Integrating wind and hydro power in Quebec
When Hydro-Quebec begins construction next summer on the 1550 MW La Romaine hydroelectric dam, the $2.8 billion-a-year utility will be simultaneously developing smart grid control and load forecasting technologies aimed at integrating hydropower with Quebec’s fast growing inventory of wind farms.
“Hydro-Quebec wants to be a world model for the safe integration of wind and hydro in a major electricity system,” said Louis-Olivier Batty, a spokesman for the company.
The $6.5 billion four-dam project will be completed by 2020, but the first one will come on line in 2014.
To prevent power fluctuations in the grid, intermittent renewables like wind need to be matched with highly flexible base-load sources that can be adjusted rapidly as weather patterns shift. Such load-balancing techniques, said Sean Whittaker, the vice president of policy for the Canadian Wind Energy Association, are difficult to achieve with coal or nuclear plants because their energy output can’t be modulated.
“They like to run at 100 percent or nothing,” Mr. Whittaker said.
But renewable energy advocates have long argued that in regions like the Pacific Northwest, wind and hydro are natural allies because hydroelectric plants can be powered up when the winds taper, and dialed down when it’s gusty, creating a reliable, all-renewable energy platform.
“You’re using the water in the reservoir as a giant battery,” Mr. Whittaker said.
More than 95 percent of Hydro-Quebec’s power comes from massive — and controversial — dam projects. But the Quebec government has asked private energy companies to supply 4,500 megawatts of wind power by 2015, equivalent to 10 percent of the province’s energy supply. In the past few years, numerous wind farms have been established in the Gaspe region, south of the St. Lawrence River.
While hydro electricity doesn’t produce emissions, large hydro dams inflict a heavy ecological toll up-river and have often attracted stiff criticism from environmental groups.
Some hydro-based utilities, like the Bonneville Power Authority in Oregon, have been receptive to calls from renewable energy advocates to promote wind energy.
Others, like B.C. Hydro, have been much slower to recognize the synergies, Mr. Whittaker said. In the case of Quebec, in fact, the policy initiative came from the provincial government, not the utility itself.
By John Lorinc
10 March 2009
Tags: Wind power, Wind energy
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