http://awea.org myBloggie - Open Source Weblog http://backend.userland.com/rss http://mybloggie.mywebland.com/?v=2.1.6 http://awea.org/blog/index.php?mode=viewid&post_id=336 11 Mar 2010 08:13:16 pm GMT + AWEA News http://awea.org/blog/index.php?mode=viewid&post_id=336 Here's a quote from a blog on a website hosted by SNL interaactive, written by Bill Burson: [quote]The main problem is the wind doesn't blow all the time, and the backup generation necessary when the wind stops blowing can generate more pollution than what was saved originally. Public Service Co. of Colorado uses more wind power in its average hourly electric generation mix than any utility in the country, but Denver's air pollution problem has not improved. [/quote] Here is our response from AWEA's Michael Goggin: [quote]It is unfortunate to see another recitation of the myth that "the backup generation necessary when the wind stops blowing can generate more pollution than what was saved originally." This myth is so persistent that we've taken the time to create a [url=http://www.awea.org/pubs/factsheets/Backup_Power.pdf]fact sheet[/url] to debunk it: The reality is that wind energy typically adds only a small increment of variability to the power system, beyond the large degree of variability in electricity supply and demand that already exists on the grid (from factors like millions of people turning air conditioners on and off, steel mills turning electric furnaces on and off, and power plants experiencing forced outages). Since wind's variability tends to be uncorrelated with these other sources of variability over the short time periods relevant for system balancing, much of wind's variability is canceled out by other sources of variability. The incremental variability introduced by wind can also be greatly reduced through a number of cost-effective changes to the power grid, like building a more robustly interconnected grid, creating larger balancing areas, implementing faster generator dispatch intervals, making greater use of dynamic scheduling or energy imbalance markets, and expanding use of energy and ancillary services markets. The incremental variability that wind energy does add to the system tends to occur very gradually, over the course of an hour or more. This type of variability can be cheaply and efficiently accommodated by non-spinning reserves, provided by hydroelectric plants or natural gas plants, including the quick-start plants mentioned by Mr. Burson. Mr. Burson is correct that some coal power plants, particularly old, inflexible, inefficient ones, may have difficulty responding to dispatch instructions to change their output. However, the likely outcome is that these inflexible coal plants will turn off and remain off during periods of the year when wind output is likely to be high, since doing so is more economic than staying online and essentially paying wind plants to use their superior flexibility to curtail their output. As the results of NREL's recent Eastern Wind Integration and Transmission Study (EWITS) indicated, much of that coal energy and capacity will likely be replaced by natural gas generation, thereby reducing emissions by even more than the amount directly displaced by wind energy. For example, EWITS found that CO2 emissions decrease by more than 25% in the 20% wind energy scenarios and 37% in the 30% wind energy scenario, compared to a scenario in which our current generation mix was used to meet increasing electricity demand. This is because coal generation declined by around 23% from the business-as-usual case to the 20% wind cases, and by 35% in the 30% wind case. Thus, Mr. Burson's fear that emissions will somehow increase with a larger amount of wind, based on an anecdotal claim that air quality in the Denver area has not improved as more wind has been deployed (which, if true, I'm guessing is caused by an increase in fossil fuel use by the transportation, heating, and/or industrial sectors), is directly refuted by the most detailed model ever built of how wind energy actually interacts with the power system. And common sense. [/quote] http://awea.org/blog/index.php?mode=viewid&post_id=335 09 Mar 2010 09:30:57 pm GMT + AWEA News http://awea.org/blog/index.php?mode=viewid&post_id=335 The U.S. wind industry is descending on Washington this week to make the case for jobs, jobs, and more jobs. John W. Grabner, Executive Director, Cardinal Fastener & Specialty Company, Inc., in Bedford Heights, Ohio, is growing a manufacturing business by fashioning bolts for wind turbines. He says if Congress passes a renewable electricity standard (RES), it will have three outcomes: “Jobs, jobs, jobs.” "We are doubling employment at our company because we are supplying the turbine manufacturers in the United States." Vic Abate sees the same industry from a different angle. He is Vice President for Renewables for GE Energy, the largest U.S. manufacturer of wind turbines. He has watched the U.S. wind industry grow, and has watched as the domestic content of U.S. turbines has doubled with increased demand. He thinks we will see a new growth spurt in manufacturing, if we get a renewable electricity standard. “I have a dozen suppliers who will follow us into the U.S. market with the right policies.” But all of the industry leaders here this week know