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| Fig. 1: Onshore Wind Turbines in Styria, Austria. (Source: Wikimedia Commons) |
Since the times of sailboats and mariners and the debut of the first windmills in 500 AD Persia, wind has been a source of power to be harnessed by society. Yet in recent history, the continuation of this foundational practice of turning kinetic energy from the wind into electricity has waned under political and economic opposition. While the first megawatt turbine went online in Vermont almost a century ago, for much of the 20th century, any development in the wind power industry was pushed aside as the worlds governments and economies prioritized the fossil fuel industry. [1] However, following the oil crisis of the 1970s and rising concerns for sustainable energy production, wind power is currently on the rise and demonstrating its immense value. Onshore wind turbine installation has played a special role in this development as it has proved to be even more accessible and efficient that its offshore counterpart.
Today the wind power industry is characterized by its constant innovation, dropping costs, improved efficiency and performance, and bulk manufacturing and installation. In 2015, the global market saw a record 63 gigawatts of wind power installed worldwide, even though fossil fuel costs dropped that same year. [1] Costs are playing a key role in driving this rise in installation. In the US, current costs sit at approximately 2.9 cents per kilowatt-hour for wind, including tax credits, which will be phased out in 2023. [1] According to a Bloomberg New Energy Finance analysis, the lifetime cost of wind and solar is less than the cost of building new fossil fuel plants, and will be the cheapest energy globally by 2030. Already, a Morgan Stanley analysis puts wind power at one third the cost of natural gas combined-cycle plants in the American Midwest. [1] And these costs only continue to drop, largely due to the innovation taking place specifically around onshore wind turbines. Because onshore turbines are drastically easier to install, they can be built with longer blades and at higher, windier elevations, with the newest designs generating 20 megawatts of power. [1]
As a result of such innovation and dropping costs, installation of wind power, especially onshore turbines, has increased worldwide. China leads the way with 19.7 Gigawatts of capacity installed in 2017, more than double any other market. [2] That same year, the US installed 7 gigawatts of capacity while Germany installed 6.5. [2] As a whole, Europe installed 16.8 GW of gross additional wind power capacity, placing wind power as the second largest form of power generation capacity in Europe. Of this new wind power capacity in Europe, 80% of installations were onshore turbines. [3]
This increase in installations has risen alongside increased power generation and investment. In 2017, wind power in the EU generated 336 terawatt hours and covered an average of 11.6% of the electricity demand through wind turbines such as those shown in Fig. 1. [3] In the same year, the European Union saw twenty five billion dollars invested in new wind energy, 16.6 billion of which was specifically allocated for onshore wind turbines. However, these investments represented only 81% of total investment the year prior. [3]
Among dropping costs and improving performance, one advantage of wind power is that installation is relatively quick, typically taking under a year to bring an entire wind farm online. [1] This type of energy is also environmentally friendly, with a carbon footprint of only 9 gCO2/KWh. Wind is a clean energy, and these emissions are only generated by the manufacturing, transportation, and installation of the turbines. Similarly, wind power requires 98 to 99% less water than fossil fuel-generated electricity, which is currently subsidized by the US Government within the fossil fuel industry. [1] Also, the physical structure of the onshore turbines take up only 1% of the land they are operated on, so other land usage such as conservation, recreation, agriculture, and grazing can occur simultaneously. Finally, wind is abundant and inexhaustible. In the United States, Kansas, Texas, and North Dakota alone host enough wind energy potential to power the entire country. [1] On a particularly windy day in 2015, Denmark wind turbines produced 140% of the nations entire electricity need (75% of power generated coming from onshore turbines) and successfully redirected 80% of the surplus power to German and Norwegian electrical grids through the use of interconnectors. [4] As seen through the first waves of installation, wind power has immense potential for contributing significantly to electricity needs across the globe.
As a result of all of this, if global use of electricity generated from onshore wind turbines increased from 2.9% to 21.6% by 2050, this shift alone could reduce global carbon emissions by 84.6 gigaton of carbon dioxide. At current prices, this would cost 1.23 trillion dollars to implement. However, It would also deliver 1.23 trillion dollars in net savings over three decades of operations, and this figure does not account for dropping prices. [1]
The greatest challenge facing the scaling of wind turbines across the globe is the intermittent nature of wind. Wind power is only generated when turbines are spinning, and so will be most effective as part of a diverse system of renewable energy sources and energy storage and transmission infrastructure. Similarly, the actual creation of onshore wind farms is often constrained by spatial challenges. Turbines cannot be too densely placed within the wind farm or else they will essentially steal one anothers wind and compromise overall efficiency. Other spatial limitations that must be accounted for include cost of land, proximity to transmission, and obstruction of views. Yet as countries such as China, the US, Germany, and Denmark move forward in their development of wind power and onshore wind turbines, they prove that these challenges can be overcome while preserving the environmental and economic advantages of such investments.
© Tule Horton. The author warrants that the work is the author's own and that Stanford University provided no input other than typesetting and referencing guidelines. The author grants permission to copy, distribute and display this work in unaltered form, with attribution to the author, for noncommercial purposes only. All other rights, including commercial rights, are reserved to the author.
[1] P. Hawken, ed., Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming (Penguin Books, 2017).
[2] A. Frangoul, "From China to Brazil, These are the World Titans of Wind Power," CNBC, 4 Jun 18.
[3] "Wind in Power 2017: Annual Combined Onshore and Offshore Wind Energy Statistics," Wind Europe, February 2018.
[4] A. Neslen, "Wind Power Generates 140% of Denmark's Electricity Demand," The Guardian, 10 Jul 15.
