All Things in Moderation

We drove through the world’s largest windfarm after we left Sweetwater.  The 2.833 year old twins were fascinated.

Austin’s two lowest cost sources of energy are natural gas and wind, followed by coal.  The City is trying to replace all its coal based use.  Wind produces about 17% of Austin’s energy, I think.  Austin also has built a large solar facility but it can supply only about 1% of capacity and costs four times as much as gas or wind.

The City’s insistence on solar projects is controversial because they will produce energy over a twenty year period projected to drop in cost comparison from four times wind to twice wind, but never be as cheap as wind.  The City justifies solar projects on a few grounds – diversity of clean sources, a boost to tech companies in and coming to Austin, and the fact that the sunniest days are the least windy.   Further, Austin does not have local wind generation capacity and buys from wind farms either in the west or on the Gulf.  Austin does have enough sunshine, and the local City owned sun powered 30MW generation plant opens in a few weeks.

Austin owns land in west TX that I thought was going to get dotted with wind generators.  I now read in this morning’s paper that the city utility wants to build 3 huge solar arrays that will potentially provide 10% of capacity.  I assume that would be instead of wind generators.

The city utility subsidizes rooftop solar panels but is leery of them in the long term.

I am not an opponent of experimenting with solar on a small scale, albeit large enough to sustain slow development, until it becomes cheap.  The local solar plant made sense to me in that regard.  But wind is so cheap that for coal replacement nothing else makes current $$$ and sense [except NG].  Like Boone Pickens, I think NG is the mobile fuel of choice in the near future, so I would go for more wind in the stationary source market.

What are the down sides of wind farms?  The prop blades are tough on birds that do not adapt by flying higher.  The ground vibrates.  The props make some noise.  The high plains from Sweetwater, TX to N.Dak. are wind central but the transmission lines are not in place and must generally be routed hundreds of miles to population centers.  Wind speeds are high enough over the Great Lakes and the coastal waters for generators, and can be placed close to coastal or lakeside population centers.

A political note:  our Land Commissioner is the daddy of windpower in America.  A staunch conservative R, I vote for him every time.  He saw that it would be cheap, a boon for underutilized mesas in TX, and that it could help sustain the economy many years ago, and subsidized its development until TX now has far and away the most wind generated power in America.  I think we will have enough to support one third of the homes in TX within two years.

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