Re: Wind energy a boon for farmers - tenfold returns !

From: habshi (habshi_at_anony.com)
Date: 11/07/04 

Date: Sun, 07 Nov 2004 01:30:04 GMT

        Why are NRIs not rushing to build these in India ? . Many
industries have stopped for lack of power - the potential is limitless

excerpts
Farmers welcome the second income these offer. In Iowa, each quarter
acre that a farmer makes available to a developer's turbine —often
with blades spanning 150 feet—can yield royalties of about $2,000 a
year, notes agricultural economist Lester R. Brown, president of the
Earth Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. Adds Brown: "In a good
year, that same plot might produce $100 worth of corn."

Farmers who develop those wind resources themselves can reap far
bigger bounties—up to perhaps $20,000 per turbine annually, Juhl
claims.

Globally, wind generation of electricity has nearly quadrupled over
the past 5 years, and in the United States, it's expected to grow 60
percent this year alone. As farmers struggle to make ends meet, "some
are now finding salvation in this new 'crop,'" Brown observes. "It's
like striking oil, except that the wind is never depleted."

Profitable wind power

The profitability of wind power has blossomed over the past few
decades. A kilowatt-hour (kWh), the basic unit of delivered
electricity, is equal to the energy consumed by a 100-watt light bulb
burning for 10 hours. In the mid-1970s, commercial wind turbines
cranked out electricity at 30 cents or more per kWh. That was a
staggering amount, considering that coal-fired plants were generating
it for about 2 cents/kWh.

Today, some wind turbines can generate power for less than 6 cents/kWh
while utilities are, in some cases, charging customers more than twice
that. Large wind farms sited where the air flow is reliable and strong
can now produce electricity for as little as 3 cents/kWh—40 percent
less than was possible with the best turbines a mere 5 years ago. For
comparison, earlier this year, power-strapped California utilities
were forced at times to buy electricity on the spot market for up to
33 cents/kWh.

 
Fifty years ago, farmers used rural windmills like that in the
foreground to pump water. Today, these are giving way to behemoths
(background) that pump electricity into the transmission lines
powering cities.
Warren Gretz/National Renewable Energy Lab.
Compared with more traditional—and more polluting—forms of electrical
generation, wind power can be competitive economically, notes energy
economist Florentin Krause of the International Project for
Sustainable Energy Paths in El Cerrito, Calif. "It's dirt cheap," he
says.

Indeed, he's found that the cost of wind-generated electricity is now
about half the cost of nuclear power if all expenses—from facilities'
construction and maintenance to demolition and disposal—are taken into
account.

Solar photovoltaic electricity and other types of renewable power, he
observes, typically need a substantial subsidy, such as a tax break,
to even come close to competing with power from fossil-fired and
nuclear plants.

What's more, Krause points out, unlike large, traditional generating
stations that can take years to construct, wind turbines can be
erected in 3 months—and they operate without spewing the greenhouse
gases that fuel global warming.

The most impressive aspect of wind power to Randall Swisher, executive
director of the American Wind Energy Association in Washington, D.C.,
is the magnitude of the supply. The U.S. wind-power potential, he
says, "is comparable to or larger than Saudi Arabia's energy
resources." In fact, Brown's research indicates that all current U.S.
electricity needs could be met from wind resources in just three
especially breezy states: North Dakota, Kansas, and Texas.

Embrace the wind

Even so, utilities have been slow to embrace the wind, and most
farmers remain unaware of the value of the breezes rushing over their
fields, notes Lisa Daniels. That's why she founded Windustry. The
6-year-old Minneapolis organization has provided state farmers and
rural landowners, including Native American communities, with a
nuts-and-bolts overview of wind's prospects and what it takes to
harness that potential.

 
Livestock can safely graze next to turbines. Cows even choose
frequently to rest against the turbines' support pillars.
Warren Gretz/NREL
Windustry and the American Corn Growers Association, based in
Washington, D.C., recently banded together to help landowners
nationwide find ways to overcome the obstacles to owning the
infrastructure to generate wind power.

Consider financing. From Juhl's experience, one of the biggest
obstacles to small-scale wind farming is a need to "educate bankers."
Unlike most other businesses, he says, wind systems "have a positive
cash flow right out of the box. Each year, they produce enough ‘crop'
to pay the debt, to pay expenses, and to put money in your pocket."
With no experience in such investments, the banks were dubious—and
reluctant to issue a loan.

Independent owners of renewable-energy systems, which include wind
farms, face yet another formidable challenge—negotiating with the
local utility to sell their product at a profitable rate. Most small
wind farmers lack the leverage and experience to cut good deals,
according to speakers at last month's American Wind Energy
Association's meeting in Washington, D.C.

