The U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has issued a request for proposals (RFP) for a program that aims to innovate and drive down the cost of distributed wind energy.
The Competitiveness Improvement Project provides financial and technical support to manufacturers of small and medium-sized wind turbines. The cost-shared subcontracts help manufacturers of turbines less than 1 MW in capacity to optimize designs, develop advanced manufacturing processes, perform testing and, new to this year's RFT, accelerate pathways to commercialization.
The 2022 RFP is due by April 1.
Since launching in 2012, the CIP has awarded 52 subcontracts to 25 companies, totaling 12.4 million in Dept. of Energy funding. Those awards led to $6.4 million in additional private-sector funding, NREL said.
Distributed wind energy can benefit farmers, businesses, and homeowners, but requires further investment and innovation to scale.
Norman, Oklahoma-based Bergey Windpower used CIP funds and guidance to achieve a 50% reduction in the levelized cost of electricity for their product, the Bergey Excel 15 wind turbine (above image), compared to a previous model.
The Pecos PW85 is an 85 kW wind turbine that provides onsite, distributed power generation, designed specifically for the U.S. distributed wind market. The Massachusetts-based company was supported last year by NREL's CIP. (Courtesy: Pecos) The installed capacity for distributed wind in the U.S. was 1,055 MW at the end of 2020, coming from over 87,000 wind turbines.
Market research prepared for DOE by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory determined that the U.S. added 14.7 MW of installed capacity in 2020, mostly using large-scale turbines — those greater than 1 MW in size.
Projects using mid-size turbines represented only 160 kW of installed capacity added in 2020, down from 1 MW in 2019 and 1.6 MW in 2018. Small wind development has also been flat for several years.
