WINDPOWER 2008 - OPENING NIGHT: LARGE

What is about to happen in the wind energy industry is astonishing but not unprecedented. Between 1920 and 1930, the U.S. auto industry became the most important industry in the country, taking a population of 120 million from 8 million cars to 23 million cars, despite the fade of the economy after 1929.

Making cars became the country’s economic driver, consuming 20% of U.S. steel, 75% of U.S. glass, 65% of U.S. leather and 80% of U.S. rubber. There were suddenly jobs to service, repair and fuel cars as well as jobs building roads and parking lots and making road signs and traffic lights. The gas station, motel and roadside restaurant were invented.

What the auto industry did for Detroit, the wind energy industry is going to do for the United States. Between 2005 and 2030, the wind industry is going to go from supplying 0.9% of U.S. power to supplying 20%.

See WIND: YOU AIN’T SEEN NOTHIN’ YET! for details on the wind industry’s newly announced goals and how the U.S. Department of Energy says it can and will happen.

The wind energy industry will buy the nation’s material production and use its services and eliminate greenhouse gases. It will provide jobs from big city machine shops to rural wind farms while dramatically mitigating global climate change. New businesses, from wind blade-transport to turbine tower-positioning cranes to electronic internet-connected force monitors to bolt torque measurers are already being born.

Sample: On the eve of the opening of WindPower 2008, the industry’s annual conclave being held this year in Houston, Texas, the excitement was palpable. The poster display, frequently a convention afterthought attracting only academics, was buzzing.

Posters ranged the gamut of topics from government policy to engineering breakthroughs and included wind’s potential to drive economic development in rural Alaska and the appeal of offshore turbines to Mid-Atlantic Coast beach-goers (they like them). There were presentations about acquisitions on Native American tribal lands and about winning approval for offshore installations in the Great Lakes (just over the horizon from Cleveland), on grid access and financing (a LOT about financing) and siting (a topic wind is doing everything possible to get right).

The posters offered a hint of the multivarious economic meaning to wind’s boom: Local manufacturing of things like adhesives, epoxies, gearboxes and drive trains, local implementation of safety programs in building and maintaining installations, local and regional internet-based monitoring of wind resources and turbine performance, internet network control of turbines during power surges and lightning strikes and protections from weather as diverse as hurricanes and icing.

Financial giant Ernst & Young is studying the wind industry to get the economic angle. Baker Botts (the law firm founded by Bush family intimate James Baker of Florida recount fame) wants its law business.

After the poster presentation and a reception on the huge and teeming exhibition floor, the conference kicked off with a high-spirited Lyle Lovett concert. Lovett was accompanied, as always, by his “Large Band.” Nothing could be more appropriate. The conference is not only wind’s largest ever, it’s getting larger as fast as the industry it represents. By the time they had issued statements announcing conference attendance would be 8,000, it had grown to 10,000; before they got that announcement printed, attendance had grown to 12,000.

There was a joke back in the 1950s about a guy who goes to Texas and sees a lot of impressive sights to which his hosts simply smile and say, “Everything’s big in Texas” until he finally takes a wrong turn on the way to the men’s room, falls into a swimming pool and starts screaming, “Don’t flush! Don’t flush!”

The wind energy industry is here in Texas to flush dependence on coal out of the world’s energy system. That’s big. And large.

click to enlarge

WindPower 2008 - Wind: Thriving At The Epicenter of Energy; Conference and Exhibition
June 1 – 4, 2008 (American Wind Energy Association)

WHO
- Lyle Lovett and His Large Band; the men and women of the wind energy industry

click to enlarge

WHAT
The annual convention of the wind energy industry got off to a large start, with a battery of noted speakers coming up, an exhibition floor teeming with innovation and accomplishment, and a message to deliver: Wind will be a driving force in economic rebound and the fight against global climate change.

WHEN
- June 1 thru 4, 2008
- Schedule-at-a-glance

WHERE
- Deep in the heart of Texas at the Geroge R. Brown Convention Center
1001 Avenida de las Americas
Houston, TX 77010
- Directions

click to enlarge

WHY
- WindPower is the most significant wind energy industry gathering of the year.
- This year’s event has scheduled 800+ exhibitors, up from 420 from the previous show.
- 12,000 are expected to attend.
- Wind energy capacity grew 27% in 2006 and 45% in 2007.
- Wind was second only to natural gas as a source of new electricity generation in the U.S. in 2007.
- New topics introduced in opening day seminars: Safety within the Wind Inudstry and Wind Energy Forecasting 101
- What AWEA is doing to make the event environmentally friendly

click to enlarge

QUOTES
- Andy Karsner, Assistant Secretary of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, DOE: "DOE's wind report is a thorough look at America's wind resource, its industrial capabilities, and future energy prices, and confirms the viability and commercial maturity of wind as a major contributor to America's energy needs, now and in the future…To dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions and enhance our energy security, clean power generation at the gigawatt-scale will be necessary, and will require us to take a comprehensive approach to scaling renewable wind power, streamlining siting and permitting processes, and expanding the domestic wind manufacturing base."
- Randall Swisher, Executive Director, American Wind Energy Association (AWEA): “The report shows that wind power can provide 20% of the nation’s electricity by 2030…[it] identifies the central constraints to achieving 20% - transmission, siting, manufacturing and technology - and demonstrates how each can be overcome. As an inexhaustible domestic resource, wind strengthens our energy security, improves the quality of the air we breathe, slows climate change, and revitalizes rural communities.”