WINDPOWER 2009 – A THIRD BIGGER IN AN OFF YEAR

McCormick Place in Chicago is humongous, bigger-seeming than any convention center NewEnergyNews has yet visited in pursuit of the lowdown on the New Energy world. Yet WindPower 2009, the wind industry’s annual conclave, fills it to the brim.

And the show has barely begun.

Latest numbers suggest almost 18,000 will participate here this year, up from last year’s 13,000 total. Not bad for an off year, a recession year. How big is this show gonna get when the economy comes back? They’ll have to hold it in the Grand Canyon.

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Grand is about the right word.

Governors from all over the Midwest (Culver – Iowa, Doyle – Wisconsin, Granholm –Michigan, Strickland – Ohio, Quinn -- Illinois) are flocking to make an appearance. It would be hard to gather up more Governors without giving away money.

Actually, in the Governors’ eyes, building wind is even better than giving them money. It’s giving them jobs and tax revenues and emissions-free energy to relieve them of the politically controversial questions of whether to permit new coal and nuclear plants. In other words, it’s like giving them votes.

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The Governors aren't the only big names scheduled. Ken Salazar, the U.S. Secretary of the Interior, will make an appearance. As will Jon Wellinghoff, the newly appointed Chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Not to mention former Democratic presidential candidate and Supreme Allied Commander of NATO General Wesley Clark, who now is a Director with Emergya Wind Technologies.

On the convention floor for the debut session Monday night, big and better was omnipresent. Turbine makers were hawking 2.5-megawatt and 3-megawatt turbines as if they were no more remarkable than the 1- and 1.5-megawatt machines they were selling like water in the desert just last year. (And 2 European manufacturers just last month signed deals for 6-megawatt machines.) NGK Insulators was selling a 1-megawatt battery. 1-megawatt! It requires 5 flatbed trucks for delivery. They were displaying a picture of a 34-megawatt array of 1-megawatt batteries they set up at a wind installation last year. (So don’t let anybody pass on that old canard about New Energy being problematically intermittent.)

There was a truck that was specially designed to carry the gigantic turbine blades now being built. It requires a steering system that helps the truck driver corner. At the Clipper WindPower booth, passersby were stopping to gawk at a gearbox the size of a single apartment in Manhattan that is part of Clipper’s 2.5-megawatt turbine. One engineer took a close look and walked away muttering, “That’s one big bad other trucker (or something like that)…” The most remarkable thing about the gearbox? It’s reknowned in the wind business for how small it is!

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But the biggest thing in the show is wind energy itself. It added another 8600 megawatts in the U.S. last year and had a big first quarter in 2009. Not bad for a recession.

Flying into Chicago, NewEnergyNews had that conversation again. The one where wind is mentioned and the other person says something like “Yes, but you never really see turbines so it can’t be a very big deal.”

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Wrong. It is a VERY BIG DEAL. It jumped from 1% of U.S. electricity to almost 2% in less than 2 years. It is as much as 7% of the electricity in some states and more than 3% in several states. Most importantly, it has been nearly half of all NEW electricity generation built in the U.S. for the last 2 years, second only to natural gas. (The turbines go unnoticed by the general populace because the wind industry has learned to be extremely smart about siting.)

The wind industry is more than a little like the oil industry was just before the the world shifted from the horse to the car. The wind developers are doing it a lot more responsibly than those old wildcatters did but, like the wildcatters, wind developers are building upward as fast as they can.

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A quarter of the way into this century, less than 2 decades from now, wind will be providing 20% of U.S. electricity. By the middle of the century, about the time today’s college students and Iraq/Afghanistan veterans start having their first grandkids, petroleum burning personal transportation vehicles will be as quaint as the buckboard and coal-burning power plants will seem like wood-burning stoves do now.

Wind energy is big and getting bigger and, for everybody who thinks about boosting U.S. jobs and keeping U.S. money and industry at home and worries about nuclear waste and, most of all, wants to get a handle on greenhouse gas emissions and stop the poles from melting, wind energy getting big is just grand.