Wind Energy Helps Texans in Power Outage

AWEA Blog responds to Forbes magazine's blog article which refutes benefits of wind energy. Links to various supportive articles and documents including a recent power outage in Texas that Wind Energy helped to provide power when fossil fuel power supplies failed. Speaks about 3x more job creation than fossil fuel plants. Explicit and intrinsic savings on the cost of wind power. Reliability of wind power. Informative read if nothing else.

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The AWEA Blog: Into the Wind

Forbes magazine's blog recently carried an opinion article attacking wind energy by Larry Bell, a professor of space architecture at the University of Houston. Following is the response that I posted in the form of a series of comments:

the U.S. wind industry is already well ahead of the trajectory the report estimated would be needed to achieve the 20% by 2030 goal, having installed over 8,000 MW of wind in 2008 and 10,000 MW in 2009. Wind energy accounted for around 40% of newly installed generating capacity in 2007, 2008, and 2009.

it’s hard to claim that wind energy isn’t abundant, when the report identifies enough economically viable wind resources to meet our electricity needs a dozen times over.

20% wind would reduce CO2 emissions by 825 million tons in the year 2030 alone and 7.6 billion tons cumulatively, in addition to large amounts of other harmful pollutants. Moreover, the report finds 20% wind would save 4 trillion gallons of water cumulatively by 2030 and substantially reduce natural gas prices by diversifying our energy portfolio away from fossil fuels. The DOE study also finds 20% wind could create over 500,000 new jobs, making it difficult for you to claim that wind energy is not a powerful job creation tool.

As far as trying to attack wind power’s reliability, you should talk to the CEO of the company that operates the Texas utility system. He’ll tell you about how wind energy helped save the day last month when dozens of fossil-fired power plants suddenly failed and went offline, yet wind energy kept producing as expected, keeping the lights on for millions of Texans.

read Bloomberg Energy Finance’s latest data on wind turbine costs, showing that as wind turbine costs have fallen drastically over the last several years, wind energy has become increasingly affordable.

Importantly, these cost numbers don’t even account for the massive negative externalities associated with fossil fuel use. Recent estimates from the Harvard School of Public Health and the National Academies of Sciences have concluded that including the economic costs of the tens of thousands of premature deaths, health problems, and other environmental harms caused by using coal makes the true costs of using fossil fuels several times greater than currently accounted for in market prices. Natural gas production, distribution, and use also imposes significant costs that are not accounted for in market prices.

And, the comparatively modest investments needed in our electricity transmission system are needed anyway even if wind were not being added to the grid – consumers are already paying tens of billions of dollars in costs per year from the unreliability of our grid and because the grid is too congested for them to be able to access lower cost sources of electricity.

The reality is that the U.S. wind industry has created 85,000 jobs so far, and the DOE study discussed above found that over 500,000 jobs would be created from getting 20% of America’s electricity from wind energy.

a legitimate Massachusetts study found that an investment in renewable energy creates three times more jobs than a comparable investment in fossil fuels.

The data is clear that thousands of times more birds are killed every year by things like buildings, cars, pesticides, and even cats, than by wind turbines.

While there is going to be some NIMBY opposition to any type of infrastructure development, you would be hard pressed to argue that more people are opposed to wind energy than are opposed to oil and gas drilling, coal plants, or nuclear plants. In fact, recent polls have found that 87% to 89% of Americans want more investment in wind energy, possibly one of the most broadly supported views on any issue in America. Read more at www.awea.org

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