Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The vast majority of Americans say they support the rapid introduction of renewable energy production. But when it comes to actually deploying it in one of the best places to do so, they don’t like it.
After commencing only in 2015, the Lake Turkana Wind Power Project (LTWP) in Kenya has rapidly become the largest such initiative in Africa, and Kenya’s single largest investment in the country’s history. It began generating electricity in 2018 and was fully inaugurated in 2019. For that reason, its lessons are being scrutinised for the technology’s wider regional potential.
For more than two thousand years, windmills were built from recyclable or reusable materials: wood, stone, brick, canvas, metal. When – electricity producing – wind turbines appeared in the 1880s, the materials didn’t change.It’s only since the arrival of plastic composite blades in the 1980s that wind power has become the source of a toxic waste product that ends up in landfills.
Small wooden wind turbines offer additional benefits that are inherent to all decentralised power sources. The fact that they’re paid for by the same people that enjoy their benefits, increases their public acceptance.
As the public learned of the recent opening of America’s first offshore wind power project, many wondered why it took so long? This week on Sea Change Radio, we talk with the executive editor of EcoRI News, Tim Faulkner, to discuss the opening of the Block Island Wind Farm off of Rhode Island.
The cost of wind power has been falling steadily again since the 2008 price spike, and newer projects have been coming in at 2 cents per kilowatt-hour, making them very competitive with natural gas fired power and ranking among the very lowest-cost ways to generate electricity. But can wind prices keep falling, or have they bottomed out?
Wind has overtaken nuclear as an electricity source in China. In 2012, wind farms generated 2 percent more electricity than nuclear power plants did, a gap that will likely widen dramatically over the next few years as wind surges ahead. Since 2007, nuclear power generation has risen by 10 percent annually, compared with wind’s explosive growth of 80 percent per year.
