Wind on the rise in the US, coal on the wane

As coal dependence falters in the US, wind-powered electricity generation is on the rise. In less than a decade, the mix of fuels used for generating electricity has gone a major shift.

The two maps below show where the changes are most marked.

Twelve states, most of them in the wind-rich Great Plains or the upper Midwest, are getting more than 10 percent of their power now from wind, a threshold first passed by Iowa in 2009. Last year, two states—Iowa and South Dakota—generated more than 25 percent of their electricity from wind. On some days in some of the areas highlighted here, almost 50 percent of electricity demand is being met by wind.

This transition has happened quickly. In Texas, for instance, the country’s largest electricity market, wind’s share of generation jumped from 2.4 percent in 2007 to 11 percent last year.


IEF 1

One way to register the rise of wind is by how much more electricity the U.S., as a whole, gets from wind-powered generation than it did just a few years ago. In 2007, according to the Energy Information Administration, the U.S. generated 0.9 percent of its electricity from wind. By last year that number had risen to 4.9 percent (an almost fourfold increase in eight years).

Another side of the energy-transition coin is apparent in the second map here, which shows where coal-fired electricity has suffered its deepest declines. The states that have reduced their coal use the most (measured in millions of tons)—Indiana, Georgia, Ohio and Pennsylvania—have done so largely by turning to natural gas.


ieefa2
Nearly every state has reduced its dependence on coal-fired electricity generation since 2007. The U.S. today gets only about a third of its power from coal, a 16-percentage point in less than a decade. The chart below shows how this decline is part of a broader diversification in electricity generation.

ieefa3

There’s no evidence that these trends are changing, and no wonder the U.S. coal-mining industry has collapsed.


Seth Feaster is an IEEFA data analyst. This article was originally published on IEFFA. Re-produced with permission.

Comments

3 responses to “Wind on the rise in the US, coal on the wane”

  1. Jens Stubbe Avatar
    Jens Stubbe

    Average unsubsidized US wind PPA’s was $0.035/kWh in 2014. Wind PTC has begun a phase out period that ends in 2021. Since 2014 Vestas has dropped their average price per sold MW by 17%, which according to their CFO thinks is a remarkably stable development that she expects will continue. With 9% annual turbine cost drops onto 2021 unsubsidized US wind PPA’s could drop to $0.018/kWh.

    Unlike solar companies Vestas is in a good financial state.
    http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-09/vestas-forecasts-record-sales-in-2016-and-boosts-dividend

    The growth from 2007 to 2015 from 0,9% to 4.9% is a 5.4 increase with an average 23,5% annual growth, which sums up to a seven doubling over a decade or exactly consistent with the global wind power trend for the four last decades.

    If this very persistent trend continues wind turbines will produce as much electricity world wide as the entire globe did in 2014 by 2031.

    To enable this transition we need to continue the cost drop that seems so firmly on track and to develop markets for cheap excess electricity and especially so because also solar shows impressive growth.

    1. Mike Dill Avatar
      Mike Dill

      If your numbers are good, then we will see wind and solar costing less than the raw coal at the mine by 2013. That would mean that mining coal for power would be un-economical.

  2. Jan Veselý Avatar
    Jan Veselý

    BTW. US coal consumption fell in Jan-Apr 2016 by more than 30% when compared with Jan-Apr 2015.
    The whole industry is collapsing.

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