As Texas struggles through freezing temperatures and power outages, frozen
wind turbines have caused conservative politicians to criticize the state's reliance on renewable energy. The blackouts that are in Texas are being made worse by the failure of wind
turbines, many freezing in the icy weather. The Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America. The major outages in the power grid came from thermal sources, such as
natural gas and coal. During Texas's devastating cold snap, the infrastructure for every source
of power was affected. Production of coal, natural gas, crude oil, wind and solar all dipped,
causing statewide blackouts. Yes, we do know how to winterize these assets, but the focus on frozen
turbines revealed an interesting tension. While Governor Abbott is a staunch supporter of oil and gas, Texas also
produces 28 percent of the nation's total wind power, way more than other states. The state has helped wind to become America's top renewable source
of electricity generation. And now, it's one of the cheapest energy sources too. We're seeing not only cost come down, but efficiency, performance and
reliability increase at the same point in time. Unlike solar, you won't find the evidence of wind's growth on people's
rooftops. Rather, large wind farms are usually sited in relatively unpopulated rural
areas. Tehachapi, California, Roscoe, Texas, Balko, Oklahoma. Out of sight for many, but nevertheless growing rapidly. The number of jobs supported by the wind industry, from construction to
manufacturing, did hit a new all-time high last year of 114,000 jobs. 2020, w e just had a record year here in the U.S., over 17 gigawatts of new
capacity brought online just in 2020. Essentially all that growth was in the onshore wind sector. But in the coming years, developers are planning more offshore projects
too, pioneering advances in the field along the way, like the development of increasingly huge turbines with individual blades larger than football
fields. Already I think wind turbines are the largest rotating machines on Earth,
right. And these 15 megawatt or even larger offshore turbines are kind of
unbelievable engineering wonders. The politics of the energy transition will always be a factor. Regulatory and permitting hurdles threaten to slow growth in the sector. And as usual, the intermittency of renewables poses a challenge, even as
energy storage solutions get cheaper. But at the end of the day, wind energy is poised to expand no matter what. The question is, how fast? Humans have been harnessing wind energy for millennia, as early as 5000
B.C., our ancestors sailed boats along the Nile River. By 200 B.C., windmills in Persia and the Middle East were used to grind
grain, and the idea of using wind for food production eventually spread around the world. In the late 1800s, wind turbines were first used to
generate electricity. But as the modern electric grid formed and power lines crisscrossed the
U.S., use of wind turbines decreased, only picking up again after the oil shortages of the 1970s, when the government sought out alternate energy
sources. The first wind farms were built in the 80s, but they looked pretty
different than the swath of slick machines that we're used to seeing today. It was very much a pioneering, kind of Wild West culture back in the 80s
and 90s, with very small wind turbines. We were looking at 50 and 20 kilowatt type systems on lattice towers. One of these old 50 kilowatt turbines would likely power fewer than 14
homes per day. But now the average turbine is about 1.67 megawatts, enough to power about
460 homes. We're now deploying turbines that are at five megawatts, six megawatts on
the onshore space. Federal R&D funding, subsidies and state-specific renewable energy
requirements have helped to drive wind's rapid expansion. Since 1980, the cost of wind energy has decreased exponentially. And in the U.S., the percentage of electricity generated from wind has
grown from less than 0.1 percent in 1990 to about seven percent in 2019. During that same time, Europe's wind share has grown to 11.6 percent and
China's to 5.5 percent. During the last 10 years in particular, the sector has seen major
technological advancements, leading to greater plant productivity. Wind turbine modeling and simulations have improved and the turbine blades
themselves have gotten longer and lighter, now incorporating curved tips that are designed to operate more efficiently at slower wind speeds. In the last, you know, one decade, it's still seen a tremendous change with
most of that being around the blade design, much more sophisticated aerofoil designs, much more impressive controls to be able to extract the
most value out of the wind and operate just at the edge of what that wind turbine structural integrity is capable of. Globally, 95.4 percent of wind power is located on land as opposed to at
sea. But in the United States, that proportion is 99.9 percent. While offshore wind is stronger and more reliable, permitting for these
wind farms has been notoriously difficult in the U.S., with many regulatory hoops to jump through and agencies to appease. It's just cheaper to build turbines onshore, and government policy has
helped the U.S. to become a world leader in onshore wind, behind just China and the E.U. as a whole in total generating capacity. There was a lot of public policy that helped to support the wind industry
become more commercial. And here in the United States it was in the form of the production tax
credit. In the European Union, it was a result of feed-in tariffs that existed
across a number of different countries. Now, onshore wind is one of the cheapest energy sources in the U.S. That can be calculated using the levelized cost of electricity, which is
the total lifetime cost of an asset, like a wind farm or a gas-fired power plant, divided by the total energy output of that source. With a levelized cost of about 26 dollars per megawatt hour, including
