Wind of Change: Enabling Power to the People

Most of us might imagine the creative frontier of  wind energy as a lab full of high-tech materials, computers and innovative research engineers. And we wouldn’t exactly be wrong.

 But Paul Gipe thinks the real frontier lies in pieces of 8 1/2″ x 11″ paper. Probably scattered on an office desk.

That’s because Gipe, a leading North American expert on wind and renewable energy,  sees legislation as the key to putting wind power and its benefits within reach of ordinary citizens.  

  Paul Gipe

“We have an unfortunate tendency to look for technological panaceas,” he said. “The cutting edge of  renewable energy is not the technology, but policy. It’s the policy revolution that is going to make renewable energy possible.”

Gipe, an American, has been in Ontario, Canada, for the last several months, working on getting the government there to adopt an advanced form of  the kind of policy he has in mind: feed-in tariffs. Over the phone from Canada this week, Gipe explained that such tariffs – which were first introduced about 20 years ago in California, but failed to catch on in the U.S. because of then-cheap oil and conservative presidential administrations – have since been put to effective use by Germany and other nations.

What the tariffs do, he said, is level the playing field for wind-energy producers of all sizes and situations by paying them at different rates, based on the availability of wind in the area of production. With feed-in tariffs in place, producers who put up turbines in very windy areas and stand to make a lot of money from the electricity produced are paid at a somewhat lower rate per kilowatt hour; those in less windy areas likely to produce less electricity are paid at a somewhat higher rate per kilowatt  hour.

This, Gipe said, makes it possible for home- or business-owners, neighborhoods, farmers, small towns and innumerable other types of individuals and groups to put up a turbine or two in less-than-prime locations and earn money from the electricity generated.  With tariffs, wind energy isn’t monopolized by utility companies – instead, it becomes an economic boon for all kinds of people and communities and a good reason to adopt a clean, renewable power source that reduces carbon emissions and dependence on fossil fuels.

“Everybody who does this has an incentive to make this work,” said Gipe. “For most Americans, this is a pretty novel idea.”

Some other countries have pushed tariffs the step farther that Gipe hopes Ontario will take, using  what’s called Advanced Renewable Tariffs (ARTs). These set up pay rates for solar as well as wind energy and adjust for project size and other variables.  

Technology will, of course, be a factor in how fast and how well people around the world make use of renewable energy sources. Gipe noted that in Cleveland, Ohio, where leaders have been exploring the feasibility of building an offshore wind farm in Lake Erie, the lack of a tariff policy is the main obstacle to a successful renewable-energy industry because only big companies can participate. But the Cleveland initiative is also complicated by the fact that Lake Erie is a body of fresh water in a cold climate - so far, Gipe said, turbine technology hasn’t found a way to cope with ice.  

In fact, wind-energy technology has actually stagnated a bit, said Richard Steubi, Fellow for Energy and Environmental Advancement at the Cleveland Foundation, which has led Northeast Ohio efforts to develop a wind-energy industry.  He thinks the wind-energy frontier lies offshore and would like the industry to scrap its expensive current practice of  converting land turbines for use in water and start fresh, designing turbines for ocean- and lake-based wind farms with the help of offshore industries already expert in marine technology.        

But Steubi also thinks that turbine manufacturers have gotten caught up in satisfying demand and turning out products – and the products keep increasing in size instead of effectiveness. Their hugeness makes them ever harder to move and set up safely on land and puts a strain on the gear boxes that run the blades.

“I think they’ll soon bump into logistical problems with that. The technology has been to make things bigger and thus more cost-effective” when what turbines need to be is cost-effective on a much smaller scale – small enough to put on top of a building, Steubi said by phone this week.

Roby Roberts doesn’t disagree, even though the Danish company he works for, Vestas, is the world’s top manufacturer of gigantic turbines of all kinds. Roberts, who is senior vice president/external affairs for Vestas America and based in Portland, Ore., said that, eventually, wind-generating of all sorts will be possible, on sites ranging from the largest open spaces to the most cramped urban settings. 

  Roby Roberts 

That’s just not what Vestas is focusing on right now. “We’re really looking at utility-scale projects,” Roberts said over his cell phone while walking to lunch Monday. “The challenge is getting scale to the point that it brings the prices down.”

In the last 25 years, according to the company website, Vestas has increased the capacity of its turbines a hundredfold. But if small-scale wind technology doesn’t interest Vestas at the moment, other advances do.  Roberts cites transmission upgrades including superconductivity; creating flexible power systems capable of making the most of intermittent wind; and high-tech digital “smart grids” that save energy by adjusting for fluctuating demand and power availability.

Research and development are important – and so is persuading people to switch to wind power. Wind makes up only 1-2 percent of energy generation worldwide, Roberts said, ”so we still have a way to go.”    

Gipe is counting on Ontario to spur that movement. What he calls “my vision, my dream” is for advanced feed-in tariffs to spark a revitalization of North America’s industrial midwest through wind power. If Ontario passes new tariffs, the province could become a model for other governments, giving them a new way to look at energy and policy. 

 ”This is ground zero,” Gipe said. “This is a fundamental change.”