Spurred by government and private incentives, innovators and engineers overcome obstacles to proliferation of green technology.

Wind energy – long considered by many, including some environmentalists, as a viable alternative to fossil fuels – is living up to its promise, thanks to government initiatives and technological innovations.

Despite the technology's promise to deliver clean and cheap energy that reduces the United States' dependence on fossil fuels with minimal impact on farmland, critics complain that huge wind turbines generate too much noise, kill too many birds and bats, and cost too much to build.

Depending on the make and model, traditional wind turbines are made of steel (66-79% of total turbine mass); fiberglass, resin, or plastic (11-16%); iron or cast iron (5-17%); copper (1%); and aluminum (up to 2%).

Researchers and engineers, spurred by government and private investment, are exploring paths toward making wind-power generation more economical and environmentally friendly.

Offshore wind energy

One important recent trend is the proliferation of offshore wind farms, a move that is helping to meet the electricity needs of cities along U.S. coastlines.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimates that America's emerging offshore wind supply chain has the potential to generate more than 4,200 gigawatts, or 13,500 terawatt-hours per year, of electricity. (One gigawatt is enough energy to power around 750,000 homes.)

In 2022, the Department of Energy launched an Energy Earthshot to reduce the cost of floating offshore wind farms located in deep waters, far from shore. This segment of the industry is expected to comprise 75% of all floating wind generation platforms built by 2035.

The Floating Offshore Wind Energy Shot within the wider initiative seeks to reduce the cost of offshore wind energy generated on floating platforms at deep water sites far from shore by more than 70%, to $45 per megawatt-hour by 2035.

The undertaking will initially require deploying 30 GW of offshore wind generation from more than 2,000 wind turbines and foundations, 6,800 miles (about twice the width of the United States) of cable, and dozens of specialized vessels.

In the first year following the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, the nation's offshore wind industry invested $2.7 billion in ports, vessels, supply chains, and transmission.

Wind farms can float

Offshore wind farms use undersea cables to transmit electricity to the U.S. power grid. Wind energy produced by their turbines travels back to land through a series of cable systems that are buried in the sea floor.

This electricity is channeled through coastal load centers that prioritize where the electricity should go and distribute it into the nation's electrical grid.

About two-thirds of U.S. offshore wind resources are located in areas where the water is so deep that conventional foundations, such as large steel piles or lattice structures fixed to the seabed, are not practical.

Instead, offshore wind projects are developing a variety of different foundations suited to unique conditions at each site.

Companies have developed floating offshore wind platforms for use in deep waters, including four distinct kinds of floating platforms – spar-buoy, tension leg platform, semi-submersible, and barge. About 80% of the projects plan to use semi-submersible platforms.

Challenges of wind-poor areas

While the U.S. has excellent onshore wind resources, some locations are less windy and have not seen much wind energy development. Harnessing wind power in a cost-effective manner has long been a challenge in these areas.

Innovative technologies could make it possible to profitably capture winds blowing higher above the ground across much of the United States.

In a recent National Renewable Energy Laboratory study, researchers found that innovations making their way into commercial markets in the coming years could unlock 80% more economically viable wind energy capacity within the contiguous U.S. as early as 2025.

The innovations include on-site manufacturing, taller towers, longer blades, and wake steering, which is a control strategy where upstream turbines are misaligned with wind direction to cause their wakes to deflect away from downstream wind.

For most of the past 20 years, wind turbines have been increasing in tower height (from 30 meters to 90 meters) and rotor diameter (from 30 meters to 125 meters), resulting in power capacity growing to three megawatts from 0.2 megawatts.

Department of Energy

The size and generating capacity of wind turbines have expanded significantly over the years.

Near-commercial innovations, in fact, can produce turbines with tip heights taller than the top of the 169-meter-tall Washington Monument when a rotor with a 150-meter diameter is attached to a 160-meter tower.

A sizable portion of potential wind energy occurs in regions of the U.S. with little or no existing wind farm deployment, such as the Southeast, Gulf Coast, and parts of the East Coast. These areas are close to electrical demand centers, potentially reducing the need for new transmission to deploy wind energy at the scale needed to meet renewable energy goals.

Analysts say this proximity offers an unexpected opportunity to harness wind power more extensively in regions where transmission infrastructure already exists or where incremental transmission could be built cost-effectively.

Expanding wind energy to these regions could also offer additional benefits, such as reducing the need for governments and utilities to import energy from distant areas to serve local demand and create local jobs and local economic growth from land leases and tax revenues, analysts say.

An Airloom wind solution

One recent innovation features a different approach. A wind-power generator being developed by a Laramie, Wyoming company, Airloom Energy Inc., that creates wind energy loops that operate horizontally and lower to the ground.

Airloom says the unique design could produce hundreds of megawatts of power at a fraction of the cost and footprint of traditional horizontal axis wind turbines.

Built with independent wings that travel back and forth over a repeating pattern, like a weaving shuttlecock on a flying loom, this concept has a series of vertical blades low to the ground that move horizontally around an oval track, the designers say.

The blades travel along a cable atop a series of 82-foot-long poles arranged in an oval and intercept the wind as they travel down both the home and the backstretch of the cable's track. As the blades come around, the power they generate is siphoned off to the grid.

Airloom says its design generates the same amount of electricity as conventional wind turbine technology at less than one-tenth the cost. Overall, the company estimates that the cost to build a wind farm using their technology is about one-quarter, and the levelized cost of generating energy is about one-third when compared to traditional wind farms. In addition, the structure can be built vertically or horizontally and either onshore or offshore.

The company says the device is also easy to transport. A 2.5 MW "Airloom" fits on a standard tractor trailer and can be manufactured using readily available materials and parts.