Growing Wind Power: Energy Collective Webinar

I just got off the line from the Growing Wind Power webinar, hosted by The Energy Collective and sponsored by Siemens. It was moderated by Jesse Jenkins, the Director of Energy and Climate Policy and the Breakthrough Institute. The participants were:

• Peter Kelly of the American Wind Energy Association
• Ellen Crivella of GL Garrad Hassan
• Earl Walker of Siemens Energy

More info on the participants is available here. I just wanted to note a few quick things that the panelists brought up about the wind industry.

One, we can get to 20% wind by 2030, as per DOE's goals. Wind electricity supplied about 3% of electricity capacity in the United States last year, but at the pace the industry is currently growing we're on track to exceed 20% within the next twenty years.

Two, our wind needs will be met by a combination of onshore and offshore generation. Offshore has the advantage of accessing often much more bountiful wind resources, and can often be located near dense coastal urban areas. On the downside, it's more expensive -- consensus from the panel was the offshore projects can be twice as expensive as onshore installations. There are also spatial and distribution elements to consider. A considerable amount of the United States lives far from the coasts, and even where good transmission infrastructure is employed, it might make more sense to capitalize on less remote onshore production or other energy technologies**. As such, panelists agreed that the relative contribution of offshore wind production is likely to be less in the United States than in smaller European nations like Spain and Denmark.

Three, there seems to be a love-hate relationship with the Production Tax Credit for wind (PTC) and other tax incentives. On the one hand, the industry (proxy: the panelists) agree that current wind technology and installations cannot survive without the support of federal subsidies. Witness the drop off in wind projects in 2010 before the PTC was extended to 2012. On the other hand, there is ample desire for more diverse pools of cheap capital, and it is understood that if wind energy is going to be a viable element in America's energy portfolio, it needs to beat the grid unsubsidized.

The webinar was a great discussion of the interlocking arenas in the wind industry, from engineering to policy to finance. Check out #TEClive on Twitter for coverage.

-------------------------

*This discussion reminded me of the ecological concept of edge effects, which is the idea that the larger area an ecosystem occupies, the less vulnerable its area is to invasion on its edges. I suppose the lesson here is that the United States, when viewed as an ecosystem (which it is), is large, diverse, and resilient. That's comforting to me.