Wind could supply 35pc of US power by 2050: DOE

OREANDA-NEWS. Wind power could provide 35pc of US electricity and serve all 50 states by 2050, a Department of Energy (DOE) report says.

The US could greatly increase wind energy's share of electricity generation from about 4.5pc today if there are more cost reductions and technological advancements along with development of transmission infrastructure, according to the Wind Vision: A New Era for Wind Power in the US report released today. Policies such as the US Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Clean Power Plan and a stable federal production tax credit could spur lower costs and technological innovation, the report says.

The US ranks first globally in wind power generation with about 61GW of utility-scale wind farms spread across 39 states.

The US could add as much as 11GW/y of new wind capacity through 2050 to reach 400GW of installed capacity, including 86GW from offshore projects, according to the report.

The growth in wind generation could lead to 600,000 new wind industry jobs, \$280bn in consumer savings and about \$108bn in lower health care costs by 2050, the report says. The increased wind power use also could help avoid more than 12.3bn metric tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions cumulatively by 2050.

The report considered a "business as usual" scenario in which the federal production tax credit is not renewed and state renewable energy portfolio standards policies remain as they were on 1 January 2014. The EPA's proposed Clean Power Plan proposal was not taken into account, and other emissions regulations such as the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule for SO2 and NOx and the mercury air and toxics standard were captured "only implicitly," through announced coal plant retirements, the report says.

DOE also modeled scenarios of high and low economic growth; oil, gas and coal resource availability; and wind power costs. The aim of these analyses was to identify conditions under which ongoing wind deployment would be possible. Wind power could reach 35pc penetration by 2050 under the "business as usual" scenario and under a low-wind-cost scenario, the analysis says.

DOE produced the report in collaboration with more than 250 experts from the public and private sectors.