| Wind Watch is a registered educational charity, founded in 2005. |
Too much wind power?
Credit: www.democratherald.com 17 May 2011 ~~
Translate: FROM English | TO English
Translate: FROM English | TO English
Well, who would have thought it? All that investment in wind power in Oregon and Washington now turns out to be too much, at least for now.
The Bonneville Power Administration says it is generating so much hydropower that it won’t be able to buy the output of wind farms.
Turns out that the predictions of the global warming experts – less snow – did not apply for this past winter and spring. The Columbia has so much water coming down that the turbines have to be churning away at full tilt. Spilling the water over the dams is not allowed because it would supersaturate the water and hurt various species of fish.
And there is no capacity in the transmission grid to ship the extra power somewhere else, even if “somewhere else” needed extra power.
All this may tell us something about the merits of planning by government policies instead of practical considerations.
The push to alternative energy sources is the result of policy choices, made mostly by Democrats in Salem, Olympia and Washington, D.C. The governments have been lavishing benefits on the wind power industry. The utilities have played along because new laws put them under pressure to generate a set percentage of electricity from alternative sources by 2025.
But nobody evidently thought this through.
Well, not exactly nobody. Pacific Power, for one, has been asking the feds in Washington— apparently without success – to accelerate the approval of new transmission lines in order to carry the output of all these new wind farms the government has wanted the utilities to build.
None of this would be a problem if the utilities had been left alone in planning for the future power needs of their respective territories. They would have built plants and lines as they were needed, assuming the regulations allowed them to do so.
Instead they got hammered into a drive to build wind farms that now are not as useful as they appeared.
This article is the work of the source indicated. Any opinions expressed in it are not necessarily those of National Wind Watch.
The copyright of this article resides with the author or publisher indicated. As part of its noncommercial educational effort to present the environmental, social, scientific, and economic issues of large-scale wind power development to a global audience seeking such information, National Wind Watch endeavors to observe “fair use” as provided for in section 107 of U.S. Copyright Law and similar “fair dealing” provisions of the copyright laws of other nations. Send requests to excerpt, general inquiries, and comments via e-mail.
| Wind Watch relies entirely on User Funding |
 (via Stripe) |
 (via Paypal) |
Share:
[ Short URL: https://wind-watch.org/news/?p=48883 ]
