Nov 2, 2011
Energy guru Daniel Yergin tells a nice story in his latest book about how a Danish farm equipment manufacturer, Vestas, took advantage of California subsidies in the late 1980s to initiate a world revolution in wind generation.
Today, however, the pioneering wind companies like Vestas are running into the same headwinds makers of photovoltaic panels have encountered--the prospect of declining European and North American subsidies, combined with growing competition from low-cost Chinese manufacturers. Wind is much closer than solar to being commercially competitive, and so the situation is not quite as dire. But wind also, by the same token, has achieved higher penetration, which means that the best on-land sites are getting exhausted even as the ability of grids to keep absorbing more intermittent energy is increasingly challenged.
On Monday this week, Vestas shares fell one fifth, after the company issued a third-quarter earnings warning. Share values already had declined 50 percent from this year's high, largely because of reported delays in turbine projects and a German turbine factory.
Smelling blood, critics of high subsidies for renewable energy are going after wind. On Oct. 11, the Manhattan Institute--a neoliberal think tank in (you guessed it) Manhattan--issued a short article highly critical of wind's costliness and alleged climate benefits.
Though the Manhattan Institute often produces well-researched and strongly conceived reports that interest even people of sharply different ideological persuasions, its report on "the high cost of wind energy as a carbon-dioxide reduction method" is not one of its better efforts.
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