Wind energy prices near all-time low

The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) has recently published its annual survey of the US wind power market covering the 2012 period. It finds that 13.1GW were connected to the grid which represented 43% of all newly installed power generating capacity in that year. In spite of its large scale, contract pricing for power from wind farms came close to all-time lows - averaging $40 per megawatt-hour (a tax credit helps to offset the capital cost of wind farms in the US).

According to LBNL, an offshoot of the US Department of Energy, the reason for the plunging price of wind power is a simultaneous 20-35% drop in wind turbine prices since 2008, coupled with improvements in turbines' ability to convert a given wind speed into electricity.

Wind power currently contributes more than 12% of total electricity generation in nine states (with three of these states above 20%), and provides more than 4% of total U.S. electricity supply.

The report also finds that the wind farms are increasingly constructed from equipment manufactured domestically. Seven of the ten wind turbine suppliers with the largest share of the U.S. market in 2012 had one or more operational manufacturing facility in the United States in 2012; in contrast, only eight years earlier, there was only one active utility-scale turbine manufacturer assembling turbines domestically. In part as a result, a growing percentage of the equipment used in wind projects has been sourced domestically. Focusing on selected trade categories, the percentage of wind turbine costs attributable to imported equipment declined from 75% in 2006-2007 to 28% in 2012.