Wind turbine state of the art

Germany is installing 6 Multibrid M5000 turbines offshore from French company Areva.

Each produces 5MW (about 5,000 homes).  Blade diameter is 120M.  Carbon fiber is used throughout to make them lighter and stronger.  They are mostly assembled onshore, so a lot easier to install.

Dirt cheap energy

A massive investment in solar and wind energy will reduce harmful emissions as well as our dependence in foreign oil.

More importantly however, it will usher in a new era of increasingly cheap energy, in two phases:

Stage One – First five years

Wind and light from the sun are free, therefore the raw materials for solar and wind energy have zero cost.  The only variable costs of these facilities are insurance, maintenance, minimal payroll and maybe land lease.

However the initial capital investment, and servicing the debt that goes with it, is higher than traditional plants.  So if the cost of a kw/h from wind or solar is higher than one from coal or gas it is due to the higher initial capital investment.

When the government spends 32 billion in solar/wind production and transmission infrastructure these capital costs will be nationalized as part of the stimulus package, and there will also be no direct interest expense to be paid by each project.  Perhaps the government will retain part of the profits, or have some other mechanism of recapturing some of the taxpayers’ investment.  But even so the wholesale price is likely to be much lower than coal’s.

Stage Two – Beyond 2014

The explosive investment in solar and wind technologies will radically increase their efficiencies.

Between 1980 and 2000 wind cost per kw fell from $2,600 to $790, mostly via increase in blade size and more efficient design.

Photovoltaic cell efficiency is still less than 20%.  They are also expensive due to their exotic materials and complex build processes.  This means there’s another 80% worth of energy to obtain from the same area via optimizations, as well as lower capital costs from streamlined construction.  In other words, there is a lot of room for improvement.

Thanks to a recent wave of venture capital investment, government programs, and academic interest, there are hundreds of new startups, labs and individuals doing promising research in this area where only a handful were just three years ago.  These actors will only speed up their research as the market for their products explodes overnight.  Each one is attacking the problem in a different way, and as is common with high-risk ventures, most will fail, some will succeed, and one will find a technology that is truly radical.

It is that one company that finds a new material or process which doubles the PV or turbine efficiency that will change the game entirely.  I have little doubt there will be one or two such disruptive players.

Let’s do the math: If we manage to increase efficiency of PV cells to 50%, and lower production costs to one third, that would reduce the cost of solar energy (non-subsidized) to one eighth what it is today!