Is wind our key to a net zero energy future? It may be shifting

This week a major US power corporation quietly divested all its unregulated renewable power assets – the sale will total 3,400 MW of utility scale wind and solar,?at a reported loss of $1.5B.??Following Q1’s reported results, the top three wind turbine manufacturers still remain largely unprofitable, and the long term impacts/survivability of the lauded offshore wind business remains questionable. ?While we see weekly announcements for new wind farms, the growing reports of marine environmental impacts, economic headwinds, and regulatory actions are throwing some shade on this renewable resource. ?Even the venerable environmental influencer, Greta Thunberg, is questioning their benefits having recently staged a protest for a planned Norwegian windfarm in reindeer country. ?What is amiss with wind?

Before 1860 – All the oil that we now know, and love was just a nuisance byproduct of Saltwater extractions and used by Native Americans for medicinal and tribal ritual purposes.?After Edwin Drake’s discovery and the first commercial oil well in Titusville, PA that all changed – and it transformed our world forever.

In a short number of years over a thousand oil wells sprung up across western PA, and the oil industry rapidly expanded.?By the 1890’s oil production reached its peak in Pennsylvania as new larger fields sprang up in Texas and California as the oil boom moved West,?funded by massive corporate and personal investments – check out Standard Oil for context.?

Part of the challenge in Pennsylvania and later in the West was how to move and store the product.?Many producers resorted to just letting the crude run into the nearby river, and fashioning earthen containment ponds to store it.?The local artisans could not make barrels fast enough to ship the oil, and no infrastructure was in place to effectively transport and process it.?Much of it was transported in horse drawn carts until rail lines were build out to the fields, and later steam ships could be repurposed to sail it to refining operations near commercial river ports in Pittsburgh.??When they tried piping it to better expedite logistics, the local teamsters, seeing the competition reining their livelihood, took to sabotaging the pipelines and burning down the supporting storage infrastructure.

Could this be the foreshadowing of the future wind energy market??If you look at historical photos of the early oil fields, and those of 21st century wind farms you’ll quickly see some stark similarities.?Spread over vast stretches of land and more recently, our ocean scapes, situated far away from the final point of use, with limited infrastructure to get it where it needs to be - similar impediments also exist.

The infrastructure for oil’s capture, processing and utilization has improved vastly over the past century and a half, but has the commonality of centralized production, processing, and shipment.?All strategically placed in major port areas with a massive pipeline systems or tanker fleets to get it where it needs to be. ??The same holds true for Natural gas.?Make no mistake, this is decidedly not an endorsement of fossil fuels.?The point is this infrastructure took well over a century to build out and costs many trillions of dollars to develop – that’s trillion with a “T”.

While free and to a large degree readily available, the best load factors we see with wind are in the high 30% range.?This simply means we need a way to store it or provide a back-up power source to replace it when it’s not available – and that’s about 2/3 of the time.?Then, there’s the issue of the footprint of wind farms.?Tens of thousands of acres are needed to support these farms, and they themselves are not without their problems.?Recent activist protests – by well known environmentalist are raising the specter that wind energy may not be as “environmentally benevolent” as we all hoped, when balanced against the ecosystems they need to be build upon and the natural resources needed to fabricate and maintain them.?(Steel and concrete are heavily carbon intensive to produce, refine, and ship)

Add to that, recently some of the largest US utilities are quietly unloading their wind assets given concerns of profitability, and the news that this past March – Rhode Island received just one competitive bid for an 884 MW offshore wind project, you can easily see that major stakeholders may be backing off this technology.?

Equally concerning remains the fact that the 3 largest wind turbine manufacturers have not turned a profit over the past 3 years.??This is what we have understood to be a rapidly expanding market which has for years been backed by a massive amount of tax subsidies (The Production Tax Credit).?If these global conglomerates cannot make a profit on wind turbines, (and two of the largest have recently taken the business decisions to sell off their entire wind businesses), what hope can we have that the technology will ever become viable in the long term.

New wind technologies are on the horizon - vertical turbines which are more efficient and much less costly to install and maintain, and solid-state battery technology may mitigate the storage issues.?But does building a better mouse trap solve some of the intrinsic problems with this form of renewable energy??Efficiently storing it, servicing well over 100,000 massive mechanical machines – with offshore farms anchored miles out to sea in harsh marine environments does bring up a number of viability concerns.?At best, today’s wind turbines have a life expectancy of 25 years, and the blades far less at perhaps 10-12 years before being replaced.?Service and upkeep of these units is taxing and expensive, with most on routine 6-12 months maintenance cycles.?Adding to the challenge, some of the largest units require well over 1000 tons of steel and concrete to erect and large amounts of lubricating oil and rare earth elements to run - the net environmental benefits of these units comes further into question.

We all want renewables to succeed, and wind energy does need to be one tactical component in our quest for a net zero sustainable future.?But this form of widely distributed generation from an intermittently available source will not answer the geometric growth requirements this planet has for energy.?Arguably, the Dutch realized this conundrum in the late 1800’s when their own windmills fell out of favor for other forms of power generation. ?The Economist reported in a November 2021 study, that to meet net zero projections, it would require 203,000 square miles of offshore farms.?This is a 70-fold increase from where we are today.?Their projection for covering all our current world energy needs is a staggering 2.7 million square miles of ocean area – roughly three times the size of the Mediterranean Sea.

For a time, we will see growth in this industry.?(The Global Wind Energy Council announced that wind energy reach the 1 Terawatt threshold for installed capacity in June).?It will peak, and then with the advent of more dependable and less costly carbon neutral generation it will likely fade as it did once before.?The recent upswing in smaller packaged nuclear generation units (200- 300 MW) presents one arguably disruptive technology that could easily replace thousands ?of wind turbines with a few dozen self-contained plants that can be sited on less than 12 acres.?Their ability to be placed almost anywhere, with power factors approaching 97% appears to make them one of the best currently available alternatives to fossil-based generation.?Further, the newer reactors have the ability to utilize recycled nuclear fuel, mitigating one of the major drawbacks that plagued this industry over the past 50 years - spend nuclear fuel management.

?And then there is the question of energy conservation. ?It seems this discussion has totally fallen out of the vernacular respective to our sustainable future.?The one true 100% carbon neutral solution would be to simply reduce our personal energy use, or at a minimum not increase it.? If we look at the historic drought situation in the Western US, this is exactly the strategy that has been taken - a prudent solution made all the better with reducing our utility bills. ?If we all changed the thermostats in our homes by just 1?F we would see an average 3% energy savings.? Employing programmable thermostats could yield three times that.

?As we move to a future targeting a carbon free economy, we must understand that wind energy can only play a measured role in its ultimate success.?And presently that is about 7% of world electricity production. ?With the worlds current electricity growth rates of 2.7%, there is no current path to net zero 2050 goals with renewables alone (wind and solar) - even with the most optimistic of forecasts.?Continued large scale investment (both commercial and governmental) heavily focused on wind could also undermine our future energy security. ?Further divestiture of renewable assets by large investor-owned utilities and municipalities would result in smaller, unregulated private investment entities? holding responsibility for maintaining these critical wind energy assets.

?Unraveling the worlds dependence on oil is providing valuable lessons on how we should approach our future energy matrix.? ?It may be time to reconsider leaning into the wind.