Gas and electric utilities plot to kill windpower
Peter Behr, scientificamerican.com
The growth of wind power may be curtailed by a growing coalition of
naysayers ranging from electric utilities to senators
The Coalition for Fair Transmission Policy fears that prime conditions in the
Great Plains will make the region's wind power too cheap to compete with
Not many years ago, there wasn't enough wind power coming from the Great Plains to worry about. Now there is, and lots of people are worrying.
A group of mostly East Coast utility companies calling itself the Coalition for Fair Transmission Policy fears that the prime conditions in the Great Plains will make the region's wind power too cheap for its members to compete with, unless developers there are made to pay the costs of moving wind power eastward.
Influential natural gas producers and generators in Texas are worried. They are demanding that the state's wind developers share the costs of backup natural gas generators that must pick up the slack when the wind doesn't blow. The gas industry, threatened by state policies that promote wind power, is asking regulators to impose penalties on wind generators that can't deliver scheduled energy when the wind dies down.
And last week, four senators representing New York, Ohio, Montana and Pennsylvania proposed to deny federal clean energy grants to wind developers that buy blades, turbines and other components from abroad.
"It is a no-brainer that stimulus funds should only go to projects that create jobs in the United States rather than overseas," Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said, pointing at a proposed Texas wind farm whose backers include a Chinese power company.
Some renewable policy advocates say the problem has less to do with China and more with on-and-off-again federal energy policies, and arguments over how to pay for the vast expansion of transmission lines needed to maximize wind power delivery. Instead of looking at foreign rivals, members of Congress should start with a look in the mirror, says this side in the debate.
"We've had so many studies," said Lisa Barton, vice president for transportation strategy and business development at Columbus, Ohio-based American Electric Power, a strong proponent of grid expansion. "It's 2010, and yet we still don't have a decision on how to move forward in connecting wind or in building a more robust transmission system."
How 'American' should the jobs be?
The issue of allocating costs for new transmission lines among states and regions is one of the high hurdles ahead for the Senate, if it can get climate and energy legislation to the floor this spring. The debate pits utilities and power generators in the North, Southwest and Pacific Northwest against companies like AEP that hope to move large amounts of competing wind power to the coasts.
Wind power development poses "a perceived threat to the embedded generators," said David Corbus, senior engineer with the Energy Department's National Renewable Energy Laboratory. "They color it in different ways. But when you come down to it, that's the bottom line on a lot of these issues." Corbus was project manager for the NREL's recently released 14-month study of wind power.
"You can't ignore the interests of the folks involved in the debate," Barton said.
Schumer and his three Democratic colleagues, Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Bob Casey of Pennsylvania and Jon Tester of Montana, say new wind power projects receiving federal stimulus grants should use U.S. manufacturing, some of which lies in their backyards.
"Companies located in New York, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere across the United States are fully capable of manufacturing the range of clean-energy components," they said in a letter last week to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.
Citing an American University study that reported foreign dominance of renewable energy grants, they proposed a moratorium on wind power grants from Treasury until the Senate can pass their "Buy America" legislation.
The American Wind Energy Association, backed by Energy Secretary Steven Chu, disputes the facts and conclusions by American University's Investigative Reporting Workshop. The wind industry employs 85,000 people, AWEA said. "In three years, we went from two turbine manufacturers with facilities in the U.S. to nine, and four more have announced plans for factories here," it added. The AU study did not count foreign-owned clean energy manufacturing employment in the United States as "American" jobs, the association said.
"You do not want to stop these projects if two-thirds is American and one-third is foreign," Chu said on Friday.
'Wind is getting curtailed'
AWEA executives say that policy delay is the real threat to the U.S. competitive position. After strong expansion of wind power in the past two years, orders for the future are jeopardized by low natural gas prices, the recession's impact and transmission bottlenecks. If the U.S. wind sector plateaus, it risks losing technological leadership to European and Chinese rivals, AWEA says.
The current transmission system is too crowded already to deliver the wind power that exists today, Corbus notes. "It's a shame for wind [generation] to be curtailed, and that's happening. Wind is getting curtailed all over the place."
The American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE) also has opposed the senators' proposal, arguing in a letter to Geithner, "We submit that the very reason the United States is falling behind the rest of the world is because the Congress has created on-again, off-again public policy regarding renewable energy."
