Too much of a good thing: Growth in wind power makes life difficult for grid managers

The fast-growing number of wind farms in the Northwest, such as the Biglow Canyon Wind Farm near Rufus, has created new challenges for those who manage the power grid.
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On the afternoon of May 19, in a single chaotic hour, more than a thousand wind turbines in the Columbia River Gorge went from spinning lazily in the breeze to full throttle as a storm rolled east out of Hood River.

Suddenly, almost two nuclear plants worth of extra power was sizzling down the lines -- the largest hourly spike in wind power the Northwest has ever experienced.

At the Bonneville Power Administration's control room in Vancouver, it was too much of a good thing. More electricity than its customers needed. More than the available power lines could export from the region. And more than the grid could readily absorb by ramping down generation at the region's network of federal dams.

So the edict went out: Feather your turbine blades; slash output.

It was an unwelcome instruction for wind farm owners, whose economics depend on generating electricity whenever possible. Yet it's one likely to go out with increasing frequency.

During the last three years, the building boom spawned by green energy mandates in Oregon, Washington and California doubled the generation capacity of wind farms in the region. By 2013, it's expected to double again.

That seems like great news. Plenty of carbon-free energy with no fuel costs. Jobs. Property taxes.

In the real world, however, the pace and geographic concentration of wind development, coupled with wild swings in its output, are overwhelming the region's electrical grid and outstripping its ability to use the power or send it elsewhere.

In theory, better coordination of the balkanized grid operations around the west could help solve the problem, reducing costs, eliminating bottlenecks and solving scheduling conflicts that plague the system today.

In practice, however, those efforts have often stalled at the planning stage -- the victim of risk-averse engineers, utility managers or public utility customers worried about seeing their rates increase.

More: http://www.oregonlive.com/business/index.ssf/2010/07/too_much_of_a_good_thing_growt.html

Lame.

Instead we hear Biden tell us we can't get 8 million jobs back into this country. :eyes:

Ugh this is definitely one of my biggest gripes against Obama. He has no vision.

That means wind power is mostly big corporation or tax shelters, neither of which is long term an sustainable. Until small property owners can have windmills as well as solar cells, that will continue to be the case.

Excess production = improve the grid load capacity and set up storage mechanisms(electrolysis comes to mind). We'll have to do it for solar anyway.

Then have it stored ready to use later.

We will deal with the technological glitch.