Technology progression and economics of wind power

Throughout history, sailing has been critically instrumental to the development of civilisation, providing the human race with greater mobility than travel over land, whether for trade, transport, fishing or warfare. Once human beings developed the technology to sail ships dating between 5000 and 5500 BC, wind became the dominant source of energy to power machines. For more than two thousands years, wind-powered machines grounded grains and pumped water. But with the growth of steam-powered machines in the 18th century, dependence on wind started eroding to power the industrial age. But among many progresses in modern time, the recent record of meeting more than 40 per cent energy demand of Denmark with 5GWs installed capacity of wind mills has created new hope of wind — to power the nation with clean energy in a cost-effective manner. As reported by Bloomberg Technology on January 11, 2018, upon reaching world record for using wind power to drive its economy, the Danish Energy Minister Lars Chr. Lilleholt states, “the arguments over renewables, once driven entirely by environmental considerations, are now very much based on the economics.” The price of wind energy moving in a steep downward trajectory, reaching 120 USD/MWh in 2016 from over 220 USD/MWh in 2012, indicates that anyone betting against the wind technology is on the wrong side of history.

To deal with growing environmental concern, although subsidy has been offering support to wind to generate electrical power, the continued progression of technology is rapidly reducing the cost of power production from wind farms. The advancement of technology along five major dimensions has placed the cost of wind energy in a steep downward slope. Advancements are being made in design and fabrication of turbine blades, size of turbines, the altitude at which turbines are placed, the generator design to extract energy, and erection of offshore wind farms.

One of the major issues of wind energy harvesting is about the availability of high-speed wind. Technology of erecting towers to place turbines at higher altitude has been making remarkable progress to access wind of increasingly greater speed. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, tall wind turbine towers as one of the promising technologies that will make wind energy more economically competitive in regions of moderate wind speeds and in previously overlooked low wind speed regions. It’s being estimated that a wind turbine installed on a 200-m tower will capture over 70 per cent more energy than the same turbine installed on a conventional 83-m tower. To take advantage of this opportunity, wind turbine tower heights have experienced a steady increase in the last 20 years. For example, the average tower height in Belgium, France and the Netherlands has increased from approximately 60m in 2000 to 100-120m in 2014.

To harvest more energy per installation, turbine size is also being increased. Such approach also opens the door of taking the advantage of scale in both installation and maintenance. The past exponential growth of turbine size is primarily driven by economics: to lower cost of per unit electricity produced. Small turbines are much more expensive than larger ones as far as per unit cost of production is concerned.  As a result, the turbine diameter size has increased from less than 20m in 1980s to more than 120m in 2010s.  As of 2017, the most powerful turbine is rated at 9.5 MW and has a rotor diameter of 164m; and the trend of building larger turbine continues. As reported by The Telegraph, the world’s largest wind turbines may double in size before 2024.

Smart design of generators is also contributing to higher efficiency in lowering the cost of per unit of electricity produced from wind. For example, as reported by MIT Technology Review, a new kind of generator that’s well suited to harvesting energy from wind could lower the cost of wind turbines while increasing their power output by as high as 50 per cent. Such development focuses on electronic switching of internal components (coils) to make generators adaptive to wind speed to maximise energy harvesting. At low wind speeds, only a few of the components are electronically switched on- just enough to efficiently harvest the small amount of energy in low-speed wind. With increasing speed, additional components are switched on proportionately to minimise the overhead– leading to higher efficiency of energy extraction. It’s expected that the commercialisation of such recent development will lead to higher efficiency and lower cost of wind energy harvesting.

Progress is also being reported in improving the design of turbines to improve the efficiency of wind energy harvesting. The theoretical limit of energy harvesting with triblade turbine from the wind appears to be 59.3 per cent of its total energy. It’s being reported that an average wind turbine captures only 30 to 40 per cent of energy. Although a modern horizontal-axis, triblade wind turbine would generate the most electricity, but alternate designs are being pursued to find better means of energy extraction. For example, as opposed to hard blades, wind turbines with flexible blades are found to be more efficient, as high as 35 per cent.

As it has been reported by the Financial Times, powerful turbines with the capacity of a single turbine can generate as high as 8MW slash price of offshore wind farms. With fewer turbines generating more power, the cost of installing and maintaining wind farms in remote offshore locations is making offshore installations economically viable.

One of the major barriers of wind energy is very high capital cost. Almost 75-80 per cent of total power production cost for a wind turbine involves capital costs. Such cost includes the cost of the turbine, the foundations, the electrical equipment and grid connection. As a result, wind turbines are more capital intensive compared with fossil fuel-powered alternatives such as natural gas or coal fired power plants, which require as much as 40-60 per cent of total costs for fuel, operation and maintenance.