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory recently concluded that 38 U.S. states have the potential to generate at least 1,000 gigawatts of electricity from onshore wind power, in an updated analysis on its "Wind Powering America" site. These include Midwestern states like Michigan, parts of New York abutting the Great Lakes, and eastern Maine.
Eastern and Great Lakes states may decide that it's worth paying a little more in order to build their own wind projects, creating local jobs and boosting their tax base, said Ralph Izzo, chairman and CEOs of PSEG, the large New Jersey utility.
"I'd like a shot at developing a project," he said. His company is one of 10 in the newly formed Coalition for Fair Transmission Policy, headed by Atlanta-based Southern Co., whose region has among the poorest onshore wind power potential in the country.
The NREL wind integration study headed by Corbus concludes, however, that the most economical wind resources, even when transmission costs are factored in, are in the Great Plains. Izzo and other members of the fair transmission coalition disagree.
Uncertainty is biggest barrier, industry officials say
Reaching a goal of 20 percent wind generation in 2024 would require construction of 10 inter-regional high-voltage lines spanning a total of nearly 22,700 miles, at a cost of $93 billion. Such an ambitious goal won't be achieved under a business-as-usual approach, the study concluded.
"It's super important because of all the jobs that will be launched," said Corbus. "If you don't have the transmission, you don't have the wind going in, and you're going to have jobs lost."
NREL also studied another option, in which aggressive wind development offshore and along the Great Lakes halves the number of long-distance transmission lines needed to maximize wind power delivery.
It's not clear whether a state-by-state approach, including large amounts of offshore wind, can happen quickly enough to reach that 20 percent goal, NREL says. It's also not clear whether state political interests would ever allow the build-out of a big transmission overlay that would speed wind power deployment, or whether regions would agree to consolidate control over the grid, in order to maximize wind power's impact.
Time matters, contend authors of an "Electrification Roadmap," released last year, which charted a scenario for moving a large portion of the U.S. light-duty vehicle fleet from reliance on gasoline power to battery or hybrid power.
If 75 percent of the light-duty vehicle miles traveled in the United States were "electric" miles in 2040, then oil consumption by that fleet would drop from more than 8 million barrels a day today to 2 million, with a corresponding decline in U.S. dependence upon foreign oil, that study says.
To reach that goal, however, the nation would have to hit a "tipping point" around 2020 with new transmission and charging infrastructure capable of serving a quarter of new car and light truck purchases.
"The No. 1 problem is that there's no certainty about what future to plan for," said Evan Wilcox, AEP's manager of transportation business development. "If we knew it would be a 20 percent renewable future, then your transmission would get built."
COMMENTS
outsidethebox at 11:32 AM on 03/08/10
It's been very interesting reading European analysis (pro and con) on wind power there. The consensus seems to be that beyond a certain % of total electrical production the fact that required backup non-wind sources are so expensive (especially when used not very often) that it overcomes a lot of the cost advantages of wind power. The US is far from that point, perhaps 18-20% of total generation, so we should proceed to continue to build
rhodinsthinker at 11:56 AM on 03/08/10
Since the only proper thing to do, for the love of the earth, is to phase the practice of moving carbon from under the ground, where it is doing no harm, into the biosphere, where it is, out of existence as fast as possible, the only alternative is to switch to "renewable" sources and get back into harmony with nature. We cannot undo the past, but we can give the earth the opportunity to, with sufficient time, recover from what has been done.
doug l at 01:26 PM on 03/08/10
Now we see how a complex regulatory landscape, designed to accomplish certain things in the name of fairness, or environmental cleanliness, or some other quality that is easily identified but difficult to define precisely, comes back to bite us on our backsides.
I am an ardent supporter of alternative energy and would love nothing more a reduced impact from human activity on the planet and its creatures, but once a mandate or subsidy enters the framework, we leave reality and take a ride into the unknown where corruption and bad decision making take place under a shower of public money.
For instance: I love windpower, but realistically it hurts birds, and bats, and takes over huge landscapes and the motors required foster an industry where human slaves in China are forced to labor in terrible condition in order to extract the rare-earth elements needed for these millions of exotic high performance generators in both windmills and the zillions of hybrid electric cars that are appearing. In the mean time new ideas about how to extract energy from wind go un-examined since they don't resemble the standard windmill design which seems to have presumed the lead. I'm hoping that new approaches to wind energy, as well as wave energy, ocean currents, as well as nuclear fission and fusion, and the conventional combustion of hydrocarbon fuelled engines continue to be with us and that we abandon the idea that any one solution is perfect.
