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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday March 08 2017, @07:09AM   Printer-friendly
from the getting-windy dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 2) by butthurt on Wednesday March 08 2017, @06:11PM (3 children)

    by butthurt (6141) on Wednesday March 08 2017, @06:11PM (#476593) Journal

    >[...] and $4 billion over 30 years.

    This?

    The US Department of Energy also invested about $137 million in gas research over three decades.

    I don't read it as $137 million per year for 30 years, which would be $4.1 billion.

    I can't help but notice that $2.8 billion is a lot smaller than $14.7 billion despite the former industry being substantially larger than the latter.

    Not just larger, but better established and profitable. It needs subsidies because there are uncertainties? Any business faces uncertainties.

    Virtually all of those deaths are in the parts of the world which have weak or non-existent pollution controls. Extracting oil has nothing to do with that.

    [...]

    And you solve that by turning the developing world in more of the developed world with the pollution controls universal to the developed world.

    Another way to solve it would be to develop sources of energy that are inherently less polluting. With wind power, I'd expect most pollution to be made during manufacture, construction and decommissioning, with very little in day-to-day operation. There's no fuel as such.

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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday March 08 2017, @06:41PM (2 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday March 08 2017, @06:41PM (#476622) Journal

    Not just larger, but better established and profitable. It needs subsidies because there are uncertainties? Any business faces uncertainties.

    Well, that is the justification. But what is the point of your argument? We've already established here that this particular measure of subsidies is showing a huge bias towards renewable power. qzm implied that there were large subsidies for shale-oil (fracking), but we just don't see that.

    Another way to solve it would be to develop sources of energy that are inherently less polluting. With wind power, I'd expect most pollution to be made during manufacture, construction and decommissioning, with very little in day-to-day operation. There's no fuel as such.

    We already did that. What happened to pollution in the developing world again? Killed 4 million people in 2015. There is here a huge ignorance of the needs of the developing world. It doesn't just need to be less polluting. It needs a long term solution to crippling poverty and overpopulation. Expensive energy sources subsidized for use in the developed world don't deliver that.

    • (Score: 1) by butthurt on Wednesday March 08 2017, @08:04PM (1 child)

      by butthurt (6141) on Wednesday March 08 2017, @08:04PM (#476683) Journal

      > We already did that. [...] Expensive energy sources subsidized for use in the developed world don't deliver [...]

      Perhaps they wouldn't be so expensive, if the industry were larger so it enjoyed greater economies of scale/network effects. Perhaps they won't be so expensive, with further technological development. Subsidies could help to bring those two things about. Fossil fuels might not appear so much less expensive, if the externalities such as ill health from pollution were taken into account.

      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday March 08 2017, @08:42PM

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday March 08 2017, @08:42PM (#476699) Journal

        Perhaps they wouldn't be so expensive, if the industry were larger so it enjoyed greater economies of scale/network effects. Perhaps they won't be so expensive, with further technological development. Subsidies could help to bring those two things about.

        That's a lot of "perhaps". Here's my view. There is some reduction in cost from a doubling of production, either by making things at a higher rate or over a longer time. But there aren't that many doublings left to wind power before it outstrips global demand. Second, wind power currently requires both transmission lines to connect it to grid and backup power sources both to cover for wind deficits and to smooth out supply. Those don't scale so well with production of wind turbines and they are typical costs which aren't normally added to the cost of wind power generation.

        Then if we look at the scale of current subsidies, they are already rather massive for what they do. I think we're well into the realm of negative marginal return on wind power subsidies. My view is let others do the heavy lifting and move into the industry when it makes sense to do so unsubsidized.