The Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, released last week, requires the country to use a lot more renewable energy by the year 2030 — and a lot less coal. And right on time, two new reports published Monday by the Department of Energy find that one key renewable sector — wind — is booming, a development that can only help matters when it comes to reducing carbon emissions.
The reports being released — including the 2014 Wind Technologies Market Report, published by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory — suggest that wind is being installed at a rapid rate, that its costs are plummeting, that its technologies are advancing, and that it is creating a growing number of jobs to boot.
Wind energy in the U.S. is now at 66 gigawatts of installed capacity, according to the report — providing roughly 5 percent of total U.S. electricity demand. 66 gigawatts is enough electricity to power 17.5 million homes (a gigawatt is a billion watts). And, says Jose Zayas, who heads the wind and water power technologies office at the Energy Department’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, 13 more gigawatts are now “in the construction phase” and set to come online by 2016.
For reference, in 2012, the U.S. had 1063 gigawatts of total installed electricity capacity, according to the Energy Information Administration.
“It really dispels some of the past myths that you cannot have significant amounts of wind energy in the system — a variable source in the system — without really affecting the overall efficiency,” says Zayas.
In the meantime, wind now provides 73,000 jobs, the new report finds. And most striking, it found that the wholesale cost of wind energy — bought under a “power purchasing agreement,” or PPA, in which a utility or company buys power from a wind farm under a long term contract — is now just 2.35 cents per kilowatt hour. That’s the lowest it has ever been.
“At 2.35 cents per kilowatt hour, wind is cheaper than the average price of wholesale electricity in many parts of the country,” says Ryan Wiser of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a lead author of the new report.
Granted, it’s important to note that costs would not be so low without the wind production tax credit, or PTC, which covers wind projects that began by the close of 2014. Still, it’s impressive.
This may help explain why of late, companies ranging from Google to Yahoo to Microsoft have been entering into power purchase agreements with wind farms to help power their energy hungry data centers.
And even as costs decline, a key technology trend is helping further advance the sector. Simply put, wind turbines are getting taller, as well as bigger overall.
So-called “hub heights” — the level of the turbine’s central rotor hub above the ground — have increased to an average of 82.7 meters for new turbine installations, which is nearly 50 percent higher than in 1998-1999. Meanwhile, the diameter of wind rotors has increased dramatically too — newly installed turbines averaged a rotor diameter of 99.4 meters in 2014, an over 100 percent increase in size since 1998-1999.
Both of these trends increase the amount of electricity that can be generated from a given wind turbine, since there is more energy to be captured higher in the air (due to higher wind speeds), and since bigger rotors can also generate “more power at lower wind speeds,” as DOE explains.
“We want the largest rotor possible on the machine, and eventually, we want to go to higher elevation,” says the Energy Department’s Jose Zayas. Ultimately, wind turbines with hub heights as high as 140 meters could open up the possibility of wind energy in across the 50 United States, DOE has previously reported.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/08/10/the-boom-in-

Nigeria can one day achieve this

Did I just saw 66 Gigawatts? Blood of God!

Countries are making progress we are making promises.....i like d idea of change when it means more than just a party.........i could be wrong but i personally think making headlines means nothing without results.

Nigeria will get there soon

Hahaha! And Nigeria is where? Check the US Dept. Of Energy website and that of Nigeria and see the difference; they currently have researches on various energy means going on while ours is only promises.

The only issue I have with wind turbines is the problem of killing of birds. I'm surprised it's up to 66GW just from wind prolly thanks to the numerous wind farms. Should Nigeria incorporate this, I wonder if we can build offshore wind farms because if I'm not mistaken, wind is much offshore compared to onshore.