China's wind power generation grows phenomenally

China's wind power generation grows phenomenally

Makes a lot of sense. The coastal area experiences relentless wind.

T. Boone Pickens pushin' wind power...
:cool:
Oil Man Champions Wind Power
July 08, 2008 - T. Boone Pickens: Oil is “one emergency we can’t drill our way out of.“

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Nobody can accuse T. Boone Pickens of being some wild-eyed environmentalist. He calls himself “a Texas oil man," the chair of a private equity fund called BP Capital Management. He puts his net worth at $4 billion, and he’s often at the top of various lists of investment gurus. But he’s been all over the media — his name was the ninth-most-searched term on Google — because of this: [url:
http://www.pickensplan.com[/url].

He’s out to get America free of imported oil, he says, and he wants to do it with the things environmentalists dream about — wind turbines for electricity, which would free up natural gas to run cars and trucks. He’d throw in nuclear power too, but only in the long term. “I’ve been an oil man all my life, but this is one emergency we can’t drill our way out of," he says on the website. “But if we create a new renewable energy network, we can break our addiction to foreign oil. “On January 20, 2009, a new President gets sworn in. If we’re organized, we can convince Congress to make major changes towards cleaner, cheaper and domestic energy resources."

He has some unlikely allies — for instance, Carl Pope, head of the Sierra Club. “I certainly never expected to be inspecting wind operations with Pickens or to be hearing his scorn for the current political notion that we can somehow drill our way out of the oil-price crisis," writes Pope on his blog. “He’s certainly likely to draw an audience that a green wind-power advocate from the Sierra Club could never command." Pickens gives a simple-looking chalk-talk in a video on the Pickens Plan website, but there’s nothing simple going on here. Pickens subscribes to the idea of “peak oil," the notion that our ability to find enough will dwindle. He says the peak passed in 2005.

More http://blogs.abcnews.com/scienceandsociety/2008/07/the-pickens-pla.html

China becoming big on wind power...
:cool:
China’s 'rapid renewables surge'
Friday, 1 August 2008 - China has the world’s fifth largest fleet of wind turbines

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China’s rapid investment in low carbon technologies has catapulted the nation up the global renewable energy rankings, a report shows. The Climate Group study said China invested $12bn (£6bn) in renewables during 2007, second only to Germany. However, it was expected to top the table by the end of 2009, it added. The findings have been published as China faces criticism over its air quality ahead of the Beijing Olympic Games, which begin on 8 August.

The report, China’s Clean Revolution, brings together the latest data on the country’s burgeoning renewables sector in one publication. Co-author Changhua Wu, The Climate Group’s China director, said the rapid rise in investment was, in part, the result of the government realising that the western model of industrialisation was unsustainable. “China has been experiencing similar problems during its industrial revolution that western nations saw during their period of rapid growth - pollution, environmental damage and resource depletion," she told BBC News.

“Domestically, we are being constrained in many ways; we do not have that many natural resources anymore. “We have to rely on the international markets, so there is a big security concern there." Uncertainty over future energy supplies has seen global fuel prices reach record levels, which has resulted in renewable technologies becoming a more attractive option. The report said China’s $12bn investment in renewables during 2007 was only just behind top-of-the-table Germany, which spent $14bn.

More [url:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7535839.stm[/url]

Credit crunch delays Pickens wind energy plan...
:confused:
Pickens' wind plan hits a snag
November 12, 2008: Credit crunch and falling natural gas prices delay plans for giant Texas farm.

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Billionaire oilman T. Boone Pickens is delaying his massive Texas wind project, citing a drop in natural gas prices and the tightening credit market. “With natural gas prices where they are, you can’t kick off a wind project, you’re not economical." Pickens said Tuesday at a news conference in Arizona. But Pickens, who has spent millions over the last few months promoting his “Pickens Plan” to wean the United States off foreign oil by switching to wind and natural gas, said natural gas and oil prices will rise again in less than a year, and characterized the setback as temporary.

