Bert Caldwell: Wind power won’t be a breeze

Dying is easy, they say in show business. Comedy is hard.

Try reconfiguring an electricity generation and transmission system based largely on hydropower so as to accommodate wind power. Now that’s hard.

Just how hard became clear last week, with release of the “Northwest Wind Integration Action Plan” by the Bonneville Power Administration and Northwest Power and Conservation Council. Wind power has been embraced by many as the resource of the future because fuel costs and emissions are zero, just as they are for hydropower.

The action plan was an effort by the two federal agencies and Northwest utilities to identify the challenges and costs of wind power development. As the region has discovered over the last 70 years or so, building dams and a transmission grid engendered costs unimagined when work began. Today, for example, Bonneville commits about $655 million annually to fish and wildlife.

Fortunately, wind development presents almost no environmental problems except to those who consider wind farms an eyesore. New turbines are not the threat to passing birds earlier models were.

But capturing wind power, particularly on the scale envisioned in the Action Plan, presents a new set of challenges. In fact, plugging so much new energy into the existing grid would be an impressive achievement.

The Northwest’s first wind project, Vancycle in Eastern Oregon, cranked out all of 25 megawatts of electricity, enough to serve about 16,000 homes. That was in 1998.

Windmills in place today can generate nearly 1,400 megawatts. An additional 2,400 megawatts expected to come on line over the next two years will bring the total to 3,800 megawatts. The region’s utilities, led by Bonneville and the NPCC, are trying to figure out how to manage 6,000 megawatts by 2024.

Just to give you an idea how rapid a progression that is, consider the chronology of dam construction by the federal government.

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation built its first hydropower project in the Northwest on the Snake River in 1909. It was not until 1957, with the completion of The Dalles Dam on the Columbia River, that federal projects in the Northwest had a combined generating capacity of 6,000 megawatts.

Note the word “capacity,” because it makes all the difference between hydropower and wind power.

Although drought can limit how much hydro-generation may be available in any given year, reservoirs assure a substantial amount will be available all the time and, in an emergency, all of it for short periods.

There are no wind reservoirs. When it blows, you get electricity. When it doesn’t, you don’t. And in the last few years the region’s times of greatest energy need have corresponded with an almost total lack of wind. There’s nothing free about “free as the breeze” to grid operators trying to keep the lights on.

“We in the utility industry tend to be a little bit of control freaks,” Bonneville Administrator Steve Wright says.

A single wind farm, then, has virtually zero capacity even if the turbines have “nameplate” capacity, an industry term for output under ideal conditions. Distributing wind farms around the region to catch what winds are blowing creates some capacity but, at best, 6,000 megawatts of nameplate wind capacity boils down to 2,000 megawatts of electricity over an extended period.

Natural gas turbines or hydropower must be available when wind is not.

“Wind is primarily a way to turn off things,” says Tom Karier, the NPCC member who co-chaired the steering committee that drafted the plan.

Which suggests another set of problems, although an unlikely one. At night, flexible resources like hydro-generation and gas turbines operate at minimal levels, if at all. What happens if the wind comes up, and grid operators suddenly have several hundred, or even several thousand, megawatts of unneeded electricity on their hands?

“Where does it go? What do you do?” asks Avista wholesale marketing manager Steve Silkworth. “You have to have something you can turn down.”

The region must add transmission lines capable of handling almost the whole 6,000 megawatts, even if that energy is available only sporadically. New gas turbines will be necessary, as well. It’s those investments, called integration costs, the Action Plan was trying to identify. Individual utilities, including Avista, have done their own studies. The smaller the utility, the more expensive wind will be.

The utilities will continue their work over the next year. The Action Plan concludes the Northwest can manage a hefty wind energy portfolio by 2024. It outlines 18 steps to be taken by the end of 2008 to prepare the way.

If the Northwest wants wind energy, it will have to work hard to get it, and pay for it. Nothing comedic about it.

Want an easier way? Conserve.