Will Wind Power Be Rendered Obsolete

An objection to the proposed 25 year power purchase agreement with Bluewater Wind is that advances in technology could make the offshore wind farm obsolete, and leave Delmarva Power and its customers stuck with an expensive long term contract.

Advances in energy technology are not analogous to those in information processing. Intel, which designs and makes computer chips, describes how its founder Gordon Moore's famous dictum has been proven right over more that four decades:

In 1965, his prediction, popularly known as Moore's Law, states that the number of transistors on a chip will double about every two years. And Intel has kept that pace for nearly 40 years. So if information technology can increase at such a remarkable pace over such a long period of time, why can't electricity generation do the same?

Information processing has progressed at such a remarkable pace because its physical limits have not yet been reached, and probably won't until we reach the quantum level. But the physical limits of energy generation are much more constrained.

Any student of the basic laws of thermodynamics will tell you that energy is not created, but transformed from one form to another. A perfect (and unattainable) machine would have a coefficient of performance (ratio of energy conversion) of one. A machine with a coefficient greater than one would be the proverbial perpetual motion machine.

The most efficient wind turbine has a coefficient of between 0.4 and 0.5 at its optimum wind speed. The theoretical maximum of a turbine's efficiency is 0.59 according to a principle known as Betz' law.

Because there's no room for exponential growth in turbine efficiency, only incremental improvement, we cannot expect a miracle breakthrough to render Bluewater Wind's turbines obsolete.

"Update:" I'll be discussing the latest on wind power in Delaware this evening with Allan Loudell on WDEL, which is found at 1150 on your AM dial.

Reference: bioenergysystems.blogspot.com