ThinkProgress

America’s wind energy industry passed a major milestone

Economic challenges facing wind energy are nothing new, industry says.

Mark Hand         August 9, 2017

The Dry Lake Wind Power Project in Arizona. CREDIT: Department of Energy

The wind energy industry reached an important milestone in 2016 when it passed the generating capacity of hydroelectric power for the first time to become the nation’s top renewable generating source. Wind energy’s growth — at least in the next few years — is showing few signs of slowing down, with 142,000 megawatts of new and proposed wind capacity lined up to connect to the nation’s electric power grid, according to new data released by the Department of Energy.

The total amount of wind capacity in the queue represents 34 percent of all generating capacity waiting to connect to the grid, higher than all other generating sources, DOE said. The wind energy industry added more than 8,200 megawatts of capacity in 2016, representing 27 percent of all energy capacity additions for that year.

That annual growth lifted the nation’s wind capacity to 81,312 megawatts at the end of December 2016, slightly above hydroelectric’s 79,985 megawatts of capacity, according to DOE. Wind supplied about 6 percent of U.S. electricity, and 14 states now get more than 10 percent of their electricity from wind.

DOE released three wind market reports on Tuesday, covering wind technology, offshore wind, and distributed wind. The primary authors of the wind technology report were employees at DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The offshore wind report was prepared by employees at DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Employees at DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory prepared the distributed wind report.

“The wind industry continues to install significant amounts of new capacity, and supplied about 6 percent of total U.S. electricity in 2016,” Daniel Simmons, DOE acting assistant secretary for energy efficiency and renewable energy, said in a statement. “As our reports explain, a combination of federal subsidies, state mandates, and technological advancements continue to help drive new wind capacity additions.”

Prior to joining DOE, Simmons worked at the Koch-funded Institute for Energy Research as vice president for policy and also held a top position at the Koch-funded American Energy Alliance, which advocated for the office he now oversees at DOE — the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy — to be eliminated.

Wind turbine prices remained well below levels seen a decade ago, DOE said. After hitting a low of roughly $800 per kilowatt from 2000 to 2002, average turbine prices increased to roughly $1,600 per kilowatt by the end of 2008. Over the past decade, though, wind turbine prices have dropped substantially.

Technological innovations are helping wind turbines optimize their performance by reaching stronger, steadier winds, according to the American Wind Energy Association, the primary trade association for the wind power industry. Longer blades have helped to boost new wind turbine performance, with wind projects built in 2014 and 2015 reporting a 42.5 percent average capacity factor in 2016, compared to a 32.1 percent capacity factor for projects built between 2004 and 2011, AWEA said in press release Wednesday.

In the offshore report, DOE noted that more than 20 offshore wind projects totaling 24,135 megawatts of potential installed capacity are in the works. The report highlighted that last December, Deepwater Wind completed the commissioning of the Block Island Wind Farm, marking a milestone as the first commercial offshore wind project in the United States.

The first major offshore wind project in the U.S. is now powering an island

Renewable energy continues its march forward. 

From 2003 through 2016, a total of 992 megawatts in capacity from more than 77,000 wind turbines was deployed in distributed applications across all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Guam, DOE said.

DOE said its recent and projected near-term growth in wind energy is supported by the federal production tax credit and state-level policies. Wind additions have also been driven by improvements in the cost and performance of wind power technologies, producing low power prices for consumers.

The prospects for wind energy growth beyond the current PTC cycle remain uncertain, given declining federal tax support, expectations for low natural gas prices, and modest electricity demand growth, DOE said. At the end of 2015, Congress agreed to extend the production tax credit. Since then, wind developers have been building projects before the tax credit expires completely in 2020.

The DOE report lists many positive factors, including the potential for continued technological advancements and cost reductions to enhance the prospects for longer-term growth, Hannah Hunt, a research analyst at AWEA, said in a blog post on Tuesday.

