Backgrounder: Wind Energy: a Green
Harvest of Electricity Technology Offers Clean Power Options
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution ( December 17,
2001 )
Washington --- Maynard Fricke
figured the 45 acres of dry, windy farmland he purchased in western
Kansas early this year might produce enough corn in a good year to
net him $50 an acre. But a few months after Fricke bought the
land, representatives of FPL Energy of Juno Beach, Fla., turned up in
the area, talking of building a "wind farm." They suggested that a
farmer might earn as much as $2,000 a year in royalties for every
wind-driven electric generator he allowed them to build on his
property. Now, three wind turbines tower over Fricke's flat
fields, lazily turning in the Kansas wind. Fricke won't say precisely
how much he is being paid for each one, but he said the $2,000 figure
is "real close." That translates to about $133 an acre. The
three machines are part of a 170-turbine wind farm spread over an
area of about 20 square miles. The wind farm has a generating
capacity of 110 megawatts, enough electricity for 33,000 homes.
"I've put that land in the Conservation Reserve Program, and the
federal government's paying me about $45 an acre not to plant
anything on it," Fricke said last week. Other turbines in the new FPL
wind farm are located on productive cropland, he added, usually
positioned at the corners of 160-acre fields, at spots not reached by
huge, round, center-pivot irrigation systems. "We've got real
good wind out here," he
said. 'Immense' potential In
fact, America has a lot of real good wind. Led by Texas and
California, 22 states are harvesting fast-increasing amounts of wind
energy. According to the Department of Energy, America will have
4,360 megawatts of electricity-generating capacity in the form of
wind turbines by the end of this month. That's enough power to serve
the needs of more than a million homes. Other projects,
including a huge offshore "wind park" off Massachusetts, are under
development and expected to begin operation in the next two
years. Three states --- Kansas, Texas and North Dakota --- have
enough "harvestable" wind to meet the energy requirements of the
entire country, experts say. But in places like Tennessee, Vermont
and Hawaii, the wind business also is growing. "It is immense,"
said energy scholar Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for
Energy and Environmental Research. "We are the Mideast of wind."
Wind could be an even bigger part of the nation's energy picture if
more transmission lines were built to serve remote locations, experts
say. That lack is the reason North Dakota, one of the country's three
"wealthiest" wind states, ranks 21st among the 22 wind
power-producing states, said Christine Real de Azua of the American
Wind Energy Association, an industry group. Worldwide, wind is
the fastest-growing energy resource, with generating capacity rising
25 percent last year and 34 percent the year before. The European
Wind Energy Association projects that European countries will share
more than 60,000 megawatts of wind generating capacity by the end of
this decade. (In comparison, Georgia Power has 15,114 megawatts of
generating capacity, most of it
coal-based.) A growing 'wind
rush' Although the price of wind-generated electricity is
slightly higher than prices from fossil-fuel generating plants ---
even with a 1.7-cent-per-kilowatt hour federal subsidy --- the power
sells, partly because of mandates that power companies include
nonpolluting and renewable energy in their portfolios. And when
consumers have the option, many are willing to pay more for ''green''
electricity. John Hangar, a former member of the Pennsylvania
Public Utilities Commission, now heads Citizens for Pennsylvania's Future,
an environmental group organized to promote clean energy. The
organization arranges purchases of wind-powered electricity from
three wind farms developed in the past two years in western
Pennsylvania. Led by the University of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania
State University and Carnegie-Mellon University, Pennsylvanians are
demonstrating a willingness to pay from 1.5 cents to 2.5 cents more
per kilowatt hour to obtain wind energy, Hangar said. Under
Pennsylvania law, electricity customers have a right to specify the
source of the electricity they buy. "Think of it as a swimming
pool filled with electricity," Hangar said. "On one side, power
companies are putting in electricity and on the other side, customers
are sucking it out. When more customers buy wind energy, we green up
the pool." AWEA estimates that consumers who buy power from the
wind power plants online by the end of this year will avoid putting
7.5 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere next year.
Texas' renewable energy requirement, adopted when President
Bush was governor, is regarded by the industry group as the most
effective state policy in promoting green power. "That policy
caused a wind rush in Texas," said Randy Swisher, executive director
of AWEA. He said that by requiring electric utilities to include
defined minimums of renewable power in their portfolios and setting
up a system of tradeable credits, the Texas policy would have
required power companies to add 400 megawatts of new renewable
generating capacity by 2003. "They are already approaching 900
megawatts," he said. "Other states have adopted renewables portfolio
standards, but none with the stunning success of Texas." In
addition to environmental concerns, growth of the industry has been
driven by technological change, unpredictable shifts in the prices of
other energy sources and the growing realization that in a world
plagued by terrorists, energy independence has economic value.
FPL, a corporate relative of South Florida's huge electric utility,
Florida Power and Light Co., is the largest producer of
wind-generated electricity in the country. It operates wind farms in
Iowa, Wisconsin, Texas, Minnesota, Oregon, Washington, California and
now Kansas. Wind farms usually are welcomed --- even sought ---
by host communities, said Mary Wells, manager of community outreach
for FPL Energy. "The approval process is much, much quicker with
a wind farm than a conventional power plant, and construction is
quicker too," Wells said. The Gray County wind farm in Kansas is
a case in point. FPL showed up in the county early this year, and the
last of the 170 wind turbines was to be dedicated today. The
company was completing work last week on the last of 399 turbines at
a new 400-megawatt Stateline Wind Project in Oregon and
Washington. In April, FPL announced plans to develop the
278-megawatt King Mountain wind farm in Upton County, Texas. The
plant is now in operation. A series of ever-larger wind
facilities are either planned or under development. Cape Wind
Associates of Wellesley, Mass., says it is developing a 420-megawatt
offshore wind farm in the shallow waters of Horseshoe Shoal in
Nantucket Sound. Underwater cables will carry the farm's output to a
substation on Cape Cod and the New England power grid. Unlike
the picturesque "windmills" that have churned over American rural
scenes since Colonial times, modern wind turbines represent ungainly
--- and high-tech --- additions to a landscape, their huge blades
revolving slowly, once every second or two. Placed on towers
more than 200 feet high, where the wind blows harder and more
consistently, the generators are driven by three blades that are
typically 70 feet long. Underground cables connect the turbines
to substations and, ultimately, a power grid. One problem that
designers have had to overcome is "overspeed," when the wind blows so
hard that the turning blades can burn up a generator designed to
function efficiently in wind speeds as low as 8 mph. A recent
patent by Danish investors described a system in which a laser
instrument monitors wind speed and automatically adjusts the pitch of
the three blades to the most efficient angle. Once a turbine is
installed, the only expense is maintenance. Unlike the volatile price
fluctuations in petroleum and natural gas, wind operators can easily
and accurately project the price they will have to charge 10 years
later. A risk for birds The
towering structures may not be altogether environmentally benign.
They can pose a hazard as to flying birds, especially those that
migrate at night, said Doug Inkley, senior wildlife biologist with
the National Wildlife Federation. "They are high structures
that are poorly lighted or not lighted at all," Inkley said, "and the
birds aren't used to them being there. They are a concern."
However, environmentalists generally have fewer worries about wind
farms than conventional coal and nuclear plants, which pollute the
air and generate radioactive waste. European manufacturers,
especially two in Denmark, have led the way in developing ever-larger
wind turbines. But many of the new 1.5-megawatt turbines being
installed this year in the United States are manufactured by Enron
Wind, a subsidiary of the giant Houston energy company that collapsed
in recent weeks. The turbine subsidiary is still
operating.
Copyright 2001 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
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