Texas Sets New US Wind Energy Record

businessgreen.com:

Texas set a new record for US wind energy generation late last week when at 6:37am on Friday wind turbines provided 19 per cent of the electricity mix - the equivalent of 6,272MW - to its main grid.

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Comments

[research]

06:53 PM on 03/11/2010

Seth says all the world nuclear waste will fit in a soccer stadium??????????????

[research]

06:52 PM on 03/11/2010

A soccer Stadium!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

when a particle you can';t see will kill you with cancer!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[CaptainFailmore]

02:50 PM on 03/10/2010

Wow, now that's something. Nineteen percent wind power, in a state with a population that high and a land area that large. Hats off to you, Texas.

Speaking of which, apparently Ampyx Power recently had a successful trial of their ten kilowatt 'power plane' - a high-altitude wind generator built like a glider, giving it advantages in stability and control while catching winds hundreds, even thousands of meters above the ground. (Not only is there more power up there, it's a hell of a lot more reliable than surface level winds.) This follows fast on the heels of other research groups like the good folks at Delft University who are already generating similar amounts of power at ground-level with sporting kites. Now there's an exciting field. Windmills are grand, but they're just the beginning! In a very short time (and definitely within this decade) I expect that we'll see 'HAWP' start making an inroads against not only other forms of wind power, but coal and gas as well. Maybe Texas will be the first state to break the eighty percent line when that time comes.

By the way, great kite flying weather here today in Indiana. Now that was a good use of my time.

[lightningbolt]

11:35 AM on 03/10/2010

19%! Wow. That is a significant chunk! We can all use this to silence the science deniers who claim that wind power cannot provide enough power.

[jyokley]

05:36 PM on 03/09/2010

My Fellow HP Bloggers:

It is truly irritating that anytime Texas is in the news so many of you jump in and "bash" Texas- make ridiculous general statements- and act as if we live in some effed up back woods - podung state. It makes many of you intelligent people sound childish to make statements like the ones ive been seeing here today.

Texas is a beautiful state- a huge state. Our major cities (Austin, Dallas/Fort Worth, Houson, San Antonio) are full of Liberal Democrats just like the rest of the country. What you people seem to not understand is just how large of a state we have- the cities are vastly outnumbered by the rural / country counties that (just like every state) lean heavily to the conservative right. We just have many more rural counties than most of the country.

Before you make these childish statements about Texas- consider us liberals live in Texas too....

Liberal Snipits about Texas:

- Houston's newly elected Mayor is a gay female
- All of our major cities (listed above) voted for Obama in 2008
- Bill White, former Democratic mayor of Houston has a very good chance of being our next Governor
- Democrat Anne Richards was our Governor before Bush
- We now are leading the nation in Wind energy

*** anyone please feel free to add more to the list- these are just a few off the cuff.

[quillsinister]

07:20 PM on 03/09/2010

Lighten up! It means we love you. :-)

And please believe we Californians take an equal amount of crap from the other direction. It's all in good fun.

[rougebaisers]

02:45 PM on 03/09/2010

And we still do not have one anywhere near the windy city of chicago.

[babyboomerorig]

10:20 AM on 03/09/2010

I find it ironic that all we hear out of the Texas Congressmen is that we need, absolutely need to drill for more oil at the same time they're producing 20% of their energy from wind turbines.

[Sam1234567]

02:09 PM on 03/10/2010

Yeah the other 80% shouldn't matter....get a clue.

[babyboomerorig]

05:08 PM on 03/10/2010

Well, Tx is getting 20%....we're getting 0%. I think it's great.

We don't have oil under our soil......but we have a lot of cow methane.

[ReedYoung]

12:56 AM on 03/09/2010

Existing wind power technology -- currently mass-produced windmills and standard techniques known to all electrical engineers and many electricians -- can provide all of the United States' electricity.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/02/better-wind-resource-maps/#more-18355#more-18355
quote >
Current wind technology deployed in nonenvironmentally protected areas could generate 37,000,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity per year, according to the new analysis conducted by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and consulting firm AWS Truewind. The last comprehensive estimate came out in 1993, when Pacific Northwest National Laboratory pegged the wind energy potential of the United States at 10,777,000 gigawatt-hours.

Both numbers are greater than the 3,000,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity currently consumed by Americans each year.
/ quote>

http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/winds/aj07_jam.pdf
quote >
"It was found that an average of 33% ... of yearly averaged wind power from interconnected farms can be used as reliable, baseload electric power. Equally significant, interconnecting multiple wind farms to a common point and then connecting that point to a far-away city can allow the long-distance portion of transmission capacity to be reduced, for example, by 20% with only a 1.6% loss of energy.
/ quote>

Summing up, currently mass-produced windmills gives us installable "wind capacity" 12 times our current use, and current electrical grid practices, and variability of wind, limit us to baseload from wind about ⅓ of installed capacity.

⅓ (12) = 4 times the electricity we need, just from wind.

