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…
Sometimes, the obvious – isn’t so obvious
But sometimes obvious answers stay mysteriously hidden. Any time you see an innovation and say – either out loud, or to yourself – “now why didn’t I think of that?”, you have experienced a Captain Obvious moment.
So as we browsed today’s papers, we came across this article. Here is the article’s first line:
With a name like General Electric, it stands to reason GE would want to embrace the electric car.
Um. Hello? Yes. It does indeed. On further reading, we realized that this is not only an example of Captain Obvious at work, it was an example of one of EarthPM’s assertions. Roughly stated, this assertion says that ‘the right thing to do helps you do things right’. In this case, GE’s use of electric cars in their own fleet is not only going to save them gasoline and money, it will drive up the demand for the very products that they want to innovate and sell.
This seems like a pretty easy decision, n’est pas?
The CEO, Jeffrey Immelt, said the company “would convert half of its corporate fleet to electric vehicles by 2015 in an effort to give the nascent technology a jump start and help develop a potentially big new market”. Give the technology a jump start. Nice pun. But it’s not punny – it’s about money. GE’s own estimates show that this expanding market will earn GE $500 million in revenue over the next three years. So it does seem obvious to (as PMI puts it) enhance the opportunity.
Here’s a little more of the article:
Electric cars are cheaper to fuel and operate than gasoline-powered cars, but they are about twice as expensive to buy, mainly because of the high cost of batteries. The battery that powers the $33,000 Nissan Leaf costs about $12,000, nearly the price of a gasoline-powered car the Leaf’s size.
Carmakers hope to be able to sharply reduce the cost of the batteries over time, but in order to do so they need to sell more electric cars.
That’s where GE comes in. GE is hoping that its planned purchase will help drive down costs by increasing production volumes and assuring carmakers that they will have at least one big buyer.
So GE becomes a customer of GM (and perhaps Nissan?). They increase the market for the cars, which drives the demand for the batteries, which GE develops and sells to GM and Nissan… get the picture?
Our question to project managers and others out there reading this: do you have any “Overhead Lines Above”? Do you have any Captain Obvious ideas like this? For example, if you work on a project that is directly or indirectly related to the electric power grid, are the vehicles in that project’s fleet electric? Wouldn’t it make sense, thinking in the long term, for those vehicles to be electric even if their initial cost is higher, since after all, the grid’s demands will be increased by electric cars?
Just asking the Captain Obvious questions…
And you should too.
Quick. Look UP! There are overhead lines above!
We close this posting with a quote from none other than Captain Obvious: