Winds Stirring Up North

Energy Prospects - 10/19/04

While the reinstated Production Tax Credit for wind energy has revived the sector in the United States, at least temporarily, recent actions in Canada are aimed at growing the nascent sector there.

Hydro-Quebec on Oct. 4 announced the selection of eight bids that will bring a total of nine new wind farms and 990 MW of wind capacity to Quebec between 2006 and 2012. The development was followed by Premier Jean Charest's announcement that Quebec's government is requesting further proposals meant to harvest an additional 1,000 MW of wind power in the province.

Development of the initial 990 MW will significantly boost Canada's relatively small national wind capacity of 439 MW and also maintain Quebec's position, along with Alberta, as one of the country's two provincial wind power leaders. Quebec and Alberta currently possess 113 MW and 269 MW of wind capacity, respectively.

Alberta, which envisions bringing an additional 1,200 MW of wind capacity online by 2007, has nonetheless found itself embroiled in a debate concerning soon-to-be-released wind interconnection standards that threaten to impede development in that province. In June, the Alberta Electric System Operator released a framework of wind facility technical requirements that the Canadian Wind Energy Association argued "go well beyond those of other North American control areas." Costs associated with AESO's draft requirements, CanWEA said, "would threaten C$1.5 billion of potential future investment by the wind energy industry in Alberta."

"We had a great deal of concern with the first [interconnection] proposal," CanWEA President Robert Hornung told Prospects. He added, however, that while AESO's draft requirements in some instances "required technologies that are not even at this point available in the marketplace," AESO has since heeded a number of the wind industry's concerns. "We are now hopeful that a revised and final draft will be more reflective of these concerns," he said.

Hornung added that AESO also is cooperating with the wind industry toward conducting a third-party study on wind variability in Alberta. The wind industry is confident the new study will prove that variability associated with integrating an additional 1,200 MW of wind capacity by 2007 will have less of an impact on Alberta's grid than was first suggested under a previous AESO-commissioned report, he said.

AESO's Final Wind Power Facility Technical Requirements report is scheduled for release Oct. 30. The system operator says that new standards are needed to ensure "the safe, reliable, fair and economic operation" of Alberta's electric system. "The objective here, really, is to design a reliable system that will enable a lot more wind to get interconnected," Fred Ritter, AESO's director of engineering, told Canadian wind industry newsletter WindSight in September.

At the national level, last week in its Speech from the Throne, Canada's federal government committed to support the development of 4,000 MW of wind energy by extending the country's Wind Power Production Incentive from its original target of 1,000 MW. While CanWEA applauded the move, Hornung said that specific details of the commitment, including incentive levels and targeted timeframes, still need to be ironed out. At its current level, Canada's WPPI provides a 1-cent-per-kilowatt-hour credit toward wind power produced at qualifying wind farms over a 10-year period.

The commitment to extend the federal WPPI will nonetheless stimulate increased development of wind power in Canada, and ultimately will help create "a domestic market large enough to attract manufacturers of wind turbines and wind turbine components" to the country, said Hornung. Canada's first national wind resources map is also expected to be completed this month. The map will not only identify the scale of potential wind resources available in Canada, but will also "break down any perceptions that wind is not poised to be a major contributor to Canada's electric supply," he told Prospects. [Joel Puglisi]