The on-going multidimensional progression of technology is increasingly making wind turbines a sustainable clean source of electrical energy. Offshore wind potentials offer opportunity to many countries to develop wind farms to meet their entire demands. On the other hand, the ongoing development of battery technology is opening the window to deal with the intermittence issue. National energy policy should be fused with the technology progression of wind energy and economics of energy supply to ensure the opening of sustainable source of clean energy to power the whole nation.

Developing countries like Bangladesh aspiring to reach the middle income status should look into the policy options of acquiring wind energy technology capability to create high paying jobs for university graduates for creating wealth through invention and innovation. Adopted policies should support the development of necessary research and development (R&D) capacity for pursuing further progression and exploring diverse innovations in the field of wind power generation.

China industrial policy at work in lingerie themed town

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On a freshly paved avenue in a Chinese rural county, a few doorways down from a dog-meat restaurant, Midnight Charm Clothing produces obvious chemises and “erotic schoolgirl” outfits.

A decade in the past Dongwangji, a town in China’s eastern Jiangsu province, was on the whole rice fields. Today it is the heartland for Chinese production of “emotional hobby underwear” — a euphemism for lingerie.

Local officials are actively helping Midnight Charm and 600 different lingerie producers as section of an initiative to strengthen “feature towns” that focal point on unique industries.

The initiative illustrates President Xi Jinping’s vision of a government-guided market financial system the place the Communist celebration channels non-public funding into favoured sectors, in addition to controlling the largest agencies via kingdom ownership.

Industries need to be chosen “based on each region’s natural endowments and comparative advantages”, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the nation planning agency, stated in December. “Every vicinity must accurately be aware of the feature town’s intrinsically unique characteristics.”

Most function towns are on the outskirts of larger cities. The Ministry of Housing and Urban Development accepted 127 characteristic cities in late-2016 and a similarly 276 in August. By 2020, the corporation desires to advance 1,000.

Beyond lingerie, different topics include pets, chocolate, drone aircraft, common Chinese opera, glassware, fund management and poetry. Some are intended as visitor attractions, whilst others such as Dongwangji are production centres.
Dongwangji produces 60 per cent of China’s lingerie enterprise output
Lei Congrui, regular manager of Midnight Charm, was once one of the first entrepreneurs in Dongwangji to produce lingerie. The enterprise now employs 20,000 people in the city and the surrounding county, accounting for 60 per cent of China’s whole lingerie production, in accordance to the local government.

Midnight Charm has produced lingerie for a British high-street company that he requested the FT now not to title due to the fact Mr Lei had acted as a subcontractor barring the brand’s knowledge.

“This region didn’t virtually have any different industries except farming, and humans here didn’t definitely know how to do business,” said Mr Lei, whose agency booked revenues of Rmb12m ($1.9m) ultimate year, primarily from export to the US. “I taught a lot of my rivals how to do it. Now some of them are doing higher than me.”

Many characteristic cities are placed in poor, rural areas left behind via China’s fast industrialisation. Experts say that if good executed, the thinking makes sense. But they also warn that the thinking may want to be mis-used to fuel property bubbles or different wasteful investment.

“We must honestly forestall the city actual estate model from migrating to small towns, which causes fees to upward shove and economic risks from property finance to worsen,” said Li Tie, director-general of the China Center for Urban Development, a think-tank under NDRC. “That’s the frequent trouble with characteristic towns.”

Zhong county, a bad vicinity outside the megacity of Chongqing in western China, is searching for to appeal to Rmb5bn in investment for a function town dedicated to aggressive e-sports video gaming. A purpose-built 6,000-seat stadium hosted a country wide competition ultimate year.
Some 20,000 humans in Dongwangji city and the surrounding county are employed in the layout and manufacture of lingerie
But at least 5 different localities are additionally creating on-line gaming towns. And not like Dongwangji’s lingerie industry, Zhong county does now not already have an present e-sports economy.

Town and county-level officers have authorized the layout for Dongwangji to obtain reputable focus as an “emotional activity underwear” function city and are now in search of approval from the Jiangsu provincial NDRC.

Tang Jingdong, the town’s Communist birthday celebration secretary, stated the assignment would enable small manufacturers to cut fees through collective purchasing of uncooked materials such as fabric.

“Once it’s approved, we’ll have land support, fiscal support, and a lot of bank funding will drift in,” stated Mr Tang. “This is a way to assist our local residents get away poverty.”

