The American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) reported that US wind power installations grew with 31% in 2011, compared to the previous year. A total of 3.4 GW of wind power capacity was installed in the last quarter of 2011, bringing 2011’s total to 6.81 GW. For this year, more than 8.3 GW of capacity is under construction across the United States.
Adding up the wind power capacity installed in 2011, total US wind power capacity now stands at 46.9 GW. The cumulative capacity increased with 17% from 2010.
According to Denise Bode, the AWEA’s CEO, traditional tax incentives are working. “This shows what wind power is capable of: building new projects, powering local economies and creating jobs”, Bode stated in a press release.
For this year, growth is expected to continue, though the expiration of the wind power Production Tax Credit (PTC) will slow the fast-growing industry a bit down. More than 100 wind projects in 31 states and Puerto Rico are under construction at present. New projects with a total capacity of nearly 3.5 GW broke ground in 4Q, bringing the annual total of projects under construction to 8.320 GW.
Via Clean Technica
While the wind, just like the sun, is a free resource, you can’t really measure how much you use or have. Instead, you have to measure the wind as it is being used. With the right information, you can tune the wind turbines to run more efficiently.
A study shows that 95% of all single-destination trips could be made by today’s electric vehicles. While Electric Vehicles only have a radius of 70 to 80 miles, only 1% of all single-destination trips in the U.S. were farther than 70 miles. This is according to two Columbia University students which analyzed data from a 2009 National Household Travel study. An overwhelming majority (95%) of these trips were under 30 miles in length, which means that you could do this trips easily with today’s EV’s.
We all know the downsides of nuclear power. While the nuclear waste you have as a left over product is really an issue, we also experienced the really bad things that could happen if something would go wrong in a Nuclear Power Plant.
Currently Electric Car Batteries are not helping the introduction of electric driving very well. The batteries are still very expensive and give the electric car a limited range of around 100 to 150 kilometres. This is usually the case for new technologies, which take time to fully develop and need an up-scaled production to be more competitive on pricing. So you could say that the battery price plus the performance of the battery is a bottleneck for the adoption of the Electric Car.