Another disadvantage for wind farmers comes from regulatory hurdles.
Big central-station power plants typically need to clear these hurdles
just once to put 500 MW on line. In contrast, to get the same wattage
on line, small-scale wind generators may collectively go through these
transactions 200 or more times—and in as many regulatory
jurisdictions.

Getting the crop to market

Perhaps the biggest constraint to wind power's growth is getting the
crop to market. The greatest technological need for rural wind-power
development, Swisher argues, is not better turbines or electronics but
"transmission infrastructure." Overcoming this, he says, "is our
number one long-term priority."

 
The only land lost from crop production are plots on which turbines
sit and the roads for reaching each turbine for periodic servicing.
Warren Gretz/NREL
Linda Taylor, Minnesota's deputy commissioner of energy, agrees.
Moving electricity from rural turbines to energy-gobbling cities, she
says, "is the only real sticking point for massive wind development."

It's already constraining development of Buffalo Ridge in southwest
Minnesota, where winds blow steadily 320 days a year. Hundreds of
turbines there are slated to deliver 450 MW of wind by the end of next
year. However, Taylor told Science News, "we could easily get 3,000 or
4,000 MW of wind energy out of that area if we could get the
transmission problem resolved." That's enough energy to power some 1
million homes.

R. Nolan Clark, an agricultural engineer and director of the
Agriculture Department's Conservation and Production Research
Laboratory in Bushland, Texas, sees much the same problem in his part
of the country. Since most transmission lines outside of urban areas
were installed in the 15 years following World War II, they are, in
his words, "old and antiquated."

Sized to carry power needs of the 1950s, they're hard-pressed to
satisfy the far more electricity-hungry households throughout even
rural America today. As a result, many of these lines can't transmit
more power, he says. Indeed, Taylor observes that any additional power
fed into such lines in her state can and often does overload them.
"This shuts the whole system down," she says.

These limitations highlight a major disconnect between the way power
lines are configured and the new needs of small, distributed
generators. An analogy with blood circulation illustrates the problem.
Big trunk lines, like arteries, branch into successively smaller
lines, like capillaries, which feed local areas including individual
residences. Operators of distributed-power systems usually have access
only to the smaller lines, although their needs require a large
artery.

Upgrading rural lines would solve the problems, but at a cost of up to
$1 million per mile, Swisher notes. An alternative plan might use wind
to generate hydrogen on the farm, and off the grid, and then to pipe
hydrogen to cities for use in automotive fuel cells (see box, below).

Electricity for distribution

For now, however, most developers aim to use wind to generate
electricity for distribution and sale by commercial utilities.
Already, a few big projects are in the works.

A 300-MW wind farm is being constructed along the Oregon-Washington
border, where transmission lines can handle the load. This project
will become the world's largest wind-harvesting system.

But a Goliath 10 times that size, tentatively named the Rolling
Thunder project, is on the drawing board of Jim Dehlsen, founder of
the pioneering wind-turbine company Zond, which was bought out by
power giant Enron Corp. If built, this South Dakota network of
turbines would be "one of the largest energy projects of any kind in
the world," points out Brown of the Earth Policy Institute.

Windustry, however, is banking on small farm- and ranch-owned
operations becoming the backbone of U.S. wind-power development. To
foster that, Daniels says, her group is trying to see if next year's
federal Farm Bill can include incentives for the development of
farmer-generated commercial power. These might include guaranteeing
bank loans, easing access to transmission systems, and facilitating
development of wind-electric cooperatives. After all, Daniels argues,
"wind is the best new crop to come along in many years."

Moreover, she points out that small-scale wind farming keeps much of
its income in the local economy. That's good because wind resources
are often strong in areas with poor soils. In such areas, it doesn't
take a huge investment to make a big impact. A few Minnesota wind
farms "have basically resurrected several small towns," Taylor notes.

And that's just the beginning, Brown says. He anticipates that
people—call them wind prospectors—skilled at pinpointing the best
places for wind farms could soon assume a role "comparable to that of
the petroleum geologist in the old energy economy."

Will rural winds power urban cars?
"Hydrogen is the fuel of choice for the new, highly efficient fuel
cell engine that every major automaker is now working on," says Lester
Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute in Washington, D.C.
With Daimler Chrysler planning to roll out its first emissions-free,
fuel cell-powered cars in 2003, he says, "Ford, Toyota, and Honda will
probably not be far behind."

What if electricity from wind-powered turbines in North Dakota broke
down water into hydrogen, which could be piped 1,600 miles to Chicago
vehicles? Bill Leighty, director of the Leighty Foundation in Juneau,
Alaska, presented results from a new study that projected the
economics of this 2010 scenario.

Last month at the American Wind Energy Association's annual meeting in
Washington, D.C., he described a system in which operators in North
Dakota would use 4,500 MW of wind-derived electricity to power
off-the-shelf electrolyzers. The system would then pressurize the
hydrogen gas and feed it into 2-meter pipelines.

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