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In the US, a number of major milestones occurred on the electric grid in 2016, almost all of them involving wind power. Now the Energy Information Administration is confirming that's because of a big overall trend: wind power is now the largest source of renewable energy generating capacity, passing hydroelectric power in 2016. And since the two sources produce electricity at nearly the same rate, we'll soon see wind surpass hydro in terms of electricity produced.
Wind power capacity has been growing at an astonishing pace (as shown in the graph above), and 2016 was no exception. As companies rushed to take advantage of tax incentives for renewable power, the US saw 8.7 Gigawatts of new wind capacity installed in 2016. That's the most since 2012, the last time tax incentives were scheduled to expire. This has pushed the US' total wind capacity to over 81 GW, edging it past hydroelectric, which has remained relatively stable at roughly 80 GW.
Note that this is only capacity; since generators can't be run non-stop, they only generate a fraction of the electricity that their capacity suggests is possible. That fraction, called a capacity factor, has been in the area of 34 percent for US wind, lower than most traditional sources of electricity. But hydropower's capacity factor isn't that much better, typically sitting at 37-38 percent. As a result, wind won't need to grow much to consistently exceed hydro.
The graphic in the article aptly illustrates the dramatically different growth curves.
(Score: 5, Informative) by VLM on Wednesday March 08 2017, @01:19PM
Its going to be interesting to see what happens when the subsidies vanish, since this smells an AWFUL like the shale-oil rush which was also just a cash in on subsidies.
From the engineering and economic side I've been following and investing in energy for a couple decades with some success and some failure but shale is a purely financial scheme, there's nothing really technologically or engineering interesting, no scaling barriers have been smashed, at least nothing like wind.
Wind is a different story in that when I was a kid there were no tubular towers, no composite blades, alternator/VFD technology was fairly archaic, really advanced blade CFD work, there's a couple technological scaling barriers that have been smashed in the last couple decades.
In some sort of WWII gone wrong scenario the USA could be doing shale in like the 50s without any problem, the reason its being done now is all enviro-political-economic-financialization and has nothing to do with a Nobel prize awarded in the 80s that first makes it possible or whatever. There have been refining catalyst improvements and process improvements that obviously increase yield and profit, so shale oil eventually makes more delicious gasoline and less asphalt today than it would have in 1950, but there's nothing "huge". Whereas we literally didn't have the materials and engineering and manufacturing and computers to make a 1980 wind turbine in 1970, and this continues. A modern 2010s turbine literally couldn't have been made in 1990, just didn't know how.
The interesting part of the scaling problems for wind is the financial numbers for wind have some crazy ridiculous polynomial with turbine size, something to do with winds aloft being more stable or something. Something like 25 feet tall will never make enough energy to refine the steel used in its construction, whereas a 100 meter 8 MW monster is insanely profitable assuming you can find space to install the darn thing. Depending a lot on $/KWH and local reliability of wind, a good rule of thumb is you won't make much more than $1M/yr per MW of installed capacity and wind turbines cost about $1M to $2M per MW and it drops dramatically with size so you can figure anything smaller than 100 meters takes more than a decade to pay off or frankly never makes money and is just greenwashing, but one of those Vesta beasts is making pure profit in maybe as little as 5 years.
so yeah there's technological breakthru reasons why wind has explosive growth. I'm sure the financialization vultures will sweep in and F it all up in addition, because a vulture gotta do what a vulture gotta do. But fundamentally wind is a healthy growth industry for technological reasons. Shale, well, not so much.