Steady wins the race. I remember a few years ago when pundits said:
"Wind power is barely 1% of US electricity, how can it make a
difference?" Well, since then, wind power has fallen in price -- since 2009, the price of wind turbines has fallen by about 1/3
-- and big investments have increased total wind power generation
almost five-fold! A few more doublings and we're talking a serious chunk
of the U.S. demand, which, when combined with solar power, which is also on a tear, really changes the energy game.
In
January 2014, wind power generated 4.8% of America’s electricity. This
breaks the previous January record which had been set in 2013, which in
turn had broken the 2012 record, and so on. If you compare any period to
the previous period in a seasonally adjusted way, because the wind
doesn't blow as much during the summer, you get one all-time-high after
the other, which is always a good sign.
The exciting thing is that
most of that growth happened when wind power was still more expensive
than coal and natural gas without subsidies, but we're reaching the
point where that's no longer the case. At around $84 per megawatt hour,
onshore wind power now costs the same as gas worldwide. Depending on how
windy an area is, it can be cheaper than coal and gas.
Here's
the sites of US onshore wind farms from 2012 (there are more since
then, but they tend to cluster in the same high-wind areas):
qaAnd
yet the U.S. is still not quite a leader in wind. This graph (though
from 2012, so things have changed a bit) shows how Denmark, Portugal and
Spain area leaders in wind power, at least as a percentage of their
electricity consumption:
Via Bloomberg
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