nd Energy Industry Aligns Forces for a Long Run
Wind energy is not only here to stay but appears to still be at the early stages of its growth cycle. 2009 was a record year for new installations again in the United States and worldwide. While 2010 almost certainly will be an adjustment year given the financing cycle of wind projects, it will likely be a blip on the screen when reviewing the wind industry's history decades from now. Wind now accounts for 1.8% of U.S. electricity (and represented 39% of all new electric capacity added in 2009), the state of Iowa got 14% of its electricity from wind in 2009 and wind energy employs 85,000 people in the U.S. and almost 500,000 worldwide.
Mainstream Has Ambitious Plans to Develop Wind Energy Across the U.S.
Former Airtiricity CEO Eddie O'Connor founded Mainstream Renewable Power in 2008 after selling Airtricity's U.S. assets and pipeline to E.On in 2007 and the rest of the company to Scottish & Southern Energy in 2008. Mainstream has since established offices in the UK, the Americas and South Africa, recruited an all-star wind team, raised $96 million in equity and signed large deals and joint ventures, including a contract with Siemens Project Ventures to develop 4 GW of offshore wind capacity northeast of England. According to Mainstream's North America CEO Adrian LaTrace, the firm's main focus in the United States is the Midwest and California. "We've acquired a pipeline of projects in Northern Illinois that establish our presence here, and we're going to continue to look for new opportunities in adjacent states in Midwest," said LaTrace. "We are also very interested in the West Coast market, specifically California, where we have begun exploring opportunities."
Wind Energy Supply Chain Creates Multiple Entries for Service Providers
From environmental consultants to wind resource specialists, from law firms and financial advisors to engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contractors, the North American wind power industry is heavily dependent on consulting firms and contractors. Because the U.S. wind power services industry has not been well characterized and quantified beyond annual reports by DOE's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, our research team developed an estimate of its size based on interviews, surveys, project data, company data and data compiled by Berkeley Lab. CCBJ estimates U.S. wind power services generated $5.3 billion in revenues in 2009, with $3.9 billion from construction, $520 million from consulting & engineering and $900 million from operation & maintenance. The three construction leaders Mortenson Construction, Blattner Energy and RES Americas build about half of U.S. wind farms and most of the O&M is done by the OEMs (Vestas reports 8% of their 2009 revenues of $8.3 billion was in services, principally O&M), but the C&E market is much more fragmented and specialized.
Clean Line Joins TransCanada and Transwest Express in Race to Build HVDC Lines
Clean Line Energy aspires to build long-haul high voltage direct current (HVDC) electrical transmission lines to move wind energy from the sparsely populated Western Great Plains (with thousands of square miles of land with average wind speeds of 9 meters per second and higher) to load centers with poor wind resources. What makes building long-haul HVDC lines such heavy lifting? Two key challenges: 1) working through the permitting and stakeholder processes of multiple states and local jursdictions and meeting the interconnection requirements of various regional grid operators, not to mention obtaining public utility commission approvals. And 2) before it can build an HVDC system, Clean Line must obtain commitments from wind energy developers to build wind farms on the resource end of the system and from load-serving entities on the receiving end to buy electrons. Clean Line has contracted with AWS Truepower, HDR, Sargent & Lundy, Tetra Tech and other firms for a variety of engineering, environmental and preliminary design work, and a great deal more work will be on tap if its projects move forward.
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