Gazette to be published within 3 days: minister

The gazette notification for the wage board for garment workers would be published within three days, which would pave the way for a rise in their salaries, said the state minister for labour and employment yesterday. Md Mujibul Haque said the law ministry has already vetted and sent the draft copy of the gazette notification to the Department of Printing and Publications. “We hope the notice will be published within three days,” he told The Daily Star. Once the notification is published, Haque said, the wage board will call for discussions to recommend a new salary scale for the country’s 3.6 million garment workers. On January 14, the government formed the wage board and ordered it to recommend a minimum salary scale for the garment workers in six months. The constitution of the board aims mainly at averting labour unrest. Massive demonstrations by hundreds of workers in Ashulia and Savar in December 2016 for a wage hike prompted nearly 100 factory owners to shut their production units.

The factories were reopened after a negotiation with the labour ministry and trade unions. The Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association sent a proposal to form the wage board to the labour ministry in August last year.

A four-member permanent wage board already exists. Whenever a board is announced afresh, two additional members representing owners and workers are usually included. The permanent board is led by Senior District Judge Syed Aminul Islam. The other three members are Kazi Saifuddin Ahmed, labour adviser to Bangladesh Employers’ Federation (owners’ representative); Fazlul Haque Montoo, executive president of Awami League’s workers front Sramik League (workers’ representative); and Kamal Uddin, a teacher of Dhaka University (independent member).

As the new members, the state minister for labour appointed Begum Shamsunnahar, women affairs secretary of Awami League, as workers’ representative, and Siddiqur Rahman, president of BGMEA, as owners’ representative.

The minimum wage was last fixed at Tk 5,300 in 2013, up from Tk 3,000 in 2010, Tk 1,662.50 in 2006, Tk 940 in 1994 and Tk 627 in 1985.

Keep tax structure predictable

The country’s apex trade body has urged the revenue authority to avoid issuing gazettes out of the blue as it affects investors’ confidence. “Businesses should be engaged before bringing in any change to rules,” said Md Shafiul Islam Mohiuddin, president of the Federation of Bangladesh Chambers of Commerce and Industry. Unpredictable policy environment erodes the confidence of the business community, he said at a seminar at the capital’s Pan Pacific Sonargaon Hotel on Friday. The National Board of Revenue organised the event to mark the International Customs Day, which was observed in 182 countries on the day.

This year, the theme for the day was: A Secure Business Environment for Economic Development.

A total of Tk 75 lakh crore will be required to attain the Sustainable Development Goals, Mohiuddin said.

Ensuring a business-friendly environment would facilitate increased trade and investment and thereby lead to higher revenue collection to finance the development schemes, he added.

“The tax and duty rates should be stable,” said Mashiur Rahman, Prime Minister’s Economic Affairs adviser. He said repeated changes in duty classifications leave importers on a wobbly ground. At the same time, a reasonable level of protection is necessary to promote industrialisation in Bangladesh. Rules and regulations should be framed in view of production, industrialisation and revenue collection, he said, while stressing on the need for diversification of industrial production.

“So, customs officials don’t just collect revenues; they have important roles in industrialisation.”Rahman also said the efficiency of revenue officials and their business-friendly attitudes are vital. “There is no meaning of enforcing laws by shutting down production,” the adviser added. Many countries used duty protection for industrialisation, said Muhammad Abdur Razzaque, chairman of the parliamentary standing committee on finance.

“If we impose duty properly on the import of powdered milk, we will not need to import milk after 3-5 years,” he said, adding that dairy farming is expanding. He also touched upon the topic of illegal capital flight out of the country. “It is alleged that a neighbourhood in Canada has been christened the ‘Begum Para’.

The money was sent there through under- and over-invoicing of exports and imports,” Razzaque added. Finance Minister AMA Muhith asked the customs department to be alert to prevent the entry of illegal items. He said the government aims to double the tax to gross domestic product ratio to 20 percent by 2021 to increase the size of the national budget. At present, the tax-to-GDP ratio stands at 10-11 percent.“It is a big target. But it is possible to achieve it seeing the way people are responding,” said Muhith.  Many countries have a higher tax-GDP ratio, the minister said, adding that some countries have a tax-to-GDP ratio of 30-32 percent. “We may not go upto that level, but it is possible to achieve our target,” he said, citing the growth of registered taxpayers to 31 lakh from 14 lakh from a couple of years ago as an encouraging sign.

“This is a very a good sign. We should be proud of it,” he added. Commerce Minister Tofail Ahmed and NBR Chairman Md Mosharraf Hossain Bhuiyan also spoke.