After Gutenberg

New York Times Green Blogger Kate Galbraith reports a record for wind generation in the United States. The record-setting happened in Texas, the nation’s wind-power leader. On 5 Mar 2010 at 6:37 a.m. the state’s main grid received about 19 percent of wind-powered electricity.

The 6,272-megawatt peak — which does not include turbines in the windy Panhandle because that region is on a different grid — surpassed another record. The state’s overall wind average is significantly lower than these spikes: Last year Texas got 6.2 percent of its electricity from wind, according to Dottie Roark, a spokeswoman for the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which operates the grid serving most of the state. The nation as a whole has less than 2 percent wind in its electricity mix.

A new NREL study offers great new maps of wind energy potential across the country, highlighting areas with key elements necessary for development: high wind speeds, access to transmission lines, and cheap land. The resolution of the Truewind maps is 650 feet, “so developers could use them not just to located the best area for an entire farm, but for each machine.”

As Lena Hansen and Amory Lovins nevertheless noted recently, “Denmark already is 20 percent wind-powered, heading for 50 percent to 60 percent, and five German states are 30 percent to 40 percent wind-powered (over 100 percent at some times).” A new study by NREL (the National Renewable Energy Laboratory) found that the U.S. could theoretically generate 37 million gigawatt-hours of wind power per year. Such development is critical in a nation, the electricity mix for which is presently less than 2 percent wind.

One reason that Texas leads other states in wind power is the amount of high-quality sites. Another reason is that Texas has an RPS (Renewable Portfolio Standard). The RPS and similar requirements equal a target of 5880 MW by 2015.

Photo: Brian Harkin for The New York Times

Texas “is able to break new wind records due partly to the growth of wind in areas with sufficient transmission. A 180-megawatt wind farm opened last September near Corpus Christi, noted Ms. Roark of the electric council. NextEra Energy Resources, a major wind developer, also recently completed a private transmission line for its enormous wind farm in West Texas.”

Developers already have exceeded that target. Since developers already have built around 7000 MW, there have been market adjustments. So many wind turbines have gone up in West Texas that when wholesale prices crashed and a fair amount of existing wind farms shut down.

Texas’s progress in installing turbines is testing the bounds of just how much wind the electrical grid can handle. Some turbines are slowed or shut down on windy days because the state does not have sufficient transmission wires to move all the power from the remote, windy areas of West Texas to cities like Dallas and Houston that need it. Last night and this morning, for example, the prices for wind generation offered on the main Texas grid actually fell below zero, a sign of oversupply that usually prompts wind generators to shut their turbines down.

Texas is spending nearly $5 billion to fix the transmission problem. It plans to build a web of power lines that would be able to deliver the wind energy from congested West Texas, home to 89 percent of the wind capacity on the state’s main grid, to power-hungry cities. That process, however, looks likely to be delayed by a recent court decision.

Centralized power production in the United States and throughout the world historically has used a “sledgehammer” approach to power production, i.e., two-thirds of the energy consumed to create electricity is lost in the conversion process. And, the ongoing thinking would seem to be, “No matter. We just will blow the tops off some more mountains and keep on polluting the atmosphere with Green House Gases.”

This report comes after T. Boone Pickens said that he scuttled a Texas wind farm project in part because of the lack of adequate transmission lines from remote locations to cities. This blog also touched on this topic recently. Where wind and solar energy is abundant also can present challenges transmitting the electricty to big markets.

The transmission issue is complex. Trading electricity (and greater dependency upon electric propulsion) requires improvements to the existing infrastructure; so stimulus money must go toward repair and enhancement of existing grids. Yet without investment in new transmission such development is bias toward the status quo, i.e., inefficient, dirty, centralized electric power plants. Texas’s challenges, observes Gailbraith, “may serve as a test case for the nation.”

A 2008 Department of Energy report outlined the changes that will be needed if the nation is going to achieve a goal of 20 percent wind power by 2030. One of the key prerequisites, the report said, is better transmission lines.

And, not the only prerequisite… an article in the Wall Street Journal explains another reason for seeing an oversupply of wind power: a fall of about 70% in natural gas prices from last year’s high made wind less attractive as a source of power. Yet at a time when climatologists forecast a 2 degree Centigrade increase in global average temperature, how could there be an oversupply of low-carbon energy?

Yes, the question was rhetorical. Yes, the answer is BAUAAE. Yes, this blog is in a funk and it blames Professor Joe.

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• U.S. Could Generate 37 Million GWh of Wind Power Per Year (peakenergy.blogspot.com)
• NREL: US has three times more wind electrictiy potential than previously thought (climateprogress.org)
• America’s Wind Energy Potential Triples in New Estimate (wired.com)
• T. Boone Pickens Planning a New Wind Farm (500 MW), But Not in Texas Panhandle (treehugger.com)
• Transmitting the Clean-Energy Future – Supreme Court dashes hopes of backers of federal transmission siting (climateprogress.org)
• Massive Texas Wind Farm Operating (abcnews.go.com)