Meet a Gargantuan Wind Turbine, the 7-Megawatt V164. You could fit the entire infield and outfield of Yankee stadium inside the area that this enormous machine sweeps. Twice! Read more.
The Obama administration Tuesday announced a plan to speed up development of wind energy by searching the Atlantic Coast for the most desirable places to build windmills rather than wait for developers to propose sites that could hurt the environment or sit in the middle of a shipping lane.
Under a new initiative called Smart From the Start, the Department of the Interior will identify sites in the Atlantic Outer Continental Shelf with “high wind potential,” Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said. Officials said it currently takes up to nine years for an offshore project to get approval to build.
This is good news. And though, as the article notes, there’ll still be some hurdles, at least it’ll hasten the process of addressing and overcoming them. And, importantly, it’s a step in the right direction in terms of the type of governmental mindset we need to get this important process moving along.
Unlike most other power sources, which consume huge amounts of water that could be used much more productively for human consumption and agriculture, wind power generation does not use any water,” said Steve Sawyer, Secretary General of the Global Wind Energy Council, the leading international wind industry trade group, in a statement Tuesday.
Whereas the more than three-quarters of the current global electricity capacity requires water for cooling and condensing steam that ultimately drives turbines to generate electricity in conventional fossil fuel and nuclear power plants, wind power generation requires practically no water. Even most solar photovoltaic systems require some water to keep the panels clean and operating at peak efficiency (although this is not represented in the graph).
How much water are we talking about? While nuclear and certain types of coal and natural gas power generation will consume somewhere around 3 cubic meters of water per megawatt hour (3m3/MWh), wind uses 0.0 cubic meters of water, according to research from Danish wind energy giant, Vestas Wind.
All tolled, the U.S. Department of Energy estimates that 20 percent of wind power on the U.S. grid by 2030 would save as much as 4 trillion gallons of water.
But the implications may be even more important for emerging economies where water and electricity scarcity already go hand-in-hand. If 40 percent of the world’s population already lives in water-stressed areas and populations in these areas grow and develop using traditional fossil-fueled plants, the water needed to operate the plants will put additional strains on a system already stretched thin. Under a business-as-usual scenario, according to a report by the Water Resources Group (pdf), global water demand is predicted to outpace water supply by 40 percent by 2030.
The long and short of it is that, except in ideal conditions, wind power is not a panacea and by no means represents the perfect stand-alone power source. But wind power also doesn’t require massive amounts of water to generate electricity, and that is a fact that is both undersold by the wind industry and undervalued by many policy makers and wind power opponents.
The new Khayelitsha District Hospital (which will be commissioned by mid-2011) has become one of the first newly constructed government buildings to join the global initiative to reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions at its facilities by installing a solar and wind grid-connected power…
In a Washington Examiner op-ed, Republican U.S. Senate candidate George Allen attacks the Obama administration for what he calls a “full-scale assault on conventional fuels.”
The op-ed, which touts the benefits of natural resources at home, is sharply critical of…
Last September the above chart was posted to show the trend in wind energy development in the Pacific Northwest over the past twelve or so years.
Another look at the data a few months later, available at http://www.awea.org/projects/, shows that between September 2009 and the end of the calendar year hundreds of additional megawatts of installed capacity was built in the region. A small increment of additional capacity has been added so far this year. Another 720 megawatts is under construction.
Wind Energy Capacity Exceeds Four Lower Snake River Dams
The post last September noted that it was back in 1997 when the Idaho Statesman lit the fuse on the regional debate over the future of the lower Snake River dams that frustrate migration and salmon survival rates to the point where even in the pristine waters of central Idaho Wilderness Areas salmon populations have been chronically depressed and continue a slide towards extinction. Back in 1997 one issue was how to replace the lost electricity supplied by the lower Snake River dams.
Over the years as the debate has dragged on the amount of installed capacity of wind now exceeds the 3,500 aMW of the lower Snake River dams.
On January 1st, 2011 SBI Energy (Rockville, Maryland, U.S.) released a new report examining clean energy investments through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA or “stimulus act”) and their impact on markets within the power, transportation and building sectors. The…
The Green Transition Scoreboard® shows $787.6 billion has been invested in renewable energy from 2007–2010 with another $571 billion in firm commitments. Significant momentum in renewables includes growth in solar…
The wind, solar, biomass, and geothermal energy sector has grown in fits and starts during the last 30 years — but now may finally have the momentum to become a self-sustaining industry [Read more].
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Renewable Energy at a Crossroads
The wind, solar, biomass, and geothermal energy sector has grown in fits and starts during the last 30 years — but now may finally have the momentum to become a self-sustaining industry [Read more].
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