In the mean time and specifically related to wind energy; I suggest that we be moving in a direction as proposed by a wind energy company called 'regenedyne' whose website is worth googling onto and watching their video. Very interesting.
PsySciGuy at 02:33 PM on 03/08/10
Of course, the REAL problem is government intervention. While congress postures about "green jobs", various special interests attempt to benefit themselves by using federal power to suppress competition. If congress simply ended regulation, the great plains wind power would quickly dominate electric generation in the US. This would in turn put outdated, dirty coal and oil plants out of business because they can't compete on price. Natural gas and nuclear would supplement wind power and broadly distributed generation (including very small producers on Midwestern farms) would ensure steady supply. Distributed solar on consumer house tops would further spread generation while decreasing demand for huge transmission lines.
albertsonrich at 02:42 PM on 03/08/10
What ever happened to the idea to use wind or solar to power electolyzers which can convert the electricity into hydrogen for use in fuel cells which, in turn, can generate pollution free power during off peak periods of wind power. It's all clean and the technology already exists.
candide at 03:00 PM on 03/08/10
Just one more area where China will bolt past the flaccid USA.
sethdayal at 03:44 PM on 03/08/10
Not politics just good sense.
Latest Chinese build Texas wind farm $1.5B. 125 Mwavg, excluding storage, transmission, and tens of millions annually for load balancing natural gas. $12B/Gw.
Big Oil knows any investment in wind must be balanced by a large investment in low efficiency NG. So much NG is needed that an Australian study has shown that it is better to skip the wind and build the high efficency NG plant instead.
The actual cost of American designed NRC approved nukes built by engineers in China is $1.2B/Gw with 4 year construction timeframes.
India's new nuke waste burning 500 Mw GenIV power plant coming into service next year at a cost of $1.5B/Gw.
Both AECL and Westinghouse claim after the first dozen or so are built they can factory mass produced with 3 year lead times at less than $1B/Gw
Real study done by a real engineer looking at repowering Australia with solar and wind.
http://bravenewclimate.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/lang_solar_realities_v2.pdf
http://bravenewclimate.com/2009/09/10/solar-realities-and-transmission-costs-addendum/
Solar PV with Pumped Hydro storage: $2800B
Solar PV with NaS battery storage: $4600B
Solar Thermal with storage: $4400B
Nuclear Power: $120B
The cost of the power lines with Wind & Solar was $180B, 50% MORE THAN THE ENTIRE NUCLEAR OPTION
While solar PV is three times the cost of wind, transmission and storage requirements are similar.
Most summers there are times when all across America there are no storm systems.
Virtually all wind sites would be producing well below average at a time when air conditioning needs and power needs are really high. A huge investment in storage or deadly radioactive radon and GHG spewing natural gas plant is required.
Of course, global warming is completely ignored. Just keep spewing the fossils and killing millions worldwide from fossil fuel air pollution.
A US investment in 2500 mass produced nuclear reactors paid for by ending fossil fuel use, would eliminate most air pollution saving 30 thousand lives annually, end the US contribution to the global warming/ peak oil problem within a ten year time frame, provide a huge job producing boost to the economy, require only a small part of our industrial capacity, and pay for itself in less than three years.
This obsession with wind power by delaying solution indefinitely kills several million people every year worldwide from toxic coal emissions and maybe very soon drags us over that civilization ending climate/peak oil precipice killing billions more.
cslater at 05:35 PM on 03/08/10
This is NOT a "Green" issue; it is about PRIVATE businesses profitting from PUBLIC property. If Cape Wind gets to make a profit from putting wind turbines in public waters, any other private business will want the same treatment: the ability to put private businesses on public property. Why not build a factory in a state park? Cape Wind is counting not having to purchase or rent property or pay any property taxes in order to profit.
jtdwyer at 05:42 PM on 03/08/10
In the simplest of economic terms, an alternative to generating power in the the Midwest, where generating resources are located, and inefficiently transmitting it to the East, where the consumer demand is located, would be to naturally (financially) encourage the relocation of demand nearer the production.
jtdwyer at 08:05 PM on 03/08/10
If our power strategy is to support remote generation and consumption meditated by costly long distance transmission, R&D of higher efficiency transmission is required to minimize total energy costs.