Wind vs Gas in Texas
The conflict between proponents of wind energy and those who oppose it is heating up in Texas. The growth of wind power has attracted powerful critics: the owners of natural-gas power plants.
The gas and wind factions have been clashing over the state’s operating rules for the past several months. The gas people say the playing field is tilted in wind’s favor; wind accuses gas of trying to snuff out the nascent wind energy sector.
The success of wind power in Texas has come at the expense of natural gas. If the wind build-out continues, by 2013 the amount of gas consumed to make electricity could fall by 18.5%, as gas plants sit idle for longer, according to Tudor Pickering & Holt, a Houston-based energy investment bank.
At the heart of the battle is a fight over the vicissitudes of wind itself. The wind industry argues that since it can’t control when the wind blows, it shouldn’t be held to the same rules that require everyone else to make payments when they fail to deliver promised power. The natural-gas generators say everyone should operate under the same rules, and lament that wind’s success is merely coming at the expense of another relatively clean energy source.
Similar fights are shaping up elsewhere. In the Midwest and Wyoming, fossil-fuel companies are questioning whether wind is getting too many advantages from government.
The lure of harnessing the wind has attracted big players. Wind-farm developers include NextEra Resources, a division of FPL Group Inc., the giant Florida-based power company, and E.On AG, the huge German power company. General Electric Co. is a major manufacturer of 400-foot-tall wind turbines and United Technologies Corp. recently entered the field.
Via: WSJ
“We’ve scaled down the cost, the energy, and the equipment so that almost anybody can deploy it,” says Rajiv Mehrotra, VNL’s CEO. “It lends itself to many business models that can serve the bottom of the pyramid,” a reference to the roughly 1.5 billion rural people who do not have access to electricity grids around the world.