“Some have focused on the report’s discussion of potential economic challenges for the industry, including competition from natural gas and solar,” Hunt wrote. “However, it should be noted that those challenges are nothing new and have in fact been listed in every version of the report this decade. Thanks to the innovation and productivity of American workers, the wind industry has been able overcome those challenges by greatly exceeding cost reduction expectations, and we expect that successful track record to continue.”

EcoWatch

Interactive Map Shows Every Wind Farm in America

By American Wind Energy Association      August 10, 2017

Using a new map tool released Thursday, anyone can now easily view the location of every utility-scale wind project and wind-related manufacturing facility in the U.S. With the very first American Wind Week in full swing, the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) released the map to help people visualize the growth of America’s largest source of renewable energy capacity.

“Wind Power has become a vital part of the U.S. economy, drawing billions of dollars in capital investment to rural communities each year and supporting over 100,000 U.S. jobs across all 50 states,” said John Hensley, deputy director of industry data and analysis for AWEA. “I’m pleased this new map tool helps Americans visualize how world-class U.S. wind resources are being put to work in all parts of the county.”

A time-lapse feature built into the map shows the progress of wind power development across the country. Starting from 1981 in the passes of California where the first modern wind energy projects were completed, users can see the story of American wind power unfold across heartland states like Texas, Iowa, Oklahoma and Kansas, and eventually to the first U.S. offshore wind project completed off Rhode Island in 2016.

The map also features markers for the more than 500 wind-related manufacturing facilities in the U.S. today. These factories support 25,000 U.S. manufacturing jobs across 41 states.

AWEA’s new map utilizes only a small percentage of the full wind project and manufacturing data available to AWEA members through Market Database Pro, a comprehensive, interactive database of all online, under construction and advanced development wind projects, and all active wind-related manufacturing facilities. More than 50 data points are provided at both the project and turbine level, with advanced interactive mapping services including filtered search capabilities, summary maps and political boundaries.

This week is the inaugural #AmericanWindWeek, dedicated to U.S. leadership in wind power. Wind is the largest source of American renewable energy capacity, supporting more than 100,000 U.S. jobs across all 50 states, with nearly 85,000 MW of installed capacity at the end of the second quarter of 2017.

Washington Post, Energy and Environment

Polluter fines drop 60 percent under Trump

By Steven Mufson        August 10, 2017

The Trump administration has so far collected $12 million in environmental-related penalties from businesses, according to a nonprofit.  Above, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt speaks during an interview for Reuters at his office in July. (Yuri Gripas/Reuters)

The Trump administration has collected 60 percent less from civil penalties for environmental wrongdoing than the administrations of presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton did on average in their first six months in office.

That’s according to an analysis by the Environmental Integrity Project, a nonprofit group founded 15 years ago by former enforcement attorneys at the Environmental Protection Agency.

The administration has lodged 26 cases for violations of the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act and other environmental laws (not including Superfund sites) and it collected $12 million in penalties from companies, the group said.  Clinton, Bush and Obama respectively lodged 45, 31, and 34 cases and collected $25 million, $30 million and $36 million in penalties.

Related: White House reviewing new report that finds strong link between climate change and human activity

The Environmental Integrity Project said that the figures showed that the Trump administration is “off to a very slow start” when it comes to enforcing environmental law. It said that the cases this year “are smaller, requiring much less spending on cleanup, and resulting in fewer measurable reductions in pollutants that end up in our air or water.”

The Trump administration also lags behind the three previous presidential administrations in the amount of injunctive relief and the amount of air pollution reductions.

At the same time, the group warned that a six-month period does not provide enough data for definitive conclusions, and cases and settlements are often the result of years of efforts. For example, the largest civil penalty imposed by the Obama administration in its first six months was a $12 million fine imposed on BP, whose large Texas City refinery suffered fires and explosions that killed 15 people and injured more than 170 others in 2005.

