Fundmastery Blog

Kurt Brouwer August 28th, 2008

This photo from the New York Times shows kids splashing around in their backyard pool overlooking the Maple Ridge Wind farm near Lowville, N.Y.  It must be pretty cool to have such an obvious connection to the source of the power they use every day.

Source: New York Times / Mike Groll / AP

Wind Energy Bumps Into Power Grid’s Limits (New York Times, August 26, 2008, Mathew L. Wald)

When the builders of the Maple Ridge Wind farm spent $320 million to put nearly 200 wind turbines in upstate New York, the idea was to get paid for producing electricity. But at times, regional electric lines have been so congested that Maple Ridge has been forced to shut down even with a brisk wind blowing.

That is a symptom of a broad national problem. Expansive dreams about renewable energy, like Al Gore’s hope of replacing all fossil fuels in a decade, are bumping up against the reality of a power grid that cannot handle the new demands.

The dirty secret of clean energy is that while generating it is getting easier, moving it to market is not.

These are the hard, technical limitations on energy and on switching to alternatives.  Our energy infrastructure has been built up over decades and it will be expensive and time-consuming to make significant changes.  I think we need to do so, but we should avoid the assumption that this will be easy or that it can be done without other environmental tradeoffs.

The NY Times continues:

The grid today, according to experts, is a system conceived 100 years ago to let utilities prop each other up, reducing blackouts and sharing power in small regions. It resembles a network of streets, avenues and country roads.

“We need an interstate transmission superhighway system,” said Suedeen G. Kelly, a member of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

…The grid’s limitations are putting a damper on such projects already. Gabriel Alonso, chief development officer of Horizon Wind Energy, the company that operates Maple Ridge, said that in parts of Wyoming, a turbine could make 50 percent more electricity than the identical model built in New York or Texas.

…Transmission lines carrying power away from the Maple Ridge farm, near Lowville, N.Y., have sometimes become so congested that the company’s only choice is to shut down - or pay fees for the privilege of continuing to pump power into the lines.

Politicians in Washington have long known about the grid’s limitations but have made scant headway in solving them. They are reluctant to trample the prerogatives of state governments, which have traditionally exercised authority over the grid and have little incentive to push improvements that would benefit neighboring states.

I think we know what this last paragraph really implies, which is that our political leaders really don’t have the desire or the motivation or even the statemanship to move a project like this along.  Make no mistake, we’ve done much bigger and more difficult things — such as building the Interstate Highway System — so we can do this too.  Have you ever driven on our interstate highway system? You know, I-80, I-75 I-95, I-40, I-75 or H1 (Hawaii).  Here is a map that illustrates how extensive it is:

INTERSTATE HIGHWAY SYSTEM

Source: Wikipedia

Well, this highway system was made possible by Federal spending beginning in 1956 under President Eisenhower and continuing on for decades. The actual cost was about $135 billion, give or take a few billion. But, the cost in current dollars would be several hundred billion dollars. Actually, it would be much more because building this today would involve buying out all the property owners along the way at today’s real estate prices.  Now, we may need a similar system for interstate electrical transmission.  Fortunately, the current estimate for the cost of this system is only about $60 billion or so, which is just pocket change compared to the cost of building our highway system today.

The Times article continues:

In Texas, T. Boone Pickens, the oilman building the world’s largest wind farm, plans to tackle the grid problem by using a right of way he is developing for water pipelines for a 250-mile transmission line from the Panhandle to the Dallas market. He has testified in Congress that Texas policy is especially favorable for such a project and that other wind developers cannot be expected to match his efforts.

“If you want to do it on a national scale, where the transmission line distances will be much longer, and utility regulations are different, Congress must act,” he said on Capitol Hill.

Anyone who lives in Northern California has seen windmills dotting the hills east of San Francisco. And, anyone who lives in or has traveled in the western U.S. knows that the wind in that region is steady and strong. So, producing energy from the wind is feasible.  And, Pickens is not just blowing hot air as this piece from Scandinavian Oil & Gas magazine indicates:

Mesa Power LLP, a company created by legendary energy executive T. Boone Pickens, has placed an order with General Electric to purchase 667 wind turbines capable of generating 1,000 megawatts of electricity, enough to power more than 300,000 average U.S. homes.

The agreement represents the first phase of the four-phase Pampa Wind Project that will become the world’s largest wind energy project, with more than 4,000 megawatts of electricity, enough for 1.3 million homes. When all phases of the project are completed as projected in 2014, the wind farm will be five times as big as the nation’s current largest wind power project, now producing 736 megawatts.

Pickens said he expects that first phase of the project will cost about $2 billion, and that electricity from the project will be on-line by early 2011. When complete, the Pampa Wind Project will cover some 400,000 acres in the Texas Panhandle.

For more on Pickens’ project see A New Strategy for Energy Independence — T. Boone Pickens. I also saw an ad featuring Pickens talking about energy.  It was good.

The New York Times article continues:

Enthusiasm for wind energy is running at fever pitch these days, with bold plans on the drawing boards, like Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s notion of dotting New York City with turbines. Companies are even reviving ideas of storing wind-generated energy using compressed air or spinning flywheels.

Yet experts say that without a solution to the grid problem, effective use of wind power on a wide scale is likely to remain a dream.

…Unlike answers to many of the nation’s energy problems, improvements to the grid would require no new technology. An Energy Department plan to source 20 percent of the nation’s electricity from wind calls for a high-voltage backbone spanning the country that would be similar to 2,100 miles of lines already operated by a company called American Electric Power.

…A handful of states like California that have set aggressive goals for renewable energy are being forced to deal with the issue, since the goals cannot be met without additional power lines…

Enthusiasm for windpower is running high now, but there is a huge gap between theory and practice.  Many politicans are announcing grandiose plans, but as the last line above points out, the grid is the ultimate bottleneck for getting serious wattage from the wind.  Fortunately, there are no major technical problems that would prevent us from building a better grid.  It’s simply a matter of finding a way to get it done.

As I wrote in the post about Picken’s project, if T. Boone was running things, I would not be be worried about leadership. But, even though he is pushing this initiative, we will also need action on the part of our political leadership in the states and in Washington D.C.  If we do not upgrade the electrical grid, then all this talk about alternative energy sources is just blowing in the wind.

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