Big budget for wind energy research

Press, 20 February 1980, Page 22

Big budget for wind energy research

From the “Economist,” London

Supporters say windmills could supply up to a fifth of electricity needs in Britain and the United States by the turn of the century. Optimistic that. After a generation of priority development, even nuclear- power supplies much less. But windmills are beginning to look one of the more promising ways of exploiting renewable energy. One reason is advances in windmill technology. Tomorrow’s wind generators will look very different from those that have pumped water and ground flour for close on 2000 years. They are getting much larger but (in terms of their weight per kilowatt of electricity they generate) also lighter. That lightness counts: engineering structures typically cost about $2 per pound weight to build.

Modern wind machines weigh only a few tenths of a pound per watt. Most systems exploiting other forms of renewable energy (whether wave, tidal, solar or biomass) need roughly a pound of weight to produce a watt of power. Admittedly, many energy experts reckon that windgenerated electricity will cost at least twice that from modern coal-fired power stations, initially anyway. But it could be an attractive source of power for peak loads — i.e. competitive with electricity generated by stand-by gas turbines, Hence the big research and development budgets of many governments for wind energy. The United States will spend S63M on wind power research this year alone. Sweden has committed SSOM over several years and West Germany has a S3OM programme.

Even Denmark and the Netherlands have allocated SIOM each for wind. Britain? Though one of the windiest places in Europe, Britain has spent less than S3M on wind power to date. That could change. The British Energy Department has just got a report suggesting that wind might well be the best bet among nonconventiona’l power sources for a country with Britain’s climate. The report needs to be taken with a little grain of salt: it was produced largely by companies, such as British Aerospace and Taylor Woodrow, keen to break

into the wind power busi ness.

Still it is sober enough tc double the cost of estimates earlier produced by some wind enthusiasts. One result could be Government support for the construction of a 3.7 megawatt wind generator in Scotland.. The point of that exercise would be to learn more about some of the basic engineering problems. For land-based windmills are not themselves a promising option for Britain. The country’s windy hilltops are too few and generally too far from where electricity is most needed. The energy department report advocates clustering ■ windmills in shallow waters like the Wash or Cardigan Bay instead. The advantages? Offshore wind speeds are typically twice those on land. Since a wind generator’s power is proportional to the cube of wind speed, that means the same number of generators could produce eight times as much electricity offshore as on land. Ten “wind-farm sites have been broadly identified round Britains coasts, each of which might supply 1000, megawatts of electricity. „ „ . x , The snags? Capital construction costs would be higher — perhaps 60 per cent more — than on land. (So, presumably, would be •subsequent maintenance costs.) Each wind-farm site might need an investment of well over $1 billion — i.e., at least as much as for a comparable nuclear, power station. ; ' America’s greater appetite for wind is largely explained by two factors. First, it has many more 'suitable windy sites on land. Second,. it is further ahead, in licking the technological problems. General Electric last year completed the world’s largest wind turbine —, a massive 200 feet across. This year Boeing should finish the first of three 300-foot generators, each designed to produce 2| megawatts for about $O.OB a kilowatt in modest winds. Boeing maintains it could halve operating costs by the time the hundredth such windmill was built.

Taxpayers ' permitting? Tooling up is precisely what a $1 billion wind-energy bill — now before the American

Congress — is all about. It aims, by 1986, to establish capacity to manufacture 600-megawatts-w i orth of wind generators a year.

Optimists say that, by the 19905, a $lO-billion-a-year industry (the of today’s aircraft industry in the United States) might emerge,

with companies like Bendix, Boeing, General Electric and Westinghouse. One question: if so tempting a prize is on offer, why

is so much Government money needed to persuade such companies to enter the commercial race?