Like mail-order brides, thousands of long-limbed wind turbines are coming to the empty outback of Washington and Oregon, where they are being married off, via the electrical grid, to hulking old hydroelectric dams.
These are arranged weddings for a warming world – designed never to give birth to greenhouse gases.
The Pacific Northwest is hardly alone as it chases the wind for clean power. Anxiety about climate change and surging demand for electricity have triggered a wind-power frenzy in much of the United States, making it the fastest growing wind-energy market in the world. Power-generating capacity from wind jumped 27 percent last year and is expected to do the same this year.
But it is in the Northwest where wind power, an often capricious source of electricity, meshes most seamlessly with the existing electricity grid, which relies heavily on hydroelectric dams, power managers say. This meshing of power sources is done in a way that maximizes power reliability while minimizing the grid’s need for energy from fossil fuels, which release the greenhouses gases that cause global warming.
“It is synergy on a scale that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world,” said Ken Dragoon, research director at the Renewable Northwest Project, a coalition of public-interest groups and energy companies.
For this synergy, thank concrete monstrosities such as Grand Coulee Dam, a federal barrier that has been squatting on the Columbia River since 1942 and is still the largest electrical generating machine in North America. Grand Coulee and other huge dams in the region are proving to be extraordinarily nimble mates for the graceful but fickle wind turbines.
When the wind fails here or when big cities demand peak power, dams can step in almost instantly and steady the electricity load. Hydroelectric power plants ramp up faster and more efficiently than coal-fired or nuclear plants, and without the chronic uncertainties in cost that plague gas-fired plants. The Pacific Northwest gets more of its electricity from hydro – 67 percent – than any other region of the country. That’s mostly because the Columbia, by itself, embodies a third of the continent’s hydroelectric potential.
The era of dam building, though, is long gone, and existing dams cannot keep up with the new demand for power.
As a result, wind capacity in this region is exploding, from just 25 megawatts in 1998 to a projected 3,800 megawatts by 2009. Last year alone, Washington state added 428 megawatts of wind power, trailing only Texas in new installations. One megawatt of wind power can supply the needs of 225 to 300 homes, on average, each day.
Randall Swisher, executive director of the American Wind Energy Association, a trade group, said the electrical grid in the Northwest is uniquely accommodating to wind power because of the dominance of hydroelectricity, and because of relatively reliable wind, progressive utility companies and new state laws demanding renewable energy. Those laws require utilities, over time, to generate 15 to 25 percent of their energy from sources that do not cough carbon into the air.
In a draft of a wind-power report that is scheduled for release this week, four major Northwest utilities and a federal agency called the Bonneville Power Administration say that they have found “no fundamental technical barriers” to integrating 6,000 megawatts of wind power into the regional grid.
That would produce clean electricity for 1.3 million to 1.8 million homes – and increase the use of wind power, as a percentage of total regional electricity production, to 8 percent. It is now 3 percent.
“That is enormous in its implications,” said Pascal Storck, president of 3Tier, a Seattle-based firm that advises companies investing in renewable energy. “It means the region is really ready to use this energy.”
When the wind does blow – and it blows a lot out here in the semiarid and relatively unpopulated farm country east of the Cascade Mountains – there is a unique wind-hydro bonus that helps keep greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere.
As wind turbines produce electricity, the big dams ease off, conserving more water, allowing them to produce more clean energy as needed.
The Northwest has been flat-out lucky when it comes to wind power, several experts say.
Besides the dams that iron out kinks in the wind, it so happens that the wind blows hardest and most reliably in those parts of eastern Washington and eastern Oregon where there is an abundance of high-voltage transmission lines that run west to the population centers of Seattle and Portland.
The wind blows in pretty much the same places where hydro dams were built by the federal government and private utilities between 1940 and 1970. Major transmission lines that connect those dams to the West Coast grid have considerable unused capacity – although new lines will need to be strung in coming years as energy generated from wind power increases.
“It is an almost ideal land-use situation,” said Jeff King, a senior resource analyst for the Northwest Power and Planning Council, a regional group created by Congress to balance electricity production and environmental needs. “We have avoided the aesthetic and environmental controversies that have plagued wind development in other areas of the country.”
Most local land owners and county governments have embraced wind power, primarily because there is money in it for them. A farmer can expect $2,000 to $4,000 per year by allowing a wind turbine to stand on his property.
Just north of the Columbia River in Washington’s Klickitat County, the planned construction of at least four large wind farms is expected to yield about $5 million a year in property taxes. That windfall will increase county tax receipts by about 25 percent, and the money is likely to keep flowing for decades.
“Oh, yeah, this is by far the biggest boom for the tax rolls we have ever seen,” said H.J. Vandenberg, the county assessor.
There is, though, a fundamental unanswered question about wind and hydro: Is the combination good for the salmon? Those fish are often described as symbols of all that is worthwhile about life in the Pacific Northwest.
Dams have been famously destructive of salmon, blocking or delaying their migration, while pushing many species to the brink of extinction. This has triggered a complicated and costly effort to use the Endangered Species Act to protect the fish.
Some environmentalists are hopeful that wind power, because it allows more water to be stored in the river, will be good for salmon. They say there will be more water to spill downstream when salmon need it for migration.
But at the Northwest Power and Conservation Council, King is not so sanguine.
“For hydro to work well with wind for reliable power production, it needs to release water on a minute-to-minute schedule,” King said. “There is going to be a conflict with fish.”
By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Staff Writer
21 March 2007
URL to article: https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2007/03/21/regions-hydro-heavy-electric-grid-makes-for-wind-energy-synergy/