subsidies, wind farms are, on average, less expensive than gas-fired power plants. Plus, they work well with solar, which comes in at about 31
dollars per megawatt hour. Wind tends to blow its hardest during the early morning hours of the day,
as well as during twilight time when solar is starting to ramp down. So those two technologies can work quite well with one another. 2020 was a banner year for onshore wind in the U.S., with more capacity
installed in the final quarter of 2020 alone than in all of 2019 . Now, total capacity exceeds 120,000 megawatts, enough to power about 38
million homes. As of late, GE has been the biggest player in the U.S. wind space, with Danish turbine maker Vestas and the German company
Siemens Gamesa also building out significant capacity. 2020 was a record year for wind installations in the U.S. and GE was successful in installing more than half of it. Generally speaking, the larger you can build a turbine, the more
cost-effective it will be. That's because the bigger the blades are, the more wind can be captured
and turned into torque. The more torque, the more power. And the higher the tower is, the faster the wind speeds are. Because of this, many of the major players have started developing onshore
turbines with up to six megawatts of capacity. And at this point, the main barrier to making them much larger is really
just transportation. Wind turbines are manufactured throughout the U.S., but different parts of
the turbine are often made in different factories, which aren't always located close to the wind farm itself. Land-based wind turbines are limited by our overpasses on highways. Even when you take the pole that holds it up and turn it sideways, it's
still so big they won't fit under most overpasses. And so you can't get them to where you want them to be. However, size becomes less of an issue out at sea, so long as manufacturing
facilities are built near ports and you can transport the blades and towers on massive ships. That's one of the reasons that there's been so much excitement in the
offshore wind space lately, especially on the United States' gusty East Coast. We launched the Hal iade-X, which was a 12 megawatt wind turbine,
just a couple of years ago. And now we're at 13 megawatts. So this really leapfrogged in the industry, bringing the whole industry
now up to this new standard for very high power, large offshore wind turbines. The H aliade-X has a rotor diameter that's longer than two
American football fields placed end-to-end. And it's not even the biggest option out there. The latest announcements from Vestas of a 15 megawatt turbine that's going
to be supporting a 236 meter rotor, this is magnificent news, y ou know, for the industry as a whole, and j ust shows
how far we have come and how far we've yet to go. None of these giant turbines are deployed commercially yet, though the
Haliade-X has a number of early customers for projects coming down the pike. While the UK and China already have a significant amount of offshore
wind, there are only two U.S. offshore farms, in Rhode Island and Virginia. But there are a lot in the works. At the end of 2019, the total planned capacity for offshore projects stood
at over 28,000 megawatts, about 680 times the miniscule amount that we currently have. And one report estimates that offshore wind will be a 70
billion dollar market by 2030. Once more projects come online, o ffshore wind is projected to cost about
115 dollars per megawatt hour, over three times more expensive than future estimates for onshore wind or natural gas. But Merfeld says that it makes more economic sense than transporting wind
power all the way from the middle of the country to the coastal population centers. Some of the best places to put offshore wind, where you can be
far enough off the coast but still not have to go too deep to put in foundations, are right along the Eastern Seaboard, where you have some of
the largest cities in the country. So being able to bring that power to big load destinations where people
desperately want renewable energy, it's a really great connection. Now, even oil and gas companies are getting into the offshore space. Shell owns a 50 percent share in two East Coast projects. BP and Equinor have formed a partnership to develop wind farms off the
coasts of New York and Massachusetts. And this year, BP and Total won large offshore leases in Britain,
outbidding established developers like the Danish company Ørsted. American oil majors have hung back, but experts say that it makes sense
for them to pivot towards offshore wind, considering their expertise in building offshore oil and gas rigs. Offshore w ind energy is very much a marriage between the onshore wind
industry , who knows all about wind turbines, and offshore oil and gas, who know about building huge floating things in the ocean and generating
energy from them. So this would give them new revenue streams and a whole new growth industry
as their base industry might be contracting. But for all the promises of wind power, there are some concerns that have
persisted over the years, impeding the expansion of both onshore and offshore turbines. A recent survey finds that wind turbines are killing not only local birds,
but some that are migratory. A group of San Diegans who live in the Far East County say wind turbines
are not only ugly, they're dangerous. You're never rested. You're always like bothered from this noise. Offshore wind presents additional issues, namely potential disruptions to
the commercial fishing industry and opposition from the Navy, which says that projects off the California coast could conflict with military
operations in the air and at sea. Add to this a disjointed regulatory system that makes it difficult to get
