Earth Equity News

Growth in Wind Power Makes Life Difficult for Grid Managers in Northwest. By Ted Sickinger, The Oregonian, July 17, 2010. "On the afternoon of May 19, in a single chaotic hour, more than a thousand wind turbines in the Columbia River Gorge went from spinning lazily in the breeze to full throttle as a storm rolled east out of Hood River. Suddenly, almost two nuclear plants worth of extra power was sizzling down the lines -- the largest hourly spike in wind power the Northwest has ever experienced. At the Bonneville PowerAdministration's control room in Vancouver, it was too much of a good thing. More electricity than its customers needed. More than the available power lines could export from the region. And more than the grid could readily absorb by ramping down generation at the region's network of federal dams. So the edict went out: Feather your turbine blades; slash output…

The pace and geographic concentration of wind development, coupled with wild swings in its output, are overwhelming the region's electrical grid and outstripping its ability to use the power or send it elsewhere... The renewables explosion, and pressure to reduce carbon emissions, is forcing the transmission issue to center stage now… Only 15%nt of the electricity generated by wind farms in the Northwest goes to the public utilities that buy power directly from BPA, which sells power from federal dams in the Columbia Basin... That makes it BPA's job to balance their up-and-down output, blending it with other sources of power so total generation at any given time matches total demand -- a requirement to maintain grid reliability... In extreme situations, however, the agency continues to dump wind. At the current rate of wind development, says the BPA's Mainzer, the region's system of dams and power lines will start running into consistent operational problems around 2013, when wind in the agency's territory reaches total capacity of some 6,000 megawatts. Above and beyond that, he said, will require major structural changes."