Predicting Wind Power with Greater Accuracy

Over the past decade, towering farms of wind turbines, some taller than a 40-story building, have become a fixture of the American countryside. These machines, which cleanly extract kinetic energy from the wind and convert it to electricity, today provide about 4 percent of the total electricity generated in the U.S.

President Barack Obama has established a goal of generating 20 percent of the nation’s electricity from wind energy by 2030. “We believe it is reasonable to achieve that goal, because of the current high rate of wind turbine deployment nationwide,” says Livermore mechanical engineer Wayne Miller, associate program leader for wind and solar power. Between 2008 and 2012, wind power capacity grew by 167 percent. “The market for new wind energy production is complex and determined by many factors, including federal tax credits for renewable energy production and the availability of cheap natural gas,” says Miller. “However, wind is now very competitive with all other sources of power generation that have been recently installed.”