a rally at a national park protesting CO2…what is wrong with this picture? If you don’t see it, you are part of the problem.

    We will never have a wind-centered economy unless you get the consumption down dramatically. And we know that will never happen…
    Or find a solution to energy storage. That is where the next billioniare will be made.

  5. Sean

    Steve, you don’t need storage, you need transmission, between distributed demand and supply, and pumped storage hydro a huge chunk of electricity demand can be supplied by renewables.

    HVDC is very efficient.

    look up demand side management.

    Photovoltaic manufacture is an entirely different kettle of fish.

    And yes, if i did discover a way to have dirt cheap energy storage i would be a very happy man.

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