Vertical axis wind turbines (VAWTs) appear to be making a comeback after a few dormant decades, but it’s unclear how much legs the somewhat maligned technology will have in the market.  VAWTs are most commonly known in the United States from their days during the 1970s to the early 1990s in California, when Sandia National Laboratories and several private companies worked together to design and deploy a number of 500 kW-600 kW utility-scale VAWTs in California.  The units worked fairly well, even if not as well as expected, for a number of years.  But they ultimately ran into mechanical problems that stifled their commercial viability.  By that time, interest had largely shifted to today’s more common three-bladed horizontal axis wind turbine (HAWT) designs, and the industry has never looked back.

VAWTs do potentially offer advantages over HAWTs, including producing power with less wind so they can be located closer together and closer to the ground for easier maintenance and installation.  There are at least 28 active VAWT manufacturers in the world today, primarily producing less than 10 kW units intended for use in urban and building-integrated settings.  Yet, many companies in this sector, such as Helix Windpower and Windspire, have faced significant financial challenges.  Small wind turbines in general have faced increased scrutiny, as there are many cases of both VAWTs and HAWTs not performing as advertised in the urban environment.  The establishment of the Small Wind Certification Council has been a major step forward for a small wind industry that is looking to regain credibility.  Still, only five small wind turbines are currently certified by the council – all HAWTs.

These challenges did not, however, prevent the largest building-integrated VAWT installation in the United States from coming online in June 2012.  It uses 18 4.5 kW Venger Wind V2 turbines on the roof of the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation.  The V2 wind turbines are 18.5 feet tall and are designed to start producing electricity at winds of 8.9 mph, well below Oklahoma City’s annual wind speed average, according to Venger Wind.

Packing Them In

Making inroads in the utility-scale market is a challenging task for VAWTs, given the formidable competition from incumbent manufacturers that have a long history of commercial viability and strong technical performance.  There is strong, though relatively limited, potential in the medium wind turbine market segment (100 kW-900 kW range) related to rural areas, islands, community wind, schools, and other distributed wind applications.  No known commercially available VAWT product currently exists in that power range – Italy’s Ropatec offers the largest known VAWT unit at 20 kW.  But a number of universities and companies are taking a closer look at VAWT technology and applications and are seeking to learn from others’ successes and failures.

A Caltech study that analyzed the performance of six VAWTs more tightly packed together found that they produced 21 to 47 watts of power per square meter of land area, compared to just 2 to 3 watts per square meter from a similarly sized HAWT farm.  Shanghai Aeolus Windpower Technology (SAWT) currently offers less than 10 kW VAWTs, but has stated plans to develop 50 kW and 1 MW units.  Sandia National Labs received a $4.1 million grant in June 2012 to reevaluate VAWTs, including their potential for offshore applications – an opportunity that Japanese, Korean, and Chinese researchers and companies are also examining.

Finally, high-profile projects at Adobe and the Lincoln Financial Field (home of the NFL’s Philadelphia Eagles) continue to drive interest in VAWTs.  But only actual performance details over time will determine if the resurgence of VAWT interest is based on concrete technical improvements or hype.

The imminent bankruptcy of Suntech, based in Wuxi, China and formerly the No. 1 manufacturer of solar PV modules in the world, may please many Western manufacturers that suffered from the company’s below-cost selling strategy.  But schadenfreude offers scant comfort for the dozens of solar PV manufacturers, Chinese and Western, that have been driven into failure in the past few years by China’s 5-year strategic plan to dominate solar PV manufacturing.  Suntech was one of the largest of the army of unprofitable Chinese manufacturers that have topped rankings of annual production for the past 3 years.

Despite ambitious domestic installation targets for solar PV, more failures are yet to come in China as the country becomes a victim of its own success and the Chinese market continues to consolidate.  As with European and American companies, Chinese manufacturers will likely enter into a number of “strategic partnerships” that result in more vertically integrated providers, including some with project development operations.  This is a strategy that has enabled FirstSolar and SunPower to ensure markets for their own modules.

The brutal fact is that no individual solar (or battery, or any other) manufacturer can compete with Chinese state capitalism.   Many policy makers and analysts would love to see an expansion of solar manufacturing in this country.  Yet, we are in this situation today because consumers, as always, have spoken with their dollars.  There is a reason that DVD players, digital cameras, and cell phones are not manufactured in the United States.  Solar PV cells and modules are now also rapidly commoditizing.

