Wind power across rural and rust belt America powers big brands

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://www.renewableenergymagazine.com/wind/wind-power-across-rural-and-rust-belt-20161222

[font face=Serif][font size=5]Wind power across rural and rust belt America powers big brands[/font]

Thursday, 22 December 2016
Robin Whitlock

[font size=4]Fortune 500 companies are increasingly becoming major customers of American clean energy according to a new report from the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA).[/font]

[font size=3]Fortune 500 companies have awakened to the potential of purchasing low-cost, reliable renewable energy in the last four years. Recently, major corporate renewable energy announcements have flooded in: Google announced it will run entirely on renewable energy in 2017, and 95 percent of that will come from wind. General Motors will use wind to power a Texas factory that makes 1,200 SUVs a day like the Tahoe and Escalade. Eighty-three companies including GM, along with Amazon, Microsoft, Mars, and others have committed to go 100 percent renewable.

AWEA’s new report Evolution of the Corporate Wind PPA: Market Insights looks behind the recent headlines, revealing how America’s leading brands are powering their business with wind. The report features never before collected details on corporate power purchase agreements (PPAs), essentially long-term contracts to buy energy, and a tool that many companies use to buy renewable energy from a specific wind or solar project. AWEA researchers surveyed 23 companies who have signed PPAs to power their business.

“In recent years Fortune 500 companies have led an intense search for the best ways to buy more clean energy” said AWEA CEO Tom Kiernan. “And when big-named brands buy clean energy, they overwhelmingly choose wind because of our reliable, low cost. Survey after survey shows Americans want more wind, and we want them to know brands behind the well-known products they buy — Amazon, General Motors, Google, Walmart and many more — are already wind powered.”

Hannah Hunt, lead author of the report and Senior Analyst for AWEA, added that wind power is the energy source of choice among these companies by a factor of six to one. The reason for this is that wind power is available in large amounts, is inexpensive, and can be acquired through stable long-term contracts (PPAs). This means that wind offers a fantastic deal for businesses seeking to provide some of the least expensive electricity out there. Since there is no fuel cost, buyers know up front what price they will pay for wind energy 10 or 20 years down the line.

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[NNadir]

1. "Twenty years down the line" almost all of the wind turbines coming on line today will be landfill.

One only need analyze the data from the Danish fiasco, which is readily available on line, from the Danish Energy Agency, listing the lifetime of every operating and decommissioned wind turbine ever built in that offshore oil and gas drilling hellhole of a country:

Data on operating and decommisioned wind turbines (as at end of October 2016).

They've littered the land and seas with more than 9,000 turbines, and more than 3,000 of those built have been "decommissioned." All the wind turbines in Denmark can't produce as much energy as a single small nuclear plant.

The trillion dollar investment in wind farms in the last ten years has not even matched the growth in the use of dangerous natural gas, it hasn't produced even 1% of the 570 exajoules of energy now consumed each year by humanity and done nothing more than leave more of a mess for future generations to clean up.