In Boston at the Wind Technology Testing Center, Rahul Yarala is helping test new designs — cheaper, lighter and more efficient — for windmill propeller blades, the same kind you see spinning on hillsides to generate electricity. The current test subject is dangling in mid-air.
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Alicia Barton is the CEO of the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center. She's pointing at the massive steel and cement structure at the testing center that is anchored into bedrock 200 feet below ground. It needs to be that strong to support the 100- to 200-foot-long blades attached to footings there. Chris Arnold/NPR hide caption
itoggle caption Chris Arnold/NPR
Alicia Barton is the CEO of the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center. She's pointing at the massive steel and cement structure at the testing center that is anchored into bedrock 200 feet below ground. It needs to be that strong to support the 100- to 200-foot-long blades attached to footings there.
Chris Arnold/NPR
"It's 200 feet long, about 20,000 pounds in weight," Yarala says. "What we're testing is the minimal amount of structural elements to make sure it's also reliable and it won't break. That's a super-important thing when it comes to having wind energy succeed — you have to bring the cost down."
The blades are now to the point where pound-for-pound, he says, they're cheaper than airplane wings, despite being more complex.
The center was built with stimulus money, but it's now funded by the private sector — innovation that is ongoing, Porter notes, regardless of the fracking boom.
"Many people believe if we take advantage of oil and gas resources, that will stop renewables in their tracks," he says. "That turns out to be just wrong."
But Paul Ashworth, chief U.S. economist at Capital Economics, says those seeing a cure-all in the recent petroleum and natural gas surge may be grabbing at fool's gold.
"I'm pretty much skeptical," Ashworth says of Porter's new report. "I think he overstates it for a couple of reasons."
For one, he doesn't think the country's going to keep gaining lots of jobs because of fracking. In fact, he says we've recently lost tens of thousands of jobs after oil got so cheap many companies stopped drilling.
"So the shale oil boom is actually already over," Ashworth says.
But fuel prices do remain low, and Porter says skeptics just don't appreciate yet how important that will be for the U.S. economy.
oil prices
Harvard University
fracking
natural gas