Small Wind Is Powering Ahead

The 2009 tally pushed the total installed capacity of small wind turbines in the United States to 100.2 megawatts. (That’s only equivalent to one-fifth the output of an average coal-fired power plant in the United States. But more than half of that capacity came online in only the last three years, making small wind one of the fastest-growing renewable energy resources around.) This adoption is being driven by government incentives, improved zoning procedures, consumers’ growing affinity for residential clean energy, and emerging financing mechanisms. The 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act expanded available federal investment tax credits for small windmills to 30 percent of the total cost of a wind system, an enormous boost that puts small wind on equal footing with the fast-growing residential solar industry.

“You can add the federal credit on top of state level rebates that can be 20 percent to 25 percent and that pushes the effective price of installing a small residential wind system down to $15,000 on average,” says Ron Stimmel, the legislative affairs manager for AWEA. With such a system, he notes, consumers are effectively pre-paying their electricity bills for decades. According to Stimmel, most windmills have a lifespan of 20 to 30 years.

To date, most of the growth in small wind in the United States has come in rural and semi-rural areas. This has been due to the requirement for many types of small windmills to sit atop poles that rise at least 40 feet aboveterra firma. Rural areas have long been more permissive of these types of installations. Looser zoning codes in those areas have allowed farmers to put up windmills without having to go through permitting hoops — or angering neighbors who might have to look at the spinning systems. Even in these types of rural regions, however, penetration remains below 5 percent and room for growth is enormous.

Some rural states have embraced wind at a policy level. Vermont, for example, became the first state to implement a feed-in tariff (FIT) for small wind systems. This tariff guarantees that small wind farmers can resell excess power back to the big utilities at above market rates.

According to AWEA, roughly half of all small wind power additions in 2009 were in the U.S., and the country has more than three times as many small wind manufacturing companies as the next closest competitor, Japan. While the U.S. may lead in small wind innovation, the rest of the world is looking to catch up. Japan, Canada, the United Kingdom, China, Germany and Holland all have significant numbers of small wind technology companies.

At present, the United Kingdom and Canada have the most well-developed small wind markets outside of the United States. But 33 countries have put in place FITs for small wind power generated by homeowners and small busineses who wish to sell their power back into the grid. Such tariffs are designed to promote the installation of smaller scale renewable power projects. These countries include most of the developed world and emerging giants such as China and India, but also a number of developing economies including the Philippines and Kenya. International policy and finance bodies are pushing hard to bring small wind systems to isolated rural communities, particularly as a complement to solar installations. The World Bank has undertaken an aggressive program to push small wind to developing nations in South America, Asia and Africa as part of its Renewable Energy in the Rural Market initiative.

Yale e360