The costs of wind power are falling, not only for turbine cost and performance, but also for operating and maintaining onshore wind farms. In just the last four years, operation and maintenance costs have dropped 38 percent, according to the Bloomberg New Energy Finance Wind Operations and Maintenance Price Index.
The figures are based on average prices for full service operation and maintenance contracts in onshore wind farms between 2008 and 2012. For the report, which appeared in the first issue of the O&M Price Index, Bloomberg analysts examined confidential operation and maintenance contract data from 38 major wind power developers and service providers around the world.
The costs of wind power are falling, not only for turbine cost and performance, but also for operating and maintaining wind farms. Shown here, Siemens service engineers work in a wind turbine's gondola. (Source: Siemens)
Service providers consisted of turbine manufacturers, primarily in Europe and the Americas. The price data included 104 confidential and undisclosed contracts in more than 24 markets. Typical contracts considered in the report included replacement costs of major components -- for example, blades, gearboxes, and generators -- as well as scheduled and unscheduled maintenance work.
Compared to the costs of gas-fired and coal-fired generation, the capital costs of wind power have already become more competitive due to better turbine siting and wind farm management, as well as lower cost, more technically advanced turbines, said Michael Liebreich, chief executive of Bloomberg New Energy Finance, in a press release.
Wind project owners and investors are becoming increasingly interested in improving the performance and efficiency of wind assets, since better planning and more efficient management of spare parts can improve output and generators’ margins by cutting unplanned, unexpected downtime.
We've previously reported on remote-controlled climbing robots developed to make wind tower maintenance easier, cheaper, and safer by doing it remotely. Although these have not yet been deployed in anything resembling huge numbers, their use could also bring maintenance costs down even more in the future.
The best projections of the viability of intermittant renewables such as wind and solar are around 10-15% of the available power required. As others have said, it simply needs storage to get past that 15%. I love reneawables, but I acknowledge the problem.
I am glad to see that the price is dropping, but you did not say anything about storage. How can wind generation amount to more than a couple percent without some way to store the generated energy? When the wind stops, is it not true that the generator draws energy from the grid to keep it warm, to spin it up as the wind increases, control circuits, etc.? And with absolutely no energy storage there must be a coal /gas / ?? always running at 100% to pick up the complete load within a couple cycles of the wind dropping (or cloud crossing the sun).
Without storage solar and wind (even if the hardware were free) can never amount to more than 10% of energy needs. True, we could put up enough generators and solar panels to cover all demands... momentarily, but night comes when no panel works, and days come when even the Santa Ana winds don't blow.
I personally have no concerns about the appearance of modern windmills. I don't understand why anybody would find them aesthetically intrusive. I find their slow steady turns fascinating to watch!
Nadine, I like your point about visual appeal, or lack thereof. They are not fun to look at, although the ones in California I've seen tend to be located away from people.
You make a good point. The ROI increases as more users/buyers invest. I'm curious to know how the savings break down. Has the initial cost dropped significantly or just operating? Or, is long-term maintenance where the significant savings are?
Where the savings lie makes a difference for future investors.
And, on a separate note, better design would help lesson the NIMBY factor. Many communities still fight against wind farms as a visual blight.
Thanks, Rob, I agree about the good news. I find Jerry's input about what I expected, meaning, here's a technology that's not too expensive and it's been around a long time, but has not seen mass adoption. I think much of the reason has little to do with economics or technology, and more to do with psychology. It's the early adopters vs the mass market, as we've seen in many industries, most notably personal electronics. And not that many people live on farms or in the country anymore.
Nice article, Ann. That's quite impressive that wind is becoming competitive with gas and coal, especially with gas costs moving so low. This is very good news for alternative fuels.
Every time I drive through West Texas I wonder why we don't hear more about energy from wind farms - they are certainly out there and at least in Texas there are many more than a single turbine on the occasional farm...seems like these technologies have been around a long time (like solar) but are extremely slow moving. Some folks are fascinated by renewable energy and are determined to live "off the grid" but it just doesn't seem to be very popular in the mass market place...
That WT's in small sizes are not really cost effective is because of greed, bad busines model or something else as I can make them for well under $1k/kw vs the $4k/kw most units cost now.
Remember they perfected them in the 30's!!!! Many of them are still running like the Jacob's and others.
A 2k WT enough to run an eff home in an average wind site is more simple than a moped!! So why are they so expensive? I see a great market with large profits I'l be filling within a yr. I can get 200% profit and still beat the others by 50% and even beat the Chinese.
I did go into production of some in the late 70's but the market wasn't there but it is now for a quality unit.
Done right they need little maintaining other than a yrly check and new bearings every 3-5 yrs if designed and built right.
Thanks for your comment, Lou. Since most of the technical and manufacturing efforts for wind turbines right now appear to be aimed at making them in high volumes for wind farms, I'm not surprised that an individual agricultural farmer finds a single wind turbine impractical and payback is slow. It doesn't sound like the rental model is working very well for the individual farmer, but that model could, of course, be tweaked to make it more attractive and productive.
New versions of BASF's Ecovio line are both compostable and designed for either injection molding or thermoforming. These combinations are becoming more common for the single-use bioplastics used in food service and food packaging applications, but are still not widely available.
The 100-percent solar-powered Solar Impulse plane flies on a piloted, cross-country flight this summer over the US as a prelude to the longer, round-the-world flight by its successor aircraft planned for 2015.
GE Aviation expects to chop off about 25 percent of the total 3D printing time of metallic production components for its LEAP Turbofan engine, using in-process inspection. That's pretty amazing, considering how slow additive manufacturing (AM) build times usually are.
A $1,500, hand-operated, bench-model, plastic injection machine crowdsource-funded via Kickstarter can be used to mold small, quality, plastic parts inexpensively, on demand.
The federal government is launching competitions to kickstart three more manufacturing innovation institutes, including one focused on Lightweight and Modern Metals Manufacturing Innovation.
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