Concordiensis

Issue date: 3/4/10 Section: Sci/Tech

Media Credit: Wikimedia Foundation

If you live anywhere in the United States that has any sustained wind, you've probably seen firsthand the controversy that erupts when companies attempt to install wind turbines. You've heard the variety of arguments and counter-arguments for their use, and likely wondered if wind farms make sense.

That's exactly what senior Environmental Policy major Jeff Coombs is doing for his senior project. By comparing wind energy to conventional energy, his work aims to shed some light on the reasons alternative energy remains rare.

The core of Jeff's work is a model comparing a 500 megawatt wind farm to a 500 megawatt conventional thermal plant powered by natural gas. This model alone provides telling reasons for the slow growth of wind energy: it's not cheap to build wind farms.

The high startup cost is hard to repay by selling the electricity generated, so the construction of wind farms is usually planned around government subsidies and tax credits. The current plan, passed as part of the recovery act last year, provides for a 30% investment credit for alternative energy and 2 cents per kilowatt-hour generated. Although it sounds like a perfect plan, if your project isn't started and under construction before the deadline, you won't get the 30% credit.

It's not just startup cost that's a problem for wind energy, however. Jeff's model includes several hypothetical scenarios that would increase the supply of fossil fuels.

Any one of these scenarios coming true would make it even harder to make money through building wind turbines, since the only economic advantage of wind energy is that the "fuel" is essentially free. Without the relatively high cost of fuel, investors see no reason to risk their capital.

It doesn't help that wind turbines have stirred up a lot of "not-in-my-backyard" sentiment due to their size and noise. As Jeff puts it, "They're not on main street." Instead, turbines are in areas with wind, and those areas are often prized by property owners for their views.

Although all of these issues are significant hurdles to implementation, Jeff's research has lead him to concentrate on two main issues facing development of wind energy. First, government subsidies and tax credits haven't been stable. He notes that the amount of money invested in wind energy almost directly correlates to the availability of financial subsidy.

When subsidies and tax credits are available, development flourishes. Without them, the cost of development for wind energy is too high to be sustainable. In the last few decades, these subsidies have lapsed over a dozen times. Not surprisingly, large-scale development of wind energy remains marginal.

Second, the value system of the economy needs to be fundamentally changed - if the value of a energy system is dependent on the cost of development and operation, conventional thermal systems will almost always win out. If the value system is changed, like putting a value on CO2 emissions, then alternative energy can become profitable, and large developments in wind energywill likely follow.

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