Lets look beyond the headline
Some quotes from the article:
"Part of the cost increase comes from higher commodity prices, and that's bad both for wind turbine makers and for wind turbine buyers (it's only good to mining companies), but part of it also has to do with extremely high demand. GE can't make wind turbines fast enough and there's certainly no recession going on for the wind power industry."
and
"In fact, demand has been high for long enough to show the market that wind power is not simply a passing fad."
closing with this gem of business acumen:
"We wish wind was much cheaper, but the way to get to that point is probably to go through some more of this "demand outstrips supply" phase."
It doesn't elaborate on how much commodity prices in general have risen, but I doubt anyone reading this hasn't noticed how much the price of bread, milk or fuel have risen in the last six months alone.
As for what market penetration wind technology will have going forward, we have yet to curb our enthusiasm for ever more power consumption. It is this, more than the supply and demand problems of steel and other metals, that determines the uptake of a low maintenance technology with no fuel bill!
I expect the percentage of our power supplies that comes from wind will reduce marginally in the next few years, but the number of turbines becoming operational (and the size of individual turbines is bound to increase at the same time.
We'll just find power prices rising as we have to keep our gas turbines, nuclear reactors and other fuel hungry power stations on for more hours per year; for those who don't know we turn our outputs on and off on a 30 minute basis according to demand.
Information is a powerful tool/weapon, but abstract headlines are designed to catch attention and rarely tell the whole story!
MM
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