Climatology Favors Wind Farms in Red States

An article in today's New York Times highlights how the five states that get the largest percentage of their power from wind are red states (Iowa, Kansas, South Dakota, Oklahoma, and North Dakota).

Source: New York Times

The reasons for this are multifaceted, but one that is not discussed explicitly in the article is climatology.

On a regional scale, the highest average annual wind speeds at 80 meters above ground (roughly turbine height) are found in the upper Great Plains.  This so-called "wind corridor" includes large portions of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Wyoming, Nebraska, Iowa, South Dakota, and North Dakota. All of these states were "red" in the last Presidential election.

Source: AWS Truepower/NREL

There are pockets of good wind power potential elsewhere, but if Arizona is the Saudi Arabia of solar, then the upper Great Plains are the Saudi Arabia of wind.  And, to no surprise, a great deal of wind power development and production can be found in those states.

Source: New York Times

In fact, the state with the largest installed wind power capacity, by a fairly wide margin is Texas.  

Source: By Aflafla1 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=56102702

Iowa also stands out and, according to the New York Times article, had the highest fraction of power generated by the wind of any state in 2016.  

And now you know why.  The answer my friend, is blowin' in the wind. 

Continued Success with Solar

A quick update today on our recent solar-panel installation, which we discussed a couple of weeks ago.

For our last billing month, we pretty much produced as much power as we consumed.  After credits for energy we pushed into the grid, we purchased only 4 kilowatt-hours of electricity from Rocky Mountain Power at a cost of $0.35.  Our $9.03 bill was comprised almost entirely of mandatory charges and taxes.

Production continues to increase with the sun angle.  Yesterday was clear and bright and it was our biggest day so far with 40.7 kilowatt-hours of production.  Huge.

The best thing about it is those panels are sitting on my roof, invisible from the street or yard, and require practically no maintenance.  Sweet!

Going Solar

Last July, we closed on a new home and moved to another location in the Avenues.  Our first order of business was to replace the roof, which was nearing end-of-life, and install solar.

We worked through the University of Utah's Community Solar program, which provides a discount on solar installations.  The install was done by Creative Energies, who did a great job.  Due to the popularity of the program, we had to wait a couple of months for install, which finally happened in early December.

Solar install in early December.

We are fortunate to have great exposure for solar, with a roof that faces south-southwest and has no major shadowing from local buildings or trees.  We lose just a little solar late in the day due to coniferous trees on the west side of the home, but the impact is small and the cooling we receive from those trees in the summer probably reduces our electrical usage more than what we would gain if we removed them.

There was some anxiety in terms of the grid-tie capabilities being connected by Rocky Mountain Power.  They take a few weeks to do this and we were hoping to be able to take the tax rebates during the 2016 tax year.  Incredibly, they connected the system on December 31st, just sneaking in under the wire.

Production in January and February was pretty limited due to snow cover, cloud cover, and low sun angle, but this month we've been killing it.  Our biggest production day was last Wednesday, when we reached a total production of 34.4 kilowatt hours.  Production totals every 15 minutes for that day show an optimal situation with no cloud cover.  We lose just a bit of production late in the day due to tree shading.

Of course, solar production is at the whims of the weather and a more typical day with occasional clouds yields a production curve with more gaps.

How large of a system to purchase was based on our desire to produced as much power as we use, but given that this is a new home for us, we had to do some guesswork.  We suspect that we are going to end up producing more power than we are consuming over the full year and that this gap will grow some as we perform upgrades to the home to reduce electrical consumption.   We figure when we buy an electric vehicle, we can put the surplus to good use.  We also have room on the roof for expansion of the solar array if we desire to do so in the future.