November 4, 2009
INTRO: This is the 3rd and final day of The American Wind Energy Association meeting in Detroit. Governor Granholm came there yesterday to promote Michigan as a place to manufacture windmill parts. Reporter Chris McCarus spoke with another advocate who says windpower saves money.
Most of Michigan’s oil and gas and all of its coal comes from outside the state. That’s $26 billion dollars a year that Michiganders lose. Larry Flowers came from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado.
“You guys don’t have a coal resource indigenous to Michigan. You don’t have a gas resource indigenous to Michigan. So all of that money goes out of state. So it just makes sense to capture the resource you have which is wind.”
Recent Michigan law forces utility companies to get 10% of their power from solar, wind or biomass by the year 2015. Most other states who’ve also passed renewable energy portfolio standards, made1 them higher.
Why doesn’t anyone develop water turbines that could be placed in fast moving bodies of water like the St Clair River or Detroit River where you never have to worry about the sun going behind the clouds or the wind not blowing? Constant motion 24/7.
Chris
we appreciate the Michigannow.org web site!
This is the kind of “creativity for good” that we need.
Continued success on all fronts,
Rich VV
What’s the matter with Sun? The sun is an everyday occurrence. Solar cells definitely work in cloudy weather.
Even in the great lakes, the wind doesn’t blow much of the time. I have had a 43′ sailboat with a 55 foot mast looking for wind for over 30 years. I think I’ll cut the mast off and just use the engine. Last summer on a 3 week cruise into northern Lake Michigan, we never saw a wave over 6 inches and never raised the sails. This has happened many times.
I can make silicon solar panels for less than 70¢/watt. The wind turbines cost way more than that and the wind doesn’t blow consistently. Recently, Michigan awarded $15MM to 4 companies making ‘advanced composite wind turbine blades’ and awarded $0.5Mm to a solar company installing panels (not making them). My company (been in Michigan 40 years http://www.shelbygemfactory ) applied for $3.9MM but was turned down. It would have employed over 200 people in Western Michigan to start and many more in the future.
I now have a company buying a building in San Diego for $18.1MM (210,000 ft2) and they want me to put in a factory making over 100MW/year of Silicon Solar panels. Michigan’s loss is California’s gain. I will be moving my entire manufacturing facility to California. Maybe when Michigan gets it’s head out of it’s rectum, thinks will improve.