Headwinds: Turbine Makers, like Solar Manufacturers, Could Be in for a Shakeout POSTED BY: BILL SWEET / QUA, NOVEMBRO 02, 2011Energy guru Daniel Yergin tells a nice story in his latest book about how a Danish farm equipment manufacturer, Vestas, took advantage of California subsidies in the late 1980s to initiate a world revolution in wind generation.Today, however, the pioneering wind companies like Vestas are running into the same headwinds makers of photovoltaic panels have encountered--the prospect of declining European and North American subsidies, combined with growing competition from low-cost Chinese manufacturers. Wind is much closer than solar to being commercially competitive, and so the situation is not quite as dire. But wind also, by the same token, has achieved higher penetration, which means that the best on-land sites are getting exhausted even as the ability of grids to keep absorbing more intermittent energy is increasingly challenged.On Monday this week, Vestas shares fell one fifth, after the company issued a third-quarter earnings warning. Share values already had declined 50 percent from this year's high, largely because of reported delays in turbine projects and a German turbine factory.Smelling blood, critics of high subsidies for renewable energy are going after wind. On Oct. 11, the Manhattan Institute--a neoliberal think tank in (you guessed it) Manhattan--issued a short article highly critical of wind's costliness and alleged climate benefits.Though the Manhattan Institute often produces well-researched and strongly conceived reports that interest even people of sharply different ideological persuasions, its report on "the high cost of wind energy as a carbon-dioxide reduction method" is not one of its better efforts.Author Robert Bryce asserts that getting 20 percent of U.S. energy from wind by 2030--a commonly stated goal--would cost $850 billion, yield greenhouse gas reductions equivalent to only 2 percent of projected global emissions, and consume 72,000 square miles of land.Let's start with the least significant of those assertions, about land. It's often said that wind turbines consume a lot of land, but go bicycling in Denmark's countryside, and you see turbines everywhere right in the middle of plowed fields. The same is true in the North German plains.So my counter-assertion is this: Wind turbines can consume a lot of land where land is cheap or worthless, say in parts of Texas, which happens to be Bryce's home state. But where land is immensely valuable--say in Germany's Mark Brandenburg, one of the world's great breadbaskets, or in Iowa-Illinois, another--turbines need consume virtually no land.Regarding costs, Bryce bases his calculations on a historic cost for installed wind of $1.70/W and a projected cost of $2.43/W. Those postulated costs, specified in the text and in a footnote but nowhere justified, may be dubious. Seven years ago, Yergin's Cambridge Energy Research Associates estimated the cost of installed wind at slightly less than $1/W, based on historical data to date at that time.Could average wind costs be higher now than seven years ago, and does it make sense to predict that they'll be still higher a decade from now? Actually, contrary to what Matthew Wald of the New York Times has said