Still, even though the below-cost Chinese market flood has contributed to manufacturing job losses in the United States and Europe, the number of solar PV installation jobs has increased considerably.  Ultimately, the result is better value for consumers and a growing overall market.  The Chinese government is effectively subsidizing the cost of solar PV for consumers in the United States and around the world – and that’s not a bad deal, unless you’re a failing solar PV maker.

President Obama’s shout-outs to climate change and clean energy policy in both his inauguration and State of the Union speeches have generated a lot of buzz in climate and clean energy.  A new Pike Research report, commissioned by the Advanced Energy Economy Institute (AAEI), was published the week before the inauguration to quantify the “advanced energy” market, which is significantly broader than the usual definitions of “clean energy.”  The advanced energy concept could be the most realistic way of capturing the Obama Administration’s (as yet undefined) energy policy.

AEEI is a nonprofit educational and charitable organization affiliated with Advanced Energy Economy (AEE), a national association of business leaders with the stated goal of making the global energy system more secure, clean, and affordable.  The organizations define advanced energy as a broad range of products and services that constitute the best available commercial technologies for meeting energy needs today and tomorrow.  The report, “Economic Impacts of Advanced Energy” draws upon more than 60 previously published Pike Research studies, as well as information gathered by Navigant’s Energy Practice, to provide an assessment of advanced energy markets measured by revenue generated by the individual product categories, globally and within the United States. The following excerpt spells it out:

“Advanced energy is not static but dynamic, as innovation and competition produce better energy technologies, products and services over time.  Today, electric and plug-in hybrid cars, natural gas-fueled trucks, high-performance buildings, energy-saving industrial processes, high-capacity wind turbines, on-site solar power, and advanced nuclear power plants are all examples of advanced energy, as they diversify energy sources, reduce health and environmental costs to communities, and use energy resources more productively.  While advanced energy represents an opportunity for U.S. companies and workers, not only to serve the domestic market but to export goods and services into the global energy market, this opportunity has never been quantified in one place.”

Key findings from the report include:

• In 2011, global revenue from the seven advanced energy segments reached nearly $1.12 trillion.
• The U.S. advanced energy market reached $132.0 billion in 2011, representing nearly 12% of the global market. The domestic advanced energy market is expected to grow to an estimated $157.0 billion in 2012, with the U.S. share of the global market expected to rise to 15%.
• The U.S. advanced energy industry contributed $13.9 billion in federal tax revenue in 2011, plus another $6.7 billion in state and local tax revenue, for a total tax contribution of $20.6 billion.
• Globally, advanced energy is larger, by revenue, than pharmaceutical manufacturing, and roughly 2/3 the size of telecommunications.
• In the U.S., advanced energy is larger than the trucking industry that distributes goods throughout the country and more than twice the size of the commercial casino industry.

The benefit of AEEI’s big-tent approach to advanced energy is that it brings together a critical mass of interests that should be able to generate momentum that will translate into policies that could reduce carbon emissions while expanding the economy.  By the same token, however, the centrist approach, because of its inclusion of nuclear and natural gas in particular, will ruffle some feathers along the way.  These are not easy decisions for utilities, grid operators, and ratepayers – let alone policymakers – but the new report at least provides some real-world baselines and defines one possible path forward.

The Pew Research Center recently published a report that leverages Pike Research market forecasts across six major clean energy industries: solar photovoltaics, wind power (onshore and offshore), biomass power, concentrated solar power, and marine and hydrokinetic energy.  In that report, Innovate, Manufacture, Compete, we forecast that revenue in these leading clean energy sectors worldwide will total $1.9 trillion from 2012 to 2018.

We cover all of these industries in depth in our Smart Energy practice market research reports – and it’s interesting to see them lined up together as they appear in Figure 6 of the Pew report.  In total, the market for these seven core industries is projected to grow from $200 billion in 2012 to about $327 billion a year in 2018, representing $1.9 trillion in cumulative revenues.  During this time, the total capacity of worldwide installations is expected to grow from 80 gigawatts (GW) in 2012 to 192 GW annually in 2018.

The numbers speak for themselves, and we used a conservative approach in arriving at them.  We are already seeing leading industries, such as wind power, beat expectations in many countries. As countries and states inch closer to their target dates for the various renewable energy mandates, clean energy deployment is poised to continue to grow throughout the decade.

(Source: Pew Research Center)