A spokesman for Mesa Power, Pickens' company that is building the Texas wind farm, laid the blame more on the credit markets. “The capital markets are problematic for everyone and...may lead us to scale back a bit," Jay Rosser, a spokesman for Mesa, said in a statement. “But we are still going forward with our wind business." Pickens' wind farm in Texas, known as the Pampa Wind Project, was slated to be the largest wind farm in the world, generating 4,000 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 1.3 million homes. A spokesman for Pickens said turbines for the first phase of the project, 1,000 megawatts of power, are still being purchased. The first phase was slated to come online in 2011. Although now it is no longer clear when it will come on line.

The Pickens Plan, which the billionaire has been pushing in TV commercials, media appearances and lobbying efforts since last summer, calls for the country to use wind to generate 20% of its electricity, displacing some of the natural gas that’s currently used to generate power. The natural gas, an abundant domestic resource, could then be used to power vehicles, thus reducing oil imports. But natural gas prices have fallen from over $12 per million British thermal units last summer to current levels of around $6. The fall in natural gas prices makes switching to wind power a less certain bet, as utilities would be reluctant to replace natural gas with wind now that natural gas prices are so low.

Pickens said Tuesday that natural gas prices need to be about $9/Btu in order for wind power to be competitive. He remained confident the dip in prices would not effect his overall Pickens Plan. “We will get the plan," he said. Pickens, who made his money in oil production and trading, has been saying for years that the United States is too dependent on foreign oil, and that oil prices will continue to rise over the long term as demand outstrips supply.

[url:
http://money.cnn.com/2008/11/12/news/economy/pickens/index.htm[/url]

See also:

What a New Energy Economy Might Look Like
Thursday, Nov. 13, 2008 - Except for the soft hydraulic whir of expectations being raised, the first week of the Obama transition was a quiet one.

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Indeed, the big news came from neither Chicago nor Washington but from Detroit and Beijing. In Detroit, General Motors — the stupendously clueless — automaker — begged for a bailout lest it go bankrupt, thereby raising the question: If our resources are limited, why should we invest in the failed corporate past rather than in the technologies of the future? The obvious answer was to protect jobs. But how long would those jobs last without a significant overhaul of the company’s management and priorities? Was it even possible that the Federal Government could demand or supervise such a radical makeover?

There was even bigger news from China, where the government announced a $586 billion stimulus package in an attempt to soften the blow of the coming recession. The China package was big and bold — and a tacit challenge to the Obama Administration. It represented 18% of the Chinese gross domestic product, the equivalent of a $2.4 trillion program in the U.S. Of course, China has bigger problems to solve than we do. Its social safety net is made of tissue; vast sums will be needed to establish a proper health-care and pension system. But much of the $586 billion will also be spent on investments to jump-start China’s next economic expansion — investments in transportation, education, communications and energy.

And that’s where the challenge is: if we don’t want to be left behind, we will have to do something similar. Obama has said building an alternative-energy economy will be his top priority. The question is, How bold is he willing to be about that? Actually, there are a lot of questions: How much of the stimulus plan he proposes in January will be devoted to immediate middle-class tax relief, and how much to investing in the future? What would a plausible — alternative-energy plan look like?

For answers, I decided to check in with the Center for American Progress (CAP) — the think tank run by Obama’s transition chief, John Podesta — which has drafted a green-energy stimulus plan of its own. “We identified $50 billion in programs that are ready to go immediately," says Bracken Hendricks of CAP. “The package would create 2 million jobs across the skill spectrum, from blue collar to high tech, and in almost every area of the country. There was huge congressional appetite for this even before the economic crisis hit."

[url=http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1858684,00.html?iid=tsmodule:
MORE[/url]

China a major player in wind power...
:cool:
China Ranks 4th In Wind Power
May 24, 2009 - With total installed capacity of 12million kilowatts, China has become the world’s fourth country in wind power-installed capacity, an official said on Saturday in Beijing.