they face something of a head wind: critics are savaging the wind industry lately because not all of the parts are made in the United States. Armed with a series of specious and superficial reports, Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York—the home of GE and a state that is eight in total wind installations—has called on Congress to suspend any stimulus funds to companies that use foreign parts in their turbines. “This discussion has already had a chilling effect on existing American jobs,” said Don Furman, Senior Vice President for Iberdrola Renewables, the second largest U.S. wind developer and the larest worldwide.. Denise Bode, AWEA’s CEO, is ready and willing to take on the critics. “They are coming after us because we have the facts on our side. We are very well positioned. If you put an RES in place, you will see explosive growth in manufacturing.” http://awea.org/blog/index.php?mode=viewid&post_id=334 08 Mar 2010 06:58:20 pm GMT + AWEA News http://awea.org/blog/index.php?mode=viewid&post_id=334 Texas, which has far outdistanced other states in building wind farms and will likely widen its lead still further over the next few years, set a [url=http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/05/setting-wind-power-records-in-texas/]record Friday (March 5) for instantaneous wind generation, as detailed by Kate Galbraith in the New York Times Green Inc. blog[/url]. The record mark, 6,272 megawatts (MW), is about what five million average American homes use (on average), and it amounted to 19% of the electricity being used at the time in the Lone Star State. Look for more records in the not-too-distant future, as Texas moves ahead with ambitious plans to build new transmission lines to the state's windy west. http://awea.org/blog/index.php?mode=viewid&post_id=333 08 Mar 2010 06:08:16 pm GMT + AWEA News http://awea.org/blog/index.php?mode=viewid&post_id=333 OK, so we have been beating the drums for a while about a national [url=http://www.awea.org/pubs/factsheets/RES_General.pdf]Renewable Electricity Standard--talking about how it will save consumers money, create jobs, and help build a clean renewable energy industry in the U.S.[/url] Who cares? We're the wind industry, and wind is renewable, so obviously we think it's a good idea. Now comes the Chair of the Public Service Commission of Wisconsin (PCSW), the regulatory agency that oversees that state's utility industry, and guess what? He thinks the same thing. Chairman Eric Callisto's [url=http://www.renewwisconsin.org/blogdocs/PSC%20Ratepayer%20Analysis.pdf]letter on the effects of a renewable electricity standard[/url] responds to a request from three legislators. The three asked for "a Commission analysis of the expected costs to utilities and ratepayers of meeting a 25% by 2025 Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) as proposed in the Clean Energy Jobs Act." Comments Chairman Callisto, "As I have testified to both the Assembly and Senate Select Committees, the electric utility sector policies in the proposed legislation - namely, the enhanced RPS and energy efficiency provisions - represent sound energy policy for Wisconsin. The Commission's analysis shows that if we continue with business as usual, if we decide to do nothing, we are taking on great financial risk in a changing world, and our ratepayers will be leaving substantial dollars on the table. "As our nation recovers from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, we of course must continue to support Wisconsin's bedrock industries like agriculture and manufacturing. But we must also position Wisconsin to lead in emerging sectors like clean energy. Numerous third party reviews, independent studies, and industry recognized research all show that the Clean Energy Jobs Act will create more than 15,000 net new jobs in Wisconsin, not just in new fields, but in construction, manufacturing, forestry, and agriculture ... "Across the state, companies like Virent, Johnson Controls, Orion Energy, Wind Capital Group, Waukesha Electric, ZBB Energy, Helios USA, Cardinal Glass, Renewegy, Nature Tech, Energy Performance Specialists, Tower Tech and many others provide good jobs for people producing alternative forms of energy. None of these companies would be producing these jobs without good public policy, aggressive energy efficiency efforts, and renewable energy standards." There's more--nearly eight pages, detailing the Commission's analysis of the proposed statute and noting that a conflicting study by the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute and Beacon Hill Institute is "of near zero value," due to an inadequate series of assumptions. But the central message is clear enough, and is underlined for emphasis by Chairman Callisto: [b][u]"[W]e will in all likelihood be spending more on electricity in the long run if we don't act now and enact enhanced renewable portfolio standards and take more aggressive action on energy efficiency."