This decade Australia’s wind farm industry expects to increase its employment almost 500% as the national renewable energy target, legislated last year, drives rapid development. Meanwhile Texan oilman and clean energy booster T. Boone Pickens has shelved his massive wind-power project – but he’s still buying 333 wind turbines – as he stepped up his push to increase the use of natural gas for transportation.

Energy Sector feels the wind in its sails

By Keith Orchison in The Australian (16/17 January 2010):

This decade Australia’s wind farm industry expects to increase its employment almost 500 percent as the national renewable energy target, legislated last year, drives rapid development.

The escalation of wind power is one of three “waves of change” in electricity supply predicted by the Australian Energy Market Operator as it seeks to model national high voltage transmission needs.

According to AEMO, the renewable target will drive a 450 percent increase in wind power while the gas generators simultaneously will be entering a golden period that will last longer. The target scheme runs out of puff in 2020 – it has a cap of 45,000 gigawatt hours a year – but gas-fuelled combined cycle plants will become the preferred technology for meeting Australian power demand over the next two decades.  Combined cycle gas turbine baseload generation is predicted to increase nearly ten-fold over two decades.

The AEMO model suggests that it will be around 2024 before the third technology wave makes its mark with large-scale geothermal development and carbon capture and sequestration processes enabling the coal generators to arrest their decline in Australian power supply.

Meanwhile the ball is with the wind developers. Miles George, managing director of Infigen Energy, builders of the first large-scale wind farm in New South Wales, recently told a Senate committee that he expects 800 MW of wind power to be established each year of this decade.

George, whose Capital wind farm near Bungendore is contracted to sell its output to Sydney Water for the desalination plant due to be commissioned this summer, says a “reasonable target” long term for the wind sector would be to meet 15 to 20 percent of national electricity demand.

Meanwhile, the Rudd Government’s RET should drive the wind sector’s employment from 1,600 people today to 7,600 by the end of the decade, according to Clean Energy Council estimates. Overall, the council predicts that the renewable energy industry will increase its employment in Australia from 10,370 people today to more than 24,000 in 2020 on the back of climate change policies.

The CEC says that support for desalination projects – by putting zero-emission power in to the eastern seaboard grid to offset use of fossil fuels – will be an important early factor for the wind industry. Apart from the 141 MW committed by Infigen to support Sydney Water, AGL is developing 524 MW of wind farms at Oaklands Hill and Hallett between now and 2012 for the South Australian water scheme.

Australia now has 49 wind farms carrying 962 turbines with a capacity of 1,668 MW. The CEC says that there are 6,000 MW of wind energy projects proposed across Australia.

The Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics sees an even more optimistic outlook for wind energy. In its latest review of electricity generation, ABARE records 10,672 MW of wind farms undergoing feasibility studies in addition to 734 MW of developments being built.

ABARE has 71 wind farms in its “less advanced projects” category.  Fourteen are proposed for New South Wales, including the giant Silverton project near Broken Hill with a planned capacity of 1,000 MW, and 30 for Victoria. A further 17 are proposed for SA.

Infigen’s George foresees a technology change further boosting Australia’s wind rush. He told the Senate committee on fuel and energy that a typical wind farm turbine today has a capacity of two megawatts and, while 3 MW units are already being brought in to operation, there are 6MW prototypes being tested.  This will enable another substantial decrease in wind power costs.

Keith Orchison, director of consultancy Coolibah Pty Ltd  –  www.coolibahconsulting.com.au - and editor of Powering Australia yearbook, was chief executive of two national energy associations from 1980 to 2003. He was made a Member of the Order of Australia for services to the energy industry in 2004. His POWERLINE blog is on www.businessspectator.com.au

By Keith Johnson in the Wall Street Journal (14 January 2010):

T. Boone Pickens, the oilman and clean-energy booster, shelved his massive wind-power project in Texas even as he stepped up his push to increase the use of natural gas for transportation.

Cheap natural gas, the lack of electricity-transmission lines and the lingering credit crunch have combined to take the shine off large-scale renewable-energy projects, and those factors led Mr. Pickens to halve his $2 billion wind-turbine order with General Electric Co., said a spokesman for Mr. Pickens’s Mesa Power LP.

Mr. Pickens in May 2008 announced plans for the biggest wind farm in the U.S., by amount of installed megawatts, to be located in the Texas panhandle. But Tuesday he said he would cut his order with GE to 333 turbines from 667 machines and use them for wind farms in Canada and Minnesota.

That means the Pampa Wind Farm slated for north Texas—and postponed last summer until at least 2013—won’t happen under current conditions.

“It’s off the table,” Mr. Pickens said Wednesday in a conference call. If Texas makes more investments in transmission lines to carry power from the remote wind farm to towns and cities, he said, “we’ll be back.”

A GE spokesman said the two parties mutually renegotiated the terms of the 2008 deal.

Natural-gas prices have fallen sharply since the summer of 2008, when Mr. Pickens announced the big wind farm and the “Pickens Plan,” which calls for using natural gas to power big rigs, buses and other large vehicles to lessen U.S. dependence on foreign oil.

Cheaper natural gas hurts wind farms, because cheaper gas makes gas-fired power plants a more attractive option for electricity generation. “You can’t finance wind farms very well when natural gas is under $6″ per million British thermal units, Mr. Pickens said. Natural-gas futures settled at $5.733 Wednesday afternoon on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

The effects of the credit crunch and the economic slowdown also slowed growth in the wider U.S. wind-power industry in 2009, after a record year for wind-power installations in 2008.

But less expensive natural gas, due to a boom in U.S. production over the last two years, has given new impetus to Mr. Pickens’s transport plans. Mr. Pickens announced Wednesday a new national television ad calling on America to “wake up” to the cost of importing oil. He also called on Congress to pass pending legislation that would offer new incentives for greater use of natural gas in the heavy-duty transport fleet.

Source: www.online.wsj.com