Can Wind Power The World?

Rising Wind

Solar energy, especially photovoltaic, is a driving force for switching to renewable energy and may even become the dominant one in the future.

Still, solar energy has some serious limitations that make it work best when combined with other technologies. These can include batteries and long-distance connections in the power grid. Another option is to adopt other forms of green energy at the same time to provide a complement of production when solar power is less productive (cloudy, winter months) or not producing at all (night).

Far ahead of all others, wind (in yellow and orange below) is the leading green energy form accompanying solar, especially as hydropower (in light blue) is expected to stagnate in the upcoming years.

Source: EIA

In 2022, global wind power generation reached 2100 TWh (up 14%). And for reaching the targets of Net Zero Emissions by 2050 Scenario, a total of 7 400 TWh is expected in 2030.

To reach this target, the production growth will need to accelerate further to a 17% compounding rate. This translates into turning the current annual addition of wind power capacity of 75 GW per year to 350 GW per year in 2030.

Of these 75 GW, 37GW were added by China alone, or more than half of the world’s total.

So how can such an ambitious objective be achieved? It likely is only possible through a mix of technological improvement, massive investments, as well as tightly coordinated energy and industrial policies.

The Existing Wind Industry

Onshore Wind

So far, onshore wind installations have dominated the industry. They represent 93% of installed capacity, largely ahead of offshore wind turbine parks.

Source: EIA

One main reason has been purely technical. Onshore wind is simply easier to implement, with the projects supplied by roads, trucks, and local concrete plants.

This easy access also converts into easier maintenance, as technicians can be living nearby and access the site by car, and can be supplied with parts and consumables by the access roads often built at the time, than the wind turbines themselves.

Source: GEvernova

Altogether, easier building and easier maintenance lead to lower costs and higher profitability. Onshore wind turbines also do not have to contend with corrosion from salty water, compared to offshore wind, reducing maintenance costs further.

Another key advantage of onshore wind turbines, compared to solar farms, is that the site can mostly still be farmed or left natural. In comparison, dual use of the land for solar power and agriculture (so-called agrivoltaics) is still only an emerging field.

Offshore Wind

As explained, offshore wind is still a minority of wind power generation.

This is because having to be built at sea makes these projects naturally more capital-intensive. Distance from inhabited areas and saltwater corrosion also increase maintenance costs and can reduce the lifespan of the wind turbine and its components.

There are, however, quite a few advantages to offshore wind as well:

• More efficient production: offshore winds are more stable, more powerful, and more frequently blowing than on land.
  • This leads not only to more production but also a more predictable one, closer to baseload power production than the more intermittent onshore wind generation.
  • In many regions, offshore wind picks up in the afternoon and evening, when the demand is at a maximum.
  • With most of the global population living near the coastline, offshore sites are often quite close to the consumers.
  • A good wind site at sea can be a lot larger than onshore. This allows for more scale.
• Less environmental impact. By reducing land use, and not disturbing the local ecosystem with access roads and traffic in remote areas, offshore wind can be more environmentally friendly than onshore.
  • The restricted area of wind parks can even help marine ecosystems.
• Less opposition: the distance to the population centers, and from sight, limit greatly the opposition to wind projects when they are offshore. The NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) reactions are that much less impactful.

Depending on depth, different types of anchoring can be used for offshore wind turbines.

Source: DoE

Once completed, the Dogger Bank wind farm in the North Sea will be the world’s largest wind farm. It will have an installed capacity of 3.6 GW, able to power up to 6 million UK homes annually.

How to Improve Wind Turbines

Always Bigger & Taller

A durable tendency in the wind industry has been to build the wind turbine ever larger and more powerful. Overall, this trend is expected to continue.

Source: DoE

A key reason is due to fundamental physics and geometry. Doubling the length of the blades increases the total swept area by 4x.

As the swept area determines the amount of wind captured and the power production, doubling the turbine size quadruples production, and doubling it again increases production by 16x compared to the initial size.

Another physics-driven factor is that the stronger the wind, the more power is generated. This is not a direct conversion: if you double wind speed, you can generate 8x the power through the turbine.

So larger turbines AND stronger winds can produce 10x times or more the power of smaller models.

Taller towers will generally mean more stable and stronger wind, boosting electricity production further.

Today the most powerful wind turbine is an 18 MW prototype by Dongfang Electric, deployed in June 2024. It has an 853-foot (260-meter) rotor diameter. A single wind turbine will be able to produce the equivalent of the annual electricity consumption of 40,000 households.

Wind turbines are becoming so big that the only realistic way to carry their blade from factory to site is airlifting. For this reason, the company Raida is building the world’s largest plane, and others like Straightline Aviation are looking at the potential of airships/zeppelins to bring the wind turbine blade on site.

Source: Straightline Aviation

Lastly, another option is not to build a giant pillar for a giant turbine, but an even bigger “wall of turbines”. Some units are in development for 40MW models and could reach as much as 126 MW.

Such a system would be most fit for areas with very strong and almost constant winds, like the North Sea.

Source: Recharge News

More Durable & Recyclable Wind Turbines

No matter how well manufactured, wind turbines are damaged over time, as they are exposed to a lot of mechanical stress from the constant movement.

This has recently caused some issues in the industry, with notably Gamesa (Siemens) announcing to the market that some turbine engines would need to be replaced much sooner than expected, causing a mini-crash in wind power stocks.

While these issues are solvable by improving the durability of the turbines, another one concerns the turbines’ blades.

Until recently, the epoxy blades ended up in landfills, making it a not-so-green situation. Vestas Wind Systems has recently unveiled a new epoxy chemistry allowing for full recycling. This allows the wind industry to become a fully circular value chain.

Source: Vestas

We can expect the rest of the industry to follow suit and solve the problem of wasting material and filling landfills with blades that reached the end of their useful product life.

Bladeless Wind Power

Giant blades like a fan have been so far the favored method to harvest wind energy. But this is by far not the only option. Quite a few others have been proposed or are in development.

The first idea is vertical axis turbines. These turbines are often less noisy, smaller, and designed to catch winds that are less strong.

This makes them more suited for urban or suburban environments, as well as rooftop installations. Some examples are the Windspire turbines or the Eddy wind turbine.

Source: Inhabitat

Another idea is to forgo the pillar holding the turbines and build flying wind turbines instead. Which is to go look for the strongest wind where they are, up to 300-600m high. So why not tie the wind turbine to a floating helium-filled balloon, like the Altaeros model:

This has other advantages, like being able to move up and down to find the stronger wind, removing entirely the cost of concrete foundations, pillar, cranes, etc. The system can also be easily redeployed to new sites in mere hours or days.

Lastly, an even more radical idea is motionless wind harvesting. This can, for example, be achieved by moving “sticks” like from Vortex Bladeless or Windstalk, using electromagnetic induction to generate power. This means the system has no gearbox or needs oil, which gives it a greater lifespan.

Other motionless systems will use the difference in air pressure created by the wind to generate power, like the Aeromine rooftop system.

Source: Aeromine

Dual and Multipurpose Wind Turbines

Another way to make wind turbines better is to use them for both power generation and other functions at the same time.

For example, offshore wind turbines already have solid anchoring to the seafloor and are relatively far at sea.