[/u][/b] http://awea.org/blog/index.php?mode=viewid&post_id=332 05 Mar 2010 04:53:26 pm GMT + AWEA News http://awea.org/blog/index.php?mode=viewid&post_id=332 [b]Guest blog by AWEA's Michael Goggin[/b] Haphazardly dropped into the middle of an interesting and otherwise technically accurate [url=http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/05/business/05solar.html][i]New York Times[/i] article[/url] about a new type of solar power plant are a couple of paragraphs of unsubstantiated nonsense on the topic of wind energy integration. The only source for the “information” in these paragraphs appears to have been an interview with Lester Lave, a wind opponent who is well-known among wind integration experts for making technically specious claims on the topic. To refute his misleading or outright incorrect claims point-by-point: 1. "'As long as the contribution of wind and solar is very small, utilities can handle it very well,' Mr. Lave said. But what happens once the share of renewable power rises to 10 percent? Or 20 percent? 'No one knows what the magic number is.'" That statement would certainly come as a surprise to utility system operators in Germany, Spain, Denmark, Portugal, or Ireland, or for that matter any of a number of regions of the U.S., all of which have successfully integrated wind penetrations of around 10% up to 20% and beyond. Ireland, for example, is at approximately 10% wind penetration, and its government recently completed a study concluding that there are no major technical barriers to reaching 40% wind penetration. That is especially noteworthy because integrating wind energy onto the grid is more challenging on a small island than it is on a large interconnected power system like we have in the U.S. Denmark currently stands well over the 20% wind mark and is working to increase that amount several times over. At the very moment that I am writing this (the evening of March 4), wind is providing over 20% of the electricity being used in Texas. In these places there may be some costs to operating the power system differently than it would have been operated without a large amount of wind, but any wind integration expert would laugh at that the idea that there is a “magic number” ceiling on the amount of wind that can be integrated with the power system. 2. "Spain, which generates more than 12 percent of its electricity from wind, has struggled with wind variability, Mr. Lave said." This statement would also come as a surprise to grid operators in Spain. Among wind integration experts, Spain is widely regarded as a success story and as a pioneer in developing advanced wind forecasting and other techniques that have made it possible to incorporate a large amount of wind energy at low cost. In fact, wind has provided more than 40% of Spain’s electricity on several occasions and in one instance 53% of the nation’s power without any problems. Some substantiation for the claim that Spain has “struggled with wind variability” would have been helpful, because most wind integration experts would be at a loss if forced to guess what Mr. Lave is referring to with that statement. 3. "Because electricity cannot be stored easily, utilities must always produce enough power to meet electric demand at any given time. In practice, this means they need keep a lot of idle plants that can be fired up rapidly when demand spikes." The article misleadingly implies that these power plants must be kept around for the sole purpose of accommodating the variability of wind energy and other renewable resources, when in reality the power system has always operated with a significant margin of plants that can be called up when electricity demand increases. Electricity demand varies by a factor of three or more depending on the time of day and year, so at any point in time the odds are that less than half of a utility’s generation capacity is being utilized, whether it has wind on its system or not. In addition, recent wind integration studies like [url=http://www.nrel.gov/wind/systemsintegration/pdfs/2010/ewits_executive_summary.pdf]one released by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in January[/url] have found that adding diversely located wind energy resources to the power system can significantly reduce the quantity of power plants that must be maintained for capacity adequacy reasons. 4. "In 2008, for example, Texas narrowly avoided a blackout when wind power, which supplied 5 percent of demand at the time, experienced an unexpected lull…" No wind-bashing article would be complete without reciting the oft-repeated and even more oft-debunked myth about wind supposedly causing an emergency situation on Texas’s power grid two years ago. In reality, the generation shortfall that day was almost entirely caused by a combination of (1) electricity demand increasing by 1,185 MW more than expected over a single hour and (2) conventional generators falling below their scheduled output. By comparison, wind output gradually declined over the course of four hours, a change that would now be easily predicted at least a day in advance by the wind forecasting program the Texas grid operator has now implemented. Moreover, the events of that day were hardly a near-blackout as Lave claims; generation shortfalls of an even larger magnitude occur several times per year on average, almost always when a large nuclear or coal plant experiences an unexpected outage and takes 1,000 MW or more of generation offline instantaneously. For a more detailed discussion of what really happened that day, please see: [url]http://www.awea.org/newsroom/pdf/AWEA_Viewpoint_on_ERCOT_event_031208.pdf[/url]