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“Concerning wind power-installed capacity, China is next only to the United States, France and Spain," Lu Yanchang, vice chairman of the China Science and Technology Association, made the above remarks at the fifth China Energy Strategy Forum. Wind power has become a main force in China’s new energy development cause, said Lu, adding that the country had built more than 200 wind power plants as of 2008, with 12.8 billion kwh electricity generated.

China’s total wind power has accounted for 1.5 percent of country’s total installed electricity capacity. The country will build more wind power projects before 2010, in east coastal areas, and vast western regions, according to Lu. North Inner Mongolia and Hebei have exploited wind energy earlier than other regions on the Chinese mainland. Inner Mongolia, covering 1.18 million square kilometers, boasts 100 million kilowatts of wind energy resources, with enormous white turbines standing high to capture the strong winds from the heartland of Mongolia and Siberia.

The region is striving to increase installed capacity of wind power to more than 10 million kilowatts in 2010, almost half of that of the country’s largest hydropower project at the Three Gorges, said Ya Saning, director of the region’s economic commission. Hebei Province will also construct wind power plants with an installed capacity of more than 10 million kilowatts as of 2020, said Zhao Weidong, an official with the provincial Commission of Development and Reform.

[url:
http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90001/90776/90884/6664463.html[/url]

Europe makin' headway in wind power...

World’s First Floating Wind Turbine
June 12, 2009 - First floating wind turbine buoyed off Norway

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Development of offshore wind farms has been restricted to places where turbines can be attached to the sea bed. But earlier this week, Siemens and energy company StatoilHydro installed what they call the first large-scale floating turbine. The installation is off the coast of Norway, and testing is expected to last for two years.

The Hywind turbine will still have a ballast that is tied to the sea floor with cables. Wires will transfer the electricity produced to the mainland grid starting in July. If successful, the project could open up offshore wind to countries that don’t have relatively shallow waters of 100 feet to 165 feet off their coasts. The Hywind is suitable for depths of about 400 feet to more than 2,200 feet.

“Hywind could open...new opportunities for exploitation of offshore wind power, as the turbines could be placed much more freely than before," Henrik Stiesdal, chief technology of the Siemens' Wind Power business unit, said in a statement.

The turbine in Norway will be 7.4 miles offshore where the water is 721 feet deep. It will be utility-size turbine, with a hub height of about 100 feet, capable of generating 2.3 megawatts of electricity. To address the conditions of the deep sea, the turbine will have a specially designed control system that will seek to dampen the motion from waves.

[url:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-10263462-54.html[/url]

See also:

Scottish Wind Farm Worth Millions
[i]13 June 2009 - Salmond: Wind farm work worth £200m

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A giant wind farm will generate orders worth more than £200 million for firms in Scotland, the First Minister said. The 152-turbine farm to be built near Abingdon in Lanarkshire will be the single biggest wind farm to have been given consent in Europe. Alex Salmond hailed the potential for firms in Scotland when he visited the site on Friday to see preparatory work.

The project will cost £500 million, and the £200 million-worth of contracts destined for firms in Scotland. This will include a £10 million order for Machrihanish-based Welcon Towers to supply turbine towers, helping to secure 100 jobs at the Kintyre yard. The farm, to be developed by Scottish and Southern Energy, will generate enough power for about 200,000 homes. homes. SSE said it will provide at least 100 jobs in its construction phase and 30 during its operational life.

Mr Salmond said: “The sheer scale of the Clyde wind farm reflects Scotland’s ambition and ability to become the clean, green energy capital of Europe. “The development of Europe’s largest single consented on-shore wind farm in South Lanarkshire reinforces the Scottish Government’s commitment to reduce harmful emissions while capitalising on the vast opportunities renewable energy presents."

He said he is “delighted” that the towers will be made in Scotland. “Scotland boasts a clear, competitive advantage in the development of clean, green energy sources with 25% of Europe’s offshore wind and tidal power. Scotland’s potential for renewables is up to 60GW - more than ten times our peak demand," Mr Salmond added.

[url=http://www.inverurieherald.co.uk/latest-scottish-news/Salmond-Wind-farm-work-worth.5360224.jp:
Source[/url]