projects approved in a timely and cost-effective manne r, and it's no wonder that the U.S. offshore industry has been slow to take off. I think one of the biggest barriers, especially in the U.S., is actually
regulatory risk. You know, government agencies not making it as streamlined or as easy as
possible to build. You know, wait, wait! We need you to do this one more study. And now it's two or three or four years, that is costing you millions and
millions and millions of dollars. The permitting process involves rigorous environmental and social impact
reviews. And while these are critical to the project's viability, they're also
often subject to frequent legal challenges from well-funded opponents. For example, after 16 years, 100 million dollars and endless litigation
and public opposition led by the Koch brothers, developers shut down plans for an offshore project in Cape Cod. One big concern was that beachfront property owners would see the turbines
from their homes. While this "not in my backyard" attitude will probably always exist to some
degree, the onshore industry at least has gotten better at handling the myriad concerns from different agencies and interest groups. One of the biggest known environmental impacts is the estimated 140,000 to
328,000 turbine-caused bird deaths per year. There are a number of companies working on this, developing and selling
radar systems, maps and forecasting tools that can detect when birds and bats are passing through and shut down turbines as needed. And new research suggests that painting one turbine black could reduce
deaths by 72 percent. As for underwater ecosystems, an early study of offshore wind in the North
Sea indicates that underwater towers have a largely positive impact, giving rise to new mussel colonies and increasing biodiversity. Some recreational fishers in Rhode Island also report that fishing has
improved near the turbines there. The foundations of these five, six megawatt turbines that are sitting off
the coast of Rhode Island are actually creating like an artificial reef and have increased the ocean life in that region. Long-term impacts are still unclear though, as is the influence on
commercial fishermen, who fear that the towers could alter fish migration patterns and make navigation difficult. With regards to noise and visual impact, most offshore projects are now
built too far from land to see or hear. And while local ordinances vary widely, GE says that onshore farms in
residential areas are typically no closer than 300 meters to any home, where the sound would be roughly equivalent to a refrigerator and likely
lost among other background noises. Fears over the supposed danger of low-frequency turbine sounds have
circulated for years, but are not substantiated by the scientific community. And for those who just don't like the look, i t may actually be
good that turbines are getting bigger. In actual, the visual impact of a fewer number of larger turbines seems to
be more palatable to most folks. Lastly, there's the perpetual hurdle of intermittency. Depending on the weather, there may be far more wind energy than an area
needs, or far too little. Our entire grid infrastructure needs an upgrade to make it more responsive
to the ebbs and flows of solar and wind resources. Building more high voltage transmission lines is a part of that equation,
but that can also be costly and subject to local opposition. In terms of storing energy, experts say that we need to continue investing
in solutions like lithium ion batteries, which are getting cheaper and cheaper, as well as funding R&D for novel technologies like flow
batteries, thermal batteries or even gravity-based storage systems. Some would like to see policies like battery subsidies or storage
mandates. When we get to roughly 20 percent of our peak demand available in storage,
we will be able to run a renewable-only system, because the mix of solar and wind, geothermal,
biomass all backed up with storage will be enough to carry us through even some of these potentially long lulls. The Department of Energy has laid out a vision for generating 20 percent of
electricity from wind by 2030 and 35 percent by 2050. It involves building out transmission infrastructure, streamlining siting
and permitting processes, improving the reliability of turbines and increasing U.S. manufacturing capacity. These targets are ambitious, but by no means impossible. Wind power capacity has already tripled in the past decade and is
projected to double in the decade to come. Now it's become ubiquitous. We see wind everywhere. It's attracting the biggest names in the business and all of this has
contributed to the market being looked upon as being far far more mature. A mainstream part of the power sector moving forward and a real key cog
within the energy transition as a whole. The production tax credit for wind, which subsidizes the cost of
electricity generated from utility-scale wind farms, has been extended through 2021. And a new investment tax credit has been created for offshore projects,
subsidizing the construction cost of projects that begin before 2026. There are absolutely opportunities to continue to lower the levelized cost
of electricity and we do see that moving forward. But that said, we still feel that wind and solar will be able to stand by
themselves in an unsubsidized environment. Net-zero emissions pledges have helped to drive the industry forward, as
major corporations have signed virtual power purchase agreements for new renewable energy facilities. Shreve thinks that the federal government could also be doing more of
that, supporting renewable development while also helping their own agencies to go green. But the kicker, as per usual, will be coordinated and ambitious
legislation. It's going to be all about federal energy policy. Are we going to see a clean energy standard? Will we see a carbon tax? At the end of the day, having a formalized federal policy is going to be
incredibly important.
