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The small wind turbine industry has been somewhat overlooked as President-elect Trump focuses his attention on preventing gigantic wind turbines from populating the shores of the US. That’s no surprise. After all, small turbines are, well, small, whereas the President-elect has already expressed his determination to strike big targets on the scale of Canada, Greenland, and Panama. Still, small wind turbine stakeholders may want to pay attention. After all, they could be next.
A Mighty Wind From A Small Wind Turbine
Despite their pint-sized size, small wind turbines could account for a significant amount of US clean energy production. “Small wind electric systems can make a significant contribution to our nation’s energy needs,” the National Renewable Energy Laboratory observes.
The “small” category typically refers to wind turbines of 20-100 kilowatts in capacity. “Turbines used in residential applications can range in size from 400 watts to 100 kW (100 kW for very large loads), depending on the amount of electricity you want to generate,” NREL elaborates.
“Although wind turbines large enough to provide a significant portion of the electricity needed by the average U.S. home generally require one acre of property or more, approximately 21 million U.S. homes are built on one-acre and larger sites, and 24% of the U.S. population lives in rural areas,” they add.
The small wind field is also a significant factor in the emerging distributed wind market. A distributed wind project is one that generates electricity for hyper-local needs on site, or one that contributes to a local distribution grid. Turbines of any size can be used in a distributed wind project, but they typically involve turbines in the small and medium size categories.
In 2022, the Energy Department estimated that distributed wind projects could provide for about half of US electricity demand.
Small Wind Turbines For The Community Wind Movement
The US Department of Energy has also been making the case for local communities to fund their own small wind turbine projects. Similar to the community solar trend, community-owned wind turbines provide local ratepayers with the benefits of rate stability along with some extras.
“A majority of community wind projects are located in rural areas where water conservation is a serious concern,” the US Department of Energy points out. “Wind energy requires minimal amounts of water, whereas thermal generators are among the largest consumers of water in the United States.”
“By diversifying the local energy supply, communities can help manage the water supply risks on a local level,” they emphasize.
The Energy Department notes that small projects tend to gain community support, avoiding the delays that can beset a major project. “The variety of different applications for which community wind projects can be used may also be a factor in garnering support for the project from local residents,” they add.
The Low Cost Small Wind Turbine Of The 21st Century Is Coming
There being no such thing as a free lunch, the small wind turbine market of the 20th century was characterized as a sort of free-for-all, lacking uniform efficiency standards and other consumer safeguards. The technology was just beginning to take shape and small turbines were relatively expensive and inefficient.
More recently, the small wind turbine industry has come into the turbine standardization fold (along with an the even smaller category of micro wind turbines), costs have dropped, and efficiency has improved, setting the stage for mass adoption.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at the Massachusetts startup Pecos Wind Power, which won an Energy Department award of $200,000 last summer to help bring its PW85 85-kilowatt small wind turbine to market. The award was part of a $3.2 million funding pot shared by 12 US small and medium wind turbine stakeholders, with a focus on accelerating distributed wind uptake in rural and agricultural markets.
The 2024 award follows a previous award in 2021, in which the Energy Department noted that the PW85 features cost-cutting elements that maximize efficiency in low wind speeds. The low-speed angle is important because it will enable the small wind turbine market to expand into the Southeast and other areas where wind speeds are less than optimal. Competition from the solar industry, in particular, is one of the factors spurring investment in new low-speed wind turbines.
“The PW85 wind turbine includes an industry-leading rotor diameter (30 meters) and full- span variable pitch blades to target a levelized cost of energy (LCOE) of $0.103/kilowatt-hour in low annual wind speeds (6 meters per second),” the Energy Department explained, with LCOE being a standard method for comparing the cost of different types of energy generation.
“This is 55% lower than the average small wind turbine project installed in 2018,” they added, noting that the agency’s overall goal is to “spur the development of increasingly lower-cost, high-capacity-factor distributed wind turbines” across the US wind industry.
Next Steps For The US Small Wind Turbine Industry
If a 55% cut in costs seems rather ambitious, it is. However, the Energy Department points out that utility-scale wind stakeholders somehow managed to achieve a cut in LCOE of up to 70% in a ten-year span. Pecos is deploying similar design elements, with a focus on increasing the size of the rotor-swept area.
The Energy Department highlights the new turbine’s “bigger-is-better philosophy for economies of scale,” working with a wing tip height below the Federal Aviation Administration requirement of 200 feet. The blades measure 53 feet, which is pretty long for a small wind turbine but short enough to keep a li on trucking costs.
Pecos deploys off-the-shelf components to reduce costs as well. Another area of cost-cutting involves turbine installation. The PW85 requires no crane, and Pecos has developed a prefabricated foundation aimed at reducing the installation timeline down to one week, as compared to conventional turbine installations that can take about six weeks.
Earlier this week, the leading nonprofit cleantech angel investing community E8 Angels announced that Pecos is one of three renewable energy startups to win funding under its Decarbon8-US impact fund for 2024. “E8 & Decarbon8-US receive support from climate leaders, including the University of Washington’s Clean Energy Institute, Washington State University, K&L Gates, CleanTech Alliance, JP Morgan Chase, Microsoft, and the Stolte Family Foundation,” E8 notes.
The whole US wind industry has the jitters over the prospects for President-elect Trump to throw a monkey wrench into the works, but if any part of the industry does continue to grow intact, the case for the small wind turbine industry seems to be a good one, given its focus on agricultural and rural markets. Everyone knows that the President-elect is a friend to the farmer, right? Just look at what he did for farmers during his first term in office…on second thought, don’t.
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Photo (cropped): The US small wind turbine industry is finally on track to hit mainstream agricultural and rural markets, after years of playing second fiddle to gigantic, utility-scale turbines (courtesy of NREL via Pecos Wind Power).
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