The largest civil penalty imposed so far by the Trump administration came on May 17, when the EPA and the state of Texas imposed a $2.5 million penalty on the owner of Vopak Terminals North America Inc. for air pollution violations at its terminal along the Houston Ship Channel, the EIP said. The Dutch company’s terminal stores biofuels, chemicals, petroleum products, base oils and lubricants, consisting of 243 tanks with a collective capacity of over 7 million barrels, the EPA said on its website.

It added that Vopak’s violations were detected in 2012, 2014 and 2015 involving open tanks, leaking tanks and inefficient flares that contributed to releases of volatile organic compounds.

Related: At EPA museum, history might be in for a change

“The company’s Deer Park facility failed to comply with Clean Air Act requirements to properly manage equipment, which resulted in excess emissions of benzene (a carcinogen) and volatile organic compounds,” the EIP said. “These compounds contribute to smog and causes asthma attacks and eye, nose and throat irritation, as well as headaches, nausea and damage to liver, kidney and the central nervous system.”

The biggest penalty imposed during the first six months of George W. Bush’s administration was a $9.5 million fine on oil refiners Motiva, Equilon and Shell.  The Clinton administration imposed a $11.1 million fine on Louisiana Pacific and Kirby Forest Industries for air pollution violations at wood product plants.

The EIP relied on consent decrees, news releases by the Justice Department and the Federal Register to compile its figures.

Read more:

Will proposed cuts undermine Trump’s vision of ‘energy dominance?’

Is the most powerful lobbyist in Washington losing its grip?

Steven Mufson covers energy and other financial matters. Since joining The Post, he has covered the White House, China, economic policy and diplomacy.

UPI     Home-Energy News

Electric vehicles to eat into global oil demand by 6 million barrels

A report from Wood Mackenzie finds the purchase price for electric vehicles is on course to reach parity with their internal-combustion counterparts.

By Daniel J. Graeber     August 10, 2017 

The pace at which electric vehicles are gaining market share is eating into the expected long-term demand for oil, a new report finds. Photo by Stephen Shaver/UP   | License Photo

Aug. 10 (UPI) — An increased consumer use of electric vehicles means global oil demand could shrink by at least 6 million barrels, a report from Wood Mackenzie found.

In what was described as a carbon-constrained scenario, the new report, prepared in coordination with GTM Research, which covers the global electricity sector, said electric vehicles could make up about 20 percent of all of the cars on the road in less than 20 years.

“The falling cost of EVs and their batteries will put EV purchase prices on par with internal combustion engine cars, boosting consumer demand,” Paul McConnell, research director of global trends for Wood Mackenzie, said in an emailed statement.

Swedish automaker Volvo said this year it was marking an end to a vehicle line powered solely by the internal combustion engine. Tesla said in its second quarter release that orders for two of its electric vehicle lines were up 15 percent in July when compared with the quarterly average.

Two million electric vehicles were on the road globally last year, with most of those in the U.S., European and Chinese markets. For Europe, the British and French governments set long-term goals to phase out new gasoline- and diesel-powered vehicles. Germany, meanwhile, has worked quickly to expand its network of charging stations across its national roadway system.

Wood Mackenzie described the maturation of the electric vehicle market as “rapid,” adding it expected momentum to start eating away at the global demand for oil.

“We foresee EVs potentially displacing about 6.5 million barrels of oil demand, offsetting growth from other sectors such as petrochemicals,” McConnell said.

Economists at the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries revised their forecast for global oil demand for 2018 higher by 1.28 million barrels per day to 97.7 million barrels per day. Total oil demand for 2017 is expected to be 96.49 million barrels per day. Most of the demand growth next year comes from developing countries.

Using the pace of transition from horse-drawn carriages to fuel-powered vehicles in the 20th century as a benchmark to measure growth, the International Monetary Fund said motor vehicles could vanish from markets in advanced economies within the next 20 years. For the shift in vehicles themselves, the IMF said retooling may be necessary for the industry.

