WASHINGTON — Right on time after the Obama administration released its Clean Power Plan, two reports published Monday by the Department of Energy find that one key renewable sector — wind — is booming.
The reports being released — including the 2014 Wind Technologies Market Report, published by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory — suggest that wind is being installed at a rapid rate, its costs are plummeting, its technologies are advancing and it is creating a growing number of jobs.
Wind energy in the U.S. is now at 66 gigawatts of installed capacity, according to the report — providing roughly 5 percent of total U.S. electricity demand and enough electricity to power 17.5 million homes (a gigawatt is a billion watts).
Jose Zayas, who heads the wind and water power technologies office at the Energy Department’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, says 13 more gigawatts are now “in the construction phase” and set to come online by 2016.
For reference, in 2012, the U.S. had 1,063 gigawatts of total installed electricity capacity, according to the Energy Information Administration.
“It really dispels some of the myths that you cannot have significant amounts of wind energy in the system — a variable source in the system — without really affecting the overall efficiency,” Zayas said.
Wind now provides 73,000 jobs, the new report finds. Most striking, it found that the wholesale cost of wind energy — bought under a “power purchasing agreement,” or PPA, in which a utility or company buys power from a wind farm under a long-term contract — is now just 2.35 cents per kilowatt hour. That’s the lowest it has ever been.
“At 2.35 cents per kilowatt hour, wind is cheaper than the average price of wholesale electricity in many parts of the country,” said Ryan Wiser of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a lead author of the new report.
Granted, it’s important to note that costs would not be so low without the wind production tax credit, or PTC, which covers wind projects that began by the close of 2014. Still, it’s impressive.
This might help explain why companies ranging from Google to Yahoo to Microsoft have been entering into power purchase agreements with wind farms to help power their energy-hungry data centers.
Even as costs decline, a key technology trend is helping further advance the sector. Wind turbines are getting taller as well as bigger overall.
