One thing that kind of oozed out of a Houston meeting this week attended by some
hard-core supporters of electricity storage: a certain animosity
toward the American Wind Energy Association.
Tones of sarcasm infused the
comments of some speakers and any number of attendees, some of
whom work for well-known utilities, equipment manufacturers, law
firms, and even boutique investment firms and banks. There was
one former state utility commissioner whose private comments
about AWEA were particularly biting.
The clear sense was that AWEA has been
plenty aggressive in