“The falling cost of EVs and their batteries will put EV purchase prices on par with internal combustion engine cars, boosting consumer demand,” McConnell said. “This is going to force automakers to develop even better EVs or far more efficient internal combustion engines, as per-mile running costs become a key differentiator between the new technology and legacy engine types.”

Related UPI Stories

• Beijing aims to expand electric bus fleet
• Volvo says goodbye to the internal combustion engine

Britain to start taking gas, diesel vehicles off roads in 2040

The Seattle Times Opinion

Switching from coal to natural gas will not save our planet

Workers move a well casing at a Chesapeake Energy natural gas well site near Burlington, Pa. (Ralph Wilson / The Associated Press)

Bill McKibben, Special to The Times          August 8, 2017

If as little as 3 percent of natural gas leaks in the course of fracking and delivering it to the power plant through a pipe, then it’s worse than coal.

MOST magic tricks and confidence games mostly work the same way — a little bit of misdirection to get the audience looking in the wrong direction. And some of the finest magicians at large in America today are its natural-gas salesmen, who have worked hard to reassure us that they’re part of the solution to the global warming crisis. To understand why that’s a ploy — to understand why they’re in fact helping drive the heating of the planet — you have to pay close attention.

The basic move is to insist that natural gas helps cut carbon emissions. Indeed, as Dan Kirschner, the head of the Northwest Gas Association, put it in his recent Op-Ed [“The power of natural gas in the war on carbon emissions,” Aug. 3, Opinion], “the U.S. leads the world in absolute reductions in carbon emissions, due in large part to the increased availability and affordability of natural gas.”

This is true on the surface. As America’s power plants have replaced coal with fracked gas, carbon emissions have fallen because natural gas produces half as much CO2 as coal when you burn it. The problem is, carbon emissions are not the only thing that drive global warming. There’s another gas that does the job even more powerfully: CH4, or methane, which is the scientific name for natural gas. If it leaks unburned into the atmosphere, then methane traps heat about 80 times more effectively, molecule for molecule, than CO2. The point of this chemistry lesson is: If as little as 3 percent of natural gas leaks in the course of fracking and delivering it to the power plant through a pipe, then it’s worse than coal.

And, sadly, it’s now clear that leakage rates are higher than that. In January 2013, aerial surveys of a Utah fracking basin, for instance, found leak rates as high as 9 percent. Data from a Harvard satellite survey showed that between 2002 and 2014, U.S. methane emissions increased more than 30 percent.

In fact, some experts who have reviewed the data say that because of the boom in fracking and the conversion to gas, America’s total greenhouse-gas emissions may actually have gone up during the Obama years. And at least the Obama administration required drillers to keep track of how much methane they were leaking — one of the first acts of the Trump EPA was to scrap that requirement, apparently on the grounds that what you don’t know can’t hurt you.

So, to summarize, because this is a subtle point that citizens, politicians and editors need to understand, given the importance of the debate: Natural gas is not reducing the amount of greenhouse-gas emissions. It is doing nothing to slow climate change.

And worse, it’s making it much harder to take the steps that really would matter. As we get off coal because of the way it drives climate change, what we should be doing is moving to renewable energy. Solar power emits no carbon at all, which makes it the natural choice. But as long as we have cheap natural gas flooding the market, we’ll move more slowly in the direction of real renewables. Cutting greenhouse-gas emissions by burning natural gas is like dieting by eating reduced-fat cookies, explained the principal investigator of a Stanford forum that studied the explosive growth in natural gas: “If you really want to lose weight, you probably need to avoid cookies altogether.”

Which is truly sad, because the solar panel is the great have-your-cake-and-eat-it technology of all time — the real deal. It takes the power the sun sends us every day and turns it into electricity. There’s no catch, no con. It’s our Houdini escape route from climate change — but only if we catch on in time to the tawdry little three-card-monte game the fossil-fuel industry is running.

Bill McKibben is the Schumann distinguished scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College and founder of the global climate campaign 350.org.