Too much too soon?

Patience Key To Success With Renewable Energy In The West

By Joseph Friedrichs, 7-21-08

Although the push for increased amounts of renewable energy continues throughout the West, a recent assessment from a federal power administration finds that demand could be exceeding supply when it comes to wind farms.

It’s likely that developers in this region will triple the amount of wind power by erecting dozens of new wind farms in the coming years. However, the assessment from the Bonneville Power Administration also reveals that unless more power lines are added with the new farms, transmission networks won’t be able to handle so much wind so quickly.

As it stands now, BPA says it has only enough space on the grid for just one-third of the anticipated 4,716 megawatts, Gail Kinsey Hill reports on Oregonlive.com.

One potential problem is that developers can sign up for transmission access at any time, first-come, first-served, with no security deposit required, Hill reports. This means a load of requests to build wind farms could flood into federal office buildings. In turn, there would be now way for the feds to know when, or even if a wind farm would be built.

What could happen if wind-farm developers aren’t careful could be a repeat of the recent housing boom in the West - a sudden surge of structures built only to stand uselessly empty, or in this case motionless.

Most of the wind farms currently in operation dwell in the Columbia River Gorge. Farms in this area distribute power to people in Oregon, Washington and Idaho, among other states. It would be a disgrace to erect dozens of wind farms in this beautiful area, only to have them loom like dead, giant robots for all to see.

Let’s take our time in the West planning and building wind farms, which are inevitably going to come. Developers must wait to make certain there will be able power lines ready to distribute the energy. As we’ve already discovered in the West, patience is a virtue. 

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I don't think you're reasonable, Joseph, where you imagine that big wind farms might stand idle because they can't connect to the grid. No wind developer would go ahead without access to the grid.

The grid access is shaky, at best, for wind power producers right now, or at least that is the impression the BPA grid managers are giving. They do have access to the grid, but it is a measured access. Apparently, this is a high water year, and to correctly manage dams for salmon and steelhead, it is best that all the water possible go through the turbines and not be spilled. Spilling produces nitrogen narcosis (sp? the bends in human terms) in fish, killing them or greatly reducing their survival chances. A newspaper story reported that BPA grid managers were not able to contact awol wind farm managers at a time when wind plus hydro was simply producing too much power for the grid, and wind was supposed to shut down and did not. So now we have wind killing birds, bats AND anadromous fish because the management coordination is not well thought out or spelled out in the law. Add to that the tax subsidized wind turbines putting power into a grid at great expense as surplus power, and the economics begin to smell. Priority to the expensive option? The expensive part is due to subsidies from Congress, of course.

I made a proposal once to remodel and retool the sawmill I was the log buyer for. The idea was timely and needed. We just were not utilizing the log as well as competitors. So I said the first thing we need to do is expand our green chain, and put in a timber handling area. We worked for a year working from finished lumber to the log to handle more material which would be the presumed result of retooling. And did we ever. The mill output just about doubled, and the log need only went up by 25%. We paid for the whole deal in 6 months, including the 6 weeks we were down for installation. But before we improved our ability to cut up logs, we had to improve our abilities to get rid of the lumber we would produce. And why that does not appear to be a part of alternative power production just bowls me over. You have to build a transmission grid that matches your power output. All wind turbines and no grid is only a method to increase the cost of power and not provide any more of it. The hydro is there, and the coal fired is there, and to add wind, you have to add ways to move that power to where it can be best utilized. Great swaths of power lines through the roadless forests is a necessity and won't happen. Great lines across developed land won't happen. So the NIMBY vote prevails, then why are we doing this? Why are we expanding the ability to produce something we don't have a way to market without shutting down other producers? America has gone insane. We just no longer think.