Last week, I posted analysis of data from the American Wind Energy Association’s 2009 annual report demonstrating a rapid expansion of the wind energy sector in the United States, with total installed capacity roughly doubling every two years.  I feel that this phenomenon deserves further examination in light of the considerable role that wind energy can and must play in future U.S. and worldwide energy markets and its place as one of the few renewable energy technologies that can be scaled up quickly and is cost-competitive and ready for prime time today.  So today, I will take a closer look at the growing importance of wind to regional markets in the U.S. in order to identify areas of both progress and potential improvement and expansion for wind energy.  In my next post, I will examine the exciting and rapidly changing field of offshore wind power development, which already plays an important role in the European market and promises to become an important area of expansion for the U.S. wind energy sector as well in the coming years.

With all the media attention focused on the Pickens Plan and the rapid scale-up of wind energy systems in Texas, it is unsurprising that most Americans strongly associate wind power with the state.  And while Texas has emerged as the leading U.S. state in aggregate wind capacity with nearly 10 gigawatts installed, several other states lead it in terms of the share of electricity generated through wind power.  Texas’ energy demand is so enormous that those ten gigawatts of capacity provide only 3.5% of the state’s electricity on average.  The champion, on the other hand, is humble Iowa, with 15% of its total electric demand in 2009 supplied by wind, and that number is all but certain to increase.  Five other states currently derive over 5% of their electricity from wind energy: Minnesota, Kansas, Colorado, North Dakota, and Oregon.  And the number one utility company in wind energy deployment does not even have a presence in Texas: Xcel Energy, which operates in the Upper Midwest and mountain states, purchased power from enough wind plants in 2009 to retain its position as the leading U.S. utility in wind for the third year running at around 11% of total electricity generated.

What energy source moves those amber waves?

So wind has been expanding exponentially, primarily in the Midwestern and Mountain states, and that is all fine and good, but what about the rest of the country?  Wind is important, but it’s not available everywhere, and it makes little sense, again, to talk about powering cities on the East Coast, where half the population of the country lives, by transmitting power generated by wind in Wyoming.  Offshore wind and other ocean-based power can certainly provide some of the answer in the long term.  But there is another base loading energy source that can be readily tapped east of the Mississippi yet to be discussed here in much detail, and that is of course: trees.  When left to its own devices, the entire eastern half of the United States reverts to forest, and for the past fifty years or so the woods have actually been growing considerably faster than we have been cutting them down, and the amount of forested area in the eastern U.S. has increased considerably during that time.  And if you look closely at the charts from the last couple of days, you will see that the use of biomass energy from this and other sources has been expanding as well, even if it has not gotten as much attention from either the public or the research offices of the U.S. Department of Energy as the recent surge in wind power.  But while wind presently accounts for 50% of non-hydro renewable power in the U.S., biomass is a close second place with 38%.  Expect it to keep growing as well.