Experts say wind energy industry is growing
Lack of space, lack of usable water and lack of energy are the three major problems facing the world today, according to the chief information officer the world’s largest wind energy company.
“I think we easily can solve the two first ones,” Torben Bonde, CIO of Vestas Wind Systems, told students and faculty Friday. “There’s a lot of space. Just look out the window, there should be plenty of room for all of us. Water, there’s also a lot of water. We just have to find the technology to make sure we can use all the water around us in the best way. The real challenge is energy.”
According to figures from the American Wind Energy Association Website, the U.S. has the wind resource potential to generate more than 14.5 million gigawatts of energy each year. Though, currently it produces only 43,461 gigawatts.
Utilizing untapped wind resources could create a significant bump in global job growth, according to a statement posted on the Global Wind Energy Council website, which states that the wind energy industry employed more than 400,000 jobs worldwide in 2008, and by 2020 could employ more than 2.2 million workers.
Bonde said he also expects the industry to grow. By 2015, he said the Denmark-based company Vestas aims to increase its yearly revenue by more than 8 billion euros, to 15 billion euros. To meet this goal, he said, the company will seek help from students in a variety of disciplines.
“It’s a fast-moving industry, so as a graduate, a freshman, you have a possibility also to get on the fast track, cause there’s really some, some new things coming up here. You’re not going into something where there maybe already be a lot of people.”
There are different roles to be played in the industry, Bonde said. “When I look into my line of business — the IT area — (there are) the strategists, the people that are making the architecture, the people that are developing it and of course eventually the people that are going to run it.”
In terms of employees’ mindsets, Bonde said he’s looking for people who take responsibility and have the ability to create.
“It’s a world where the agenda changes because it is so young,” he said. “So when I’m talking to Danish students, also in the universities and so on, my advice for them is, maybe it’s not all this about having the technology at the best levels. That’s of course also important, but it’s the behavior — it’s the mindset. We can work on all the skills and the technology.”
Edwin Stafford, co-director of the Center for the Market Diffusion of Renewable Energy and Clean Technology, coordinated Bonde’s visit to USU. He said students with backgrounds in agriculture and engineering will also have opportunities related to the wind energy industry.
Agriculture and Wind Energy
Among those who stand to benefit most from growth in the renewable energy industry are people living in rural areas, Stafford said.
“What’s happening now, is that the agricultural industry faces interesting problems because of imports of food from other countries. Sometimes they’re cheaper than what we can grow right here in the states. Agriculture is always kind of subject to droughts, to storms that might destroy crops, etc. This is kind of a hazard for the industry just in general.”
“What’s nice about energy,” he said, “is that the agricultural industry itself can now diversify into energy on a number of fronts.”
Stafford said in Germany farmers are already gleaning the benefits of energy harvesting.
“There is a lot of farmland that farmers are using to kind of basically put up solar panels, and so that way these farmers in Germany are both growing pigs and, you know, generating electricity for utility,” he said.
Farmers and ranchers in the U.S. can follow the same model, he said.
“You can put wind turbines on farms,” he said. “You can continue to graze cattle under wind turbines. You can continue to grow corn and wheat and different types of crops under wind turbines. You can literally get energy income, and you can have income from your harvest of your crops.”
The Smart Grid
“The biggest challenge we have with wind industry is that most of the wind is in the Midwest. But the problem is most of our populated areas are on the East Coast,” Stafford said.
“The legacy of transmission that has been built is where all the nuclear power plants and the coal mines — the natural gas areas — are,” he said. “So, what we’ve done as a nation is we’ve developed this infrastructure that favors coal, natural gas and nuclear power. And now what we need to do is to kind of shift that infrastructure to where renewable energy resources are, and that’s where wind, solar, geothermal resources (are).”
A critical part of solving this problem, he said, is developing a utility grid that can store energy and transmit it more easily than the current grid.
During his presentation, Bonde said, “If Edison was alive today and went into one of the transmission functions, he would be able to work with it, because the last 100 years there hasn’t actually been that much of a development in electricity technology as such.”
Stafford said the current grid is about 60 years old, in terms of technology.
“It’s designed basically just to deliver power,” he said. “It’s not designed like the Internet, where you have communication going back and forth for efficiency.”
Bonde said there is a need to develop what’s called a “smart grid,” or a grid that can respon
d to fluctuations in energy input and intelligently determine output.
“In Germany, there is 35 gigawatts of energy being produced by private people,” he said. “Just imagine being a utility company when the sun is shining. Suddenly from one moment to another, you get a boost of energy to this grid, and this is a very fragile grid.”
Despite the sensitivity of the grid and the unpredictability of solar energy boosts, consumers still expect the lights to come on when someone hits the light switch, he said.
“This is also big business,” Bonde said. “In Germany, every kilowatt is traded nine times before it’s actually consumed. So there’s a huge marketplace that is trading energy back and forth, depending on what is the expected demand the coming 24 hours, the coming five days, the coming three months. So this is big business.”
“Even for people who don’t believe in lean energy, the nice thing is that it’s price-stable,” Stafford said. “Wind power will be the same price 20 years from now. We don’t know where biofuel prices will be in 20 years, but wind power prices are locked for 20 years.”
– robmjepson@gmail.com