In celebration of a reporter taking greater note of the project, I'll sum up some updates on wind power from the last month.
US Q1 wind power construction fell to a 5 year low compared to other first quarters. However full year construction is expected to reach 6.1k (down from over 9k last year). Several articles cite lack of transmission capacity, lack of financing due to the crisis, or long approval for new projects. To further explain, the stimulus funds that boosted 2009 production focused on both ready to go projects and new ones. New projects however take up to two years to go from proposal to wind generation for several bureaucratic reasons. You can read the Q1 report released
here.
Lake Erie and Ontario are part of as many as four new proposals for offshore (but freshwater) wind farms from the Great Lakes. One Lake Erie project proposes up to 1 GW of power which would be the largest wind farm in existence. However, by the time it is built several other wind farms would be larger.
Here is an article from NY.
Here is one about the 1 GW project.
A
new study revealed massive untapped wind and solar transmission potenial in the West to open up massive new areas for investment.
Several massive wind projects have been planned for the 2011 and 2012 time period with individual farms as large as 5 GW and states planning as much as 18 GW of new power pending completion of transmission line expansion. Total US power output is less than 500 GW with current wind power capacity at 35 GW.
Fiorenza said that wind power was insignificant as a percentage of our energy production. Here are the top three percentage wind states in 2009:
Iowa: 14.20%
Minnesota: 9.40%
North Dakota: 8.10%
Here are those same states in 2008:
Iowa: 7.10%
Minnesota: 7.48%
North Dakota: 4.68%
Now this is the total power produced over the course of the year delivered to customers even while construction was occurring. States like Texas already have 8.7% of their power capacity in wind for 2010 with more on the way. There is nothing insignificant about this.