I'm not a wind industry financier, as is Jerome a Paris . .I'm just a fan of sustainable energy. I have been for 30 years. I tend to follow the news on these things. And while I like the way things are going in terms of the adoption of new energy generation technologies, particularly wind, I see a story such as the one reported today in WindPower Monthly, and I find it quite irritating. The city of Yumen in the northwest Chinese Gansu Province, has announced that they will be constructing a 500MW wind farm next month, and they will use nothing but Chinese built turbines. Why are the Chinese able to do that, but something so straightforward, so direct, to spur the U.S. industry is seemingly impossible?
Every few weeks, we hear about another massive new initiative to create a wind farm in one country or another. (Egypt just announced a tender to create a 1 Gigawatt(!) offshore wind farm, which would be one of the biggest in the world.) There are large wind farms built and more planned for the U.S. . . but any time Obama proposes an idea that we limit such new capital expenditures to U.S.-only manufacturers, he is attacked and shouted down, usually by European interests (in this market, that would be Siemens, Vestas, et. al.)No doubt, there were others around the world who complained when our President proposed this idea to support the U.S. alt-energy industry.
But as with their strange immunity to international currency standards, the Chinese seem to get a free pass from the international community on these kinds of things. Here they are announcing a massive new wind farm with the intention to do it quickly (1 month is light speed for this sort of thing) and using ONLY Chinese equipment, and there is silence . . .I guess because we expect this kind of thing from the Chinese government. They are explicitly using this project to help:
..accelerate the promotion of Chinese-manufactured wind turbines on the market. The 500MW wind farm, which is awaiting final approval, will have a total investment of CHY5billion.
Why cannot the U.S. government make a similar effort? We've even set aside some money in the stimulus funding to do this sort of thing, but the 'U.S. manufacturing' requirement ended up getting stripped out due to just the kind of carping I mentioned above.
It's either time to put our foot down and insist that we have the right to promote our own industries, or we demand that the Chinese open the bidding for such projects to international competition.
On a side note, in a small personal way, I'm happy that there is some progress in small wind projects in the U.S. I have heard that the U.S. is far and away the biggest market for small residential scale wind projects. I'm terribly proud of my mother. After about 20 years of me talking about alternative energy, she actually surprised me last week by calling to tell me that she had just worked with a contractor to have a pair of 10kW turbines installed on the family farm in Ohio. I had spoken with her about such a possibility a couple years back, and I guided her to a couple of companies I thought might be reputable. (One company that had approached her . . .the reason she asked me about it in the first place, was a northeast Ohio family company that none of us in our family trusted very highly. There's a bit of history there.) Anyway, she had contacted a company in northwestern Ohio called Northcoast Wind and Power, and unbeknownst to me, moved the process forward. So the call last week was to tell me that she's going ahead to install two 10kW wind turbines on 120 foot tall towers behind the two homesteads on our family farm.
These turbines, one installed about 100' behind each of the houses, should provide about 90% of the annual power needs of the homesteads (including outbuildings and such.) The design of the turbines, by a Minnesota company called Ventera Energy, is rather unique in that it has fewer maintenance requirements of other similarly-sized systems, and they are selling it with a very innovative power inverter that can easily accept an additional 2 kilowatts of solar PV to the same site. (Note: I have NO connection whatsoever to Ventera or North Coast Wind & Power. I just love to trumpet the story of American companies doing innovative things with energy technologies.) These homes now house my two sisters' families. These have the potential to provide electrical power for over 25 years, with just minor maintenance every 3 to 5 years.
It makes me very proud of my mother, a 79 year old woman who listens to my rants about conservative America and the Oil and Gas industry with quiet, good-natured aplomb, and then just goes out and does something to help. Given the beauty I remember of my childhood on the farm where she and my father raised me, I am very happy to see these types of individual efforts that will collectively do so much to preserve the sublime beauty of these places. I remember so well the sunrises over the Mahoning river valley in northeastern Ohio, as I walked out the cow lane to bring in the herd each morning.
From what the people at North Coast have told her, they are busy as hell right now. People are jumping on the alternative energy bandwagon left and right, partially to take advantage of state and federal initiatives and tax credits, but probably more fundamentally, because they care about the world we live in, and they want to preserve it. Why wouldn't we want to preserve it? This soil, this land, nurtured most of us through our childhoods. It provided the foundation upon which our great nation (and the other proud nations of the world) have flourished in the past century. We should be doing all we can to save it. I know that I would not be anything without this place, or without people such as my parents, the models of natural husbandry, to provide such wonderful models of hope. I hope these kinds of efforts will eventually overcome the bumbling of the large corporations we see in the Gulf. This land, this soil, the foundation for the next generation of my family, is depending on just such hopes. As is the land and sea all over the world, for all of our children.
Update: I just wanted to add that the way that we will intertie these windmills into the electric grid is determined by state law, so it's set state-by-state. And the Ohio law (and the utilities' implementation of it) are not terribly friendly to small-scale alt-energy installations. As I said above, these windmills will generate a large percentage of the home electrical power for two homes. My sister called Ohio Edison (parent company: First Energy) to find out what the policy was. Basically, each house is a separate bill, so each is treated separately. Each account has a generation account that is credited when more power is generated by the turbines than the house is using. Basically, the power flows back onto the electrical grid. When the house uses more electricity than it generates, the generation account is debited. At the end of each month (or annually, it's not quite clear yet), when the account balance is negative, we have to pay Ohio Edison. When the account balance is positive, we get to give that balance to Ohio Edison and it gets zeroed out again for the next period. Lovely, no? This is on top of the fact that each home's bill also includes a distribution charge, which gets charged no matter what the credit/debit balance is, meaning, if we generate power and put it on the grid, they are going to charge us about $40 a month to 'distribute' our power back to us. And an account balance on the 'generation' account doesn't get used to pay off the 'distribution' account.
Don't get me wrong, the windmills do make financial sense. They'll probably pay for themselves (after the government credits, etc.) in about 10 or 11 years. But the industry sure manages to take their cut of these things. Not terribly surprising in a state where power is generated so overwhelmingly by the old fuels.
Oh, and just to be clear on my initial point about the Chinese wind farm . . I do realize that the U.S. has a significant number of industrial scale wind farms, particularly in Texas, Oregon, and Iowa, but my point is that we cannot seem to mandate that these farms are populated with American-made hardware. VClib, in the comments, correctly noted that the U.S. is limited by trade agreements against making such requirements, particularly concerning our European wind industry competitors. My counter to that is then, why do we agree to that when our largest trading adversary is NOT limited by such agreements? Particularly about items that are infrastructure? Couldn't our infrastructure be considered of national security interest, and perhaps exempt from such international trade requirements? Perhaps we should be working to put similarly restrictive language into a new trade agreement with China? When does Most Favored Nation trading status come up again for China? Or perhaps we should be working with Europe to remove such ridiculous language from our own trade agreements. The point being, this is the future of our economy, and we're fighting with one arm tied behind our back.