Friday, 12th March 2010.

9,922 MW of Wind Energy Capacity Additions in U.S. in 2009.

Written on Saturday, 30th January 2010 by Neeta

Net additions in Wind Power sector in the year which has just gone by, has registered 39% increase over the year 2008. The additions are indeed record breaking but a closer analysis of the state of wind power manufacturing sector out there reveals a different saga.

The top 5 U.S. states for wind power are:

Texas – 9,410 megawatts

Iowa – 3,670 megawatts

California – 2,794 megawatts

Washington – 1,980 megawatts

Minnesota – 1,809 megawatts

In addition to US, Denmark, Germany, Spain, China and India are some of there other nations who are doing a lot for development of wind power through wind turbines. The main issue with the wind energy is the design of turbines. There are many manufacturers who have been getting lots of orders but still wind energy constitutes only 1.5% of electricity produced throughout the world.

The AWEA warns that U.S. wind manufacturing is weakening and that the future is uncertain. The result was net job losses in the manufacturing sector, which were compounded by low orders and high inventory. Looking forward, the critical Recovery Act manufacturing incentives that were announced only at the start of this year will also need to be supplemented with the hard targets of a national Renewable Electricity Standard.

Today wind energy is pretty expensive when we compare it with energy from fossil fuels. But here we are not factoring in the costs associated with measures related to pollution mitigation. When we do so, we can safely say the difference between Wind Energy and Non- Renewable energy would not be quite high.

Handsome increase in capacity addition which US has achieved in Wind energy in 2009 over 2008 may not get repeated in 2010 but surely with right long term plans and incentives, there can be decent additions even in 2010.

Image courtesy Flickr.

Potential for 1.9 Million Renewable Energy Jobs Three universities of the USA have conducted studies related to...
Indian Power Sector update Nov 2009 India has so far achieved only 17000 MW of capacity...
Solar PV manufacturing in India and roadmap ahead India’s Solar PV mission is expected to take off in...
Wind turbine on your house top Probably this would count as one of the biggest breakthroughs...
Google push in renewable energy Google Inc is a search behemoth. We all know that....