[sethdayal]

02:40 AM on 03/09/2010

Your sources have been debunked here:

http://nucleargreen.blogspot.com/2010/01/review-comment-on-stanford-wind.html

Jacobson's " A Path to Sustainable Energy by 2030 “ Report gets chewed up and flushed here:

http://bravenewclimate.com/2009/11/03/wws-2030-critique/

The real definitive study on this issue is found here. It is done by a real practicing electrical engineer looking at repowering Australia with solar and wind.

http://bravenewclimate.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/lang_solar_realities_v2.pdf

http://bravenewclimate.com/2009/09/10/solar-realities-and-transmission-costs-addendum/

Solar PV with Pumped Hydro storage: $2800B
Solar PV with NaS battery storage: $4600B
Solar Thermal with storage: $4400B
Nuclear Power: $120B

The cost of the power lines with Wind & Solar was $180B - 50% MORE THAN THE ENTIRE NUCLEAR OPTION

While solar PV is three times the cost of wind, transmission and storage requirements are similar.

Most summers there are times when all across America there are no storm systems.

Virtually all wind sites would be producing well below average at a time when air conditioning needs and power needs are really high. There isno sun at night. A huge investment in storage or deadly radioactive radon and GHG spewing natural gas plant is required.

[JScott]

02:21 AM on 03/10/2010

So were the costs of retirement and disposal of nuclear waste figured in, probably not.

[research]

04:49 PM on 03/17/2010

Nuclear Costs: The Apocalypse.

grid pv needs no storage, very deceptive.

[powercosmic]

11:33 PM on 03/08/2010

Yep, 70% of the Tea Baggers live in texas and they generate a lot of hot air!

Why, we neeed to keep the health care debate going so we can power the entire country with these people!

[pointyheadprodigy]

10:36 PM on 03/08/2010

They tied George Bush, Tom Hayden, and Ron Paul to a pole in front of a windmill didn't they?

[hippie4ever]

10:24 PM on 03/08/2010

George W Bush lives there so I'm not surprised at all.

[hibeam]

09:07 PM on 03/08/2010

I put a windmill on the roof of my car. When I get going about 50mph I switch over to the windmill.

[research]

08:41 PM on 03/08/2010

Great! add solar and bio fuels to that, and we supply all the world energy needs, cheap, clean, safe and forever, no fossils or nukes needed. see my profile for proof.

[powercosmic]

11:31 PM on 03/08/2010

Uhhh, not forever !

The sun will only last another 5 billion or so years before its supply of hydrogen is fused into helium, at that point it will swell and grow MUCH hotter evaporating the oceans of the earth and literally blowing our atmosphere into space.

;-) have a nice day.

[ReedYoung]

12:45 AM on 03/09/2010

Buzzkill!

[research]

04:44 PM on 03/09/2010

5 billion years will do....

[Sam1234567]

02:11 PM on 03/10/2010

And how do you propose to produce those things without using fossil fuels?

[research]

04:14 PM on 03/10/2010

Of course the first generations will use the existing power system for manufacturing.

As far as energy payback, solar and wind produce some 20-30 times as much electricity as it take to make them.

[sheila]

08:32 PM on 03/08/2010

This is just such a lie.

take this for example:

"The Kahuku wind farm, which will be built by First Wind Holdings, is expected to be based on 12 turbines, producing 2.5 megawatts each and providing enough power in total to power 7,700 homes."

2.5 MW = 2500 kw rated capacity. Say they produce at the level the Palm Springs windmills do, roughly 17% of rated capacity. That means their actual output for all 12 is just 475 kW. Per hour, the total output of all 12 is then 475 kWh per hour, or roughly 342,000 kWh/month. Monthly energy consumption for an American home is 936 kWh/month.

Which means these 12 turbines will provide enough power for 365 homes, not 7700 homes. that is a vastly different number, isn't it? why are they getting away with pretending that these projects will operate at 100% of rated capacity (even Big Coal and Big Nukes only hit 90%) when it has never, once, in the history of the world happened, nor will it ever?

So, at an average of 50 acres/mW rated capacity, that's 1,500 acres to power 365 homes. genius.

Meanwhile, rooftop solar and efficiency upgrades in the built environment require ZERO acres, no new transmission, no roads, transformers, etc., kills no animals, emits no GHGs (concrete is super high) and is democratically owned. gee, what shall we do?

[lbsaltzman]

09:04 PM on 03/08/2010

You may have a false assumption built in to your argument. Palm Springs has very old and inefficient turbines.

[Veritas 1]

12:03 AM on 03/09/2010

Maybe these estimates were done by the same guy who counted the number of bottles in that Argentinian man's house. I think i may just stop believing anything i read in Huff Post's "green" section.

[hibeam]

08:32 PM on 03/08/2010

Fred Flintstone would be proud. I also really like the donkey walking around in a circle as a source of energy. Why can’t we have a Manhattan project for Nuclear Fusion?