A Canadian company’s wind power development plan highlights a key factor impeding the growth of the wind power industry - the lack of transmission lines near many locations where there’s plenty of wind to spin the giant turbines. The CanWest News Service reports that privately-owned Greengate Power Corp. of Calgary “hopes to take advantage of Alberta’s limited transmission capacity at a time when interest in this province in so-called renewable energy generally - and wind power in particular - is red hot.”
Greengate plans to develop up to 950 megawatts of generation at six sites through southern and central Alberta, says the report, noting that, “the only things the sites have in common is that they are windy, and there’s transmission capacity available nearby.”
While wind power advocates and government officials believe that as many as 3,000 megawatts, or nearly $7 billion in wind power projects, could be developed in Alberta in the near term, proposed wind power projects throughout southern Alberta have been delayed because adequate transmission doesn’t exist to carry the power to customers, says the report.
Greengate is using that challenge as a strategic advantage to build only where capacity already exists. Altogether, using an industry yardstick of $2 million to $2.2 million per megawatt, Greengate is aiming for a portfolio worth up to $2 billion.
Greengate founder, president anc CEO Dan Balaban, a former technology management consultant with Ernst & Young LLP and PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP and a technology entrepreneur, says siting projects near existing transmission lines allows the company ti “significantly accelerate” its development plans.
The Greengate story highlights one of three key problems bedeviling the growth wind power - some of the windiest places on earth are also remote from power transmission lines. Another big problem: the intermittency of wind, making it a less-than-ideal source for base load power. But scientists at Stanford University may have come up with a way to solve that problem.
In a news release (PDF, Text) from Stanford and the American Meteorological Society, the researchers say that wind power long described as fickle “can be groomed to become a steady, dependable source of electricity and delivered at a lower cost than at present.”
The key is connecting wind farms throughout a given geographic area with transmission lines, thus combining the electric outputs of the farms into one powerful energy source. The findings are published in the November issue of the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology. … Interconnecting wind farms with a transmission grid reduces the power swings caused by wind variability and makes a significant portion of it just as consistent a power source as a coal power plant.
It’s a bit like having a bunch of hamsters generating your power, each in a separate cage with a treadmill. At any given time, some hamsters will be sleeping or eating and some will be running on their treadmill. If you have only one hamster, the treadmill is either turning or it isn’t, so the power’s either on or off. With two hamsters, the odds are better that one will be on a treadmill at any given point in time and your chances of running, say, your blender, go up. Get enough hamsters together and the odds are pretty good that at least a few will always be on the treadmill, cranking out the kilowatts.
The combined output of all the hamsters will vary, depending on how many are on treadmills at any one time, but there will be a certain level of power that is always being generated, even as different hamsters hop on or off their individual treadmills. That’s the reliable baseload power.
Interconnected wind farms would operate the same way.
What both of these stories have in common is the need for more transmission lines - both to interconnect wind farms and to connect them to the overall power grid. That’s something to keep in mind if you’re looking to invest in wind power: someone has to build all those transmission lines.
The one big problem facing wind power that scientists can’t solve: NIMBYism.
