The Short Path to Oil Independence
(Page 2 of 3)
February/March 2005
By Lester R. Brown
The average turbine in 1991 was roughly 120 feet tall, whereas new ones are 300 feet tall — the height of a 30-story building. Not only does this more than double the amount of harvestable wind, but winds at the higher elevation are stronger and more reliable.
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In Europe, which has emerged as the world leader in developing wind energy, wind farms now satisfy the residential electricity needs of 40 million consumers. In 2003, the European Wind Energy Association projected that by 2020 this energy source would provide electricity for 195 million people — half the population of Western Europe. A 2004 assessment of Europe’s offshore potential by the Garrad Hassan consulting group concluded that if European governments move vigorously to develop this potential, wind could supply all of the region’s residential electricity by 2020. Wind power is growing fast because it is cheap, abundant, inexhaustible, widely distributed, clean and climate- benign. No other energy source has all of these attributes.
The cost of wind-generated electricity has been in free fall over the last two decades. The early wind farms in California, where the modern wind industry was born in the 1980s, generated electricity at a cost of 38 cents per kilowatt-hour. Now many wind farms are producing power at 4 cents per kilowatt-hour, and some long-term supply contracts have recently been signed at 3 cents per kilowatt-hour. And the price is still falling.
Unlike the widely discussed fuel cell/ hydrogen transportation model, the gas-electric hybrid/wind model does not require a costly new infrastructure; the network of gasoline service stations is already in place. So, too, is the electricity grid needed to link wind farms to the storage batteries in cars. For this new model to work most efficiently, we would need a strong integrated national grid. Fortunately, the need for modernizing our antiquated set of regional grids, and replacing them with a strong national grid, is now widely recognized, especially after the 2003 blackout that darkened portions of the northeast United States and southeast Canada.
One of the few weaknesses of wind energy — its irregularity — is largely offset with the use of plug-in gas-electric hybrids, as the batteries in these vehicles become a part of the storage system for wind energy. Beyond this, there is always the tank of gasoline as a backup.
