According to the AWEA (American Wind Energy Association), the U.S. wind industry broke all previous records by installing nearly 10,000 megawatts (MW) of new generating capacity in 2009 (enough to serve over 2.4 million homes), but still lags in manufacturing, the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) said today in its Q4 report. These new projects place wind power neck and neck with natural gas as the leading source of new electricity generation for the country.  Together, the two sources account for about 80% of the new capacity added in the country last year.

But is this enough?

“The U.S. wind energy industry shattered all installation records in 2009, chalking up the Recovery Act as a historic success in creating jobs, avoiding carbon, and protecting consumers,” said AWEA CEO Denise Bode. “But U.S. wind turbine manufacturing – the canary in the mine — is down compared to last year’s levels, and needs long-term policy certainty and market pull in order to grow.  We need to set hard targets, in the form of a national Renewable Electricity Standard (RES), in order to provide the necessary stability for manufacturers to expand their U.S. operations and to seize the historic opportunity we have today to build up a thriving renewable energy industry.”
Where is this wind power?

Amongst other places, deep in the heart of Texas.

See the table below, showing the top 5 states in terms of  MW of power installed.

Texas, the nation’s wind-power leader, set a new record for wind generation today, March 5, 2010, when — at 6:37 a.m. — about 19 percent of the electricity on the state’s main grid was supplied by turbines.

But sometimes, the problem – strangely enough – is that the wind turbines are shut down because they are generating too much power, yielding an effect in which the value of the electricity they generate is actually lower than zero.  Read this snippet from the New York Times eco blog, GreenInc:

“Texas’s progress in installing turbines is testing the bounds of just how much wind the electrical grid can handle. Some turbines are slowed or shut down on windy days because the state does not have sufficient transmission wires to move all the power from the remote, windy areas of West Texas to cities like Dallas and Houston that need it. Last night and this morning, for example, the prices for wind generation offered on the main Texas grid actually fell below zero, a sign of oversupply that usually prompts wind generators to shut their turbines down.

Texas is spending nearly $5 billion to fix the transmission problem. It plans to build a web of power lines that would be able to deliver the wind energy from congested West Texas, home to 89 percent of the wind capacity on the state’s main grid, to power-hungry cities. That process, however, looks likely to be delayed by a recent court decision.”

Whoa.  Here at EarthPM that sparks (yes, a pun!) a lot of ideas for projects.  Power transmission projects.  Power storage projects.  So we’d like to hear about some record number of project managers being hired…