The Obama administration is holding fast to a George W. Bush-era scenario in which wind provides 20 percent of U.S. electricity by 2030 – doing it one better, actually, suggesting 35 percent wind by 2050 is viable – although it acknowledges that a wide range of challenges will have to be overcome to pull it off.

In releasing a refresh to its 2008 Wind Vision report, the administration on Thursday said the wind industry had demonstrated an ability to scale up and drive down costs, avoid causing grid disruptions, and not be too big of a pain in the neck to critters or communities – making 35 percent by 2050 “an ambitious but feasible deployment scenario.”

The administration resisted calling the “Study Scenario” a goal, but in outlining and quantifying a long roster of benefits that would accrue from boosting wind dramatically – the sector now provides about 4.5 percent of U.S. grid power – it certainly built a case for it.

The Department of Energy said the 2050 buildout it depicted would result in avoidance of 12.3 gigatonnes of greenhouse-gas emissions, yielding “a levelized global benefit from wind energy of 3.2 cents per kilowatt-hour” of wind produced. Health benefits would deliver another 0.9 cents per kWh in value.

The massive deployment of more than 300 gigawatts of new wind, with attendant transmission upgrades, would result in higher costs in the short and medium terms, the report admitted, but would pay off further out.

“On an annual basis … consumers of electricity incur an increase in costs of $2.3 billion (6¢ per kilowatt-hour [kWh]) in 2020 and $1.5 billion (3¢ per kWh) in 2030, but realize a savings of $14 billion (28¢/kWh) in 2050,” the report said.

 

Like all such reports, this one relies on plenty of assumptions within its sprawling 350 pages. They might best be summarized with this sentence from page 248:

“The Wind Vision Study Scenario projects that wind technology costs continue to decline, that demand for wind power grows to support the Study Scenario penetration levels, and that wind power plants and the transmission assets needed to support them are actually built.”

All of which means that encouraging policies will need to be enacted, as Big Wind admitted.

“This definitive report provides the wind industry with aggressive targets for the growth of wind energy in America, and we stand ready to meet them,” Tom Kiernan, CEO of the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA), said in a statement. “It starts with getting common-sense policies in place, so we can double U.S. wind energy in the next five years.”

In addition to the PTC, AWEA is looking to full implementation of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan to help drive growth by encouraging at least some states to adopt renewable portfolio standards or other policies that will boost wind development.

Interestingly, while the administration is making the case for 20 percent wind by 2030, green groups have noted that the Clean Power Plan, while offering states flexibility in pursuing emissions targets, envisions all nonhydro renewables providing only around 12 percent of U.S. electricity in 2030.