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Apr 3 - Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News - Les Blumenthal
The News Tribune, Tacoma, Wash.
Think about this the next time you flip a light switch: Washington state now ranks seventh when it comes to the generation of wind power in the United States. Washington is already home to the largest wind farm in the nation, the Stateline project, which straddles the border with Oregon southeast of the Tri-Cities. The $300 million project, built and operated by a Florida-based energy company, includes more than 450 wind turbines that can generate enough electricity to power more than 80,000 homes. The state's five operating wind farms are all east of the Cascade Mountains where winds blow consistently enough to turn the windmills' massive blades. They can produce a combined 390 megawatts of electricity, or roughly the same as a large thermal generating plant powered by natural gas. A nuclear power plant has a capacity of about 1,000 megawatts. Puget Sound Energy, the state's largest utility with more than 1 million customers, is building its second wind farm, this one near Ellensburg. At least one other project is on the drawing board, also for the Ellensburg area. "It's pretty remarkable," said Jeff King, a senior resource analyst for the Northwest Power and Conservation Council, of the growth in wind-generated power in the region. King said the amount of electricity generated by wind turbines in the region could more than double in the next 10 years. Combined with energy conservation, that should mean the region will have enough power to meet demand without having to build major coal, natural gas or nuclear generating plants until at least 2016, he said. The upper Great Plains, along with Texas and Kansas, have the greatest wind energy potential, according to the American Wind Energy Association, a trade group based in Washington, D.C. In order for a wind farm to be successful it must be built where the wind blows about 18 mph "every hour and every day," King said. "That's pretty windy," he said. While there have been several proposals to build wind farms along the coast, they were dropped because the wind wasn't steady enough. The wind turbines automatically shut down when it is too windy, between 50 and 60 mph. Most wind farms in the region operate at capacity only about a third of the time. But even with the sometimes fickle winds, energy analysts say wind power should be a good fit with the region's hydro-electric system, which produces 40 percent to 50 percent of the region's energy. It's called shaping -- when the wind blows, the regions' dams can be shut down. When the wind stops blowing, the dams can be switched back on. Analysts say it is much harder to turn off and on a gas- or coal-fired generating plant or a nuclear power plant than it is a dam. "Hydro is a natural complement to wind, but there are limits," said Ed Mosey a spokesman for the Bonneville Power Administration, which markets the low-cost electricity generated at the region's federal dams on the Columbia and Snake rivers. Only several years ago, Bonneville was considering buying about 1,000 megawatts of wind power to sell to the region's utilities. But BPA scaled that back to about 30 megawatts because it has a surplus of electricity, Mosey said. Though it has looked at the possibility of buying wind power, Tacoma Power also has more electricity than it needs. Steve Klein, Tacoma Power's superintendent, said his utility is exploring the possibility of installing tidal generators in the Tacoma Narrows as it considers environmentally friendly sources of energy. "Tidal might become our wind," he said, adding that generating electricity using tidal generators would be much more predictable than relying on wind to produce power. Even if the region's publicly owned utilities have a surplus of electricity, the region's privately owned utilities, such as Puget Sound Energy, don't. PSE is one of the few utilities in the country that owns and operates its own wind farms. About 5 percent of its electricity now comes from its wind farms. The company wants to double that to 10 percent by 2013. "It appears to have a very bright future," said Grant Ringal, a PSE spokesman.
WIND POWER FACTS: Top 10 states, based on installed capacity: --California, 2,150 megawatts; --Texas, 1,995; --Iowa, 836; --Minnesota, 744; --Oklahoma, 475; --New Mexico, 407; --Washington, 390; --Oregon, 338; --Wyoming, 288; --Kansas, 264 Worldwide capacity: 56,000 megawatts U.S. capacity: 9,100 megawatts, enough to supply 2.3 million average households Number of states with wind farms: 44 Nation's top producer: FPL Energy of Florida, which operates wind farms in 20 states, including the Stateline wind farm in Eastern Washington
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