By Frank Andorka, Senior Correspondent
What Happened: GE unveiled its latest wind turbine, the Haliade-X. It will
- Stand 853-feet tall.
- Have blades the length of a football field.
- Will, if all goes according to plan, will produce 67 GWh annually (Vox calls that “whackadoodle.”)
SolarWakeup’s View: First off, let me say my first reaction to this story was, “Whoa – that is one enormous wind turbine.”
But then it got me to thinking: When a utility retires a fossil-fuel-fired plant, how much wind and solar will we need to replace all that generation? The answer is a ton.
When a plant is retired, it takes a lot of megawatts with it. If you multiply those megawatts by the capacity factor, the amount of electricity production that is actually disappearing is staggering – and it provides an enormous opportunity for solar and wind to take up that space.
Here’s the rub, however: The wind industry seems to have realized how much production it will have to make up, and they are engineering their new technology to account for it. From our vantage point, the solar industry lags a bit behind its renewable energy cousin. It’s time for us to get with the program.
Although it’s true energy storage is the hot new technology, with breakthroughs coming at an ever-quickening pace (see our article yesterday on DC-coupled battery storage), it’s important not to forget that flexibility still requires energy generation.
The bottom line is this: Whatever else we are focusing on in the industry, it’s time we did some long-term planning to account for the sheer volume of electricity production we’re going to need to make up – and get our technology ready to fill that need.
More
GE Renewable Energy Secured $10.4 Billion In Orders In 2017 (CleanTechnica)
E030: GE Invests In Renewable Energy To Grow Its Power Business With Daniel Hullah of GE Ventures