Bonneville Power Experiences Too Much of a Good Thing. By Matthew L. Wald, NYTimes, September 23, 2010."Saturated with too much energy from wind and water, the Bonneville Power Administration, a federal agency based in the Pacific Northwest, has been forced to look for outside help. For the moment its problems represent an extreme, but experts predict that other systems will find themselves in the same pickle as utilities build more wind machines in an effort to reach state-mandated quotas for renewable energy. Bonneville, which issued a report [PDF, 12 pp] this month on its rough patch, went through a period in June where it literally had to give energy away and induce neighboring utilities to shut down their fossil-fuel powered plants. The problem was that its own territory was struck by unexpected storms that filled its dams with water.
"Other systems might have released the water and bypassed the wind turbines, but for Bonneville that causes environmental damage. Water that goes over a spillway as opposed to through a turbine picks up bubbles of nitrogen gas from the atmosphere. When baby salmon absorb the bubbles, they experience something resembling the bends in a human diver. The same storms also brought wind… Normally hydro and wind are a good pairing because hydro plants can adjust their output almost instantly to compensate for a variation in winds. But if all the water has to go through the turbines, as was the case in June, the hydro operator loses the ability to cut back when there is a sudden surge in wind."
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