Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday March 31 2020, @01:24PM   Printer-friendly
from the electrifying dept.

2019 saw over 60 gigawatts of wind power installed:

Wind power is now one of the cheapest options for generating electricity. In many areas of the globe, building and maintaining wind power is cheaper per unit of power than it is to fuel a previously constructed fossil fuel plant. While offshore wind remains more expensive, its prices have dropped dramatically over the last several years, and it is rapidly approaching price parity with fossil fuels.

But cost isn't the only thing at issue. Renewables may require new transmission lines to feed their power to where people actually live, and managing wind's intermittent nature may require grid upgrades once its percentage gets high enough. And due to the past successes of wind, a significant number of the best sites are now already in use in some regions. Given those issues, it can be difficult to justify shutting down power plants that may have decades of service left in their expected lifespan. This is especially true in fully industrialized countries, where total electricity use has been trending downward, largely due to gains in energy efficiency.

Despite these potential headwinds, wind saw its second highest total of installs in 2019, at 60.4GW, which represents a 19 percent growth compared to the year before. (The only year with a higher total was 2017.)

This was primarily driven by policy changes in the two wind giants, the US and China. China added about 24GW of new capacity last year, which places its total at 230GW. There, starting next year, all new wind projects will be required to be competitive with the rest of the sources on the grid, which is largely driven by the price of coal power. In the US, a tax credit was expected to expire at the end of this year (it has been extended for an additional year), leading to a large number of plants that were installed to take advantage of this credit. Because of that, the US saw an additional 9.1GW of capacity, bringing its total to over 100GW for the first time.

2019 did see a new landmark: for the first time, more than 10 percent of the newly installed capacity was in the form of offshore wind, at 6.1GW. This places offshore wind at nearly five percent of the total global capacity, at over 29GW total.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by Gault.Drakkor on Wednesday April 01 2020, @12:28AM

    by Gault.Drakkor (1079) on Wednesday April 01 2020, @12:28AM (#977848)

    The "nameplate" value is a good place to start. Where nameplate refers to: given ideal conditions, what is the sustained production value. Eg wind blowing constant rate 24/7.

    Down rating to actual expected values I would expect is location dependent. I read on one website (brave new climate) an article that looked at the wind generation a some years back for Australia. They had an effective 1/3 of nameplate for their wind for the year the was investigated.

    So while nameplate can be misleading it is good starting place. I only find it obnoxious when people start thinking that name plate is what energy can be delivered when saying "Renewables can supply all our energy". See these grossly misleading calculations that only factor electrical energy(ignoring total energy use), ignore down rating, and trivialize energy storage costs.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2