Windfarm in Texas. Photo courtesy of Flickr.
Alternative energy continues to take off, with demand outstripping supply.
We’ve read about shortages of solar panels over the past couple of years, resulting from high demand and limited supplies of polysilicon.
Today’s Wall Street Journal has a front page story about how now a lot of wind power projects are facing delays due to a shortage of wind turbines.
Modern wind turbines are astonishingly complicated machines, containing more than 8,000 components and requiring special transformers to turn their spinning blades into electricity. Though commonly called windmills, they’re technically wind turbines. Manufacturers depend on a network of component suppliers that, in turn, need years to ramp up production. That’s created a bottleneck for the turbine makers.
Though still a relatively small force on the U.S. energy grid, wind power is on the rise as oil prices and environmental concerns soar. Governments from Beijing to Sacramento are showering the sector with subsidies in an effort to boost production of clean energy and reduce emissions of greenhouse-gases like carbon dioxide. Europe now plans to produce 20% of its energy from renewable sources by 2020, up from about 6% today, with wind power playing the leading role.
In the U.S., more wind power was installed last year than in any country in the world — 2,454 megawatts, or more than the equivalent of two nuclear reactors. Despite the recent action, the U.S. still lags behind other countries that have spent decades nurturing wind power with subsidies and price supports. Germany has fewer wind resources — breezy, wide-open spaces — than the state of North Dakota, for instance, but has twice as much wind power as the entire U.S. Spain, with one-seventh the population of the U.S., has the same amount of wind power. Overall, only about 1% of power in the U.S. comes from wind.
The turbine shortage could have a significant impact on how quickly the industry can continue to grow in the near term, as well as on what shape it will take in the future. Just five manufacturers produce more than 80% of the world’s wind turbines. A midsize, 1.5-megawatt turbine costs about $1.2 million.
This can only lead to more investment into both wind and solar, which is a good thing.
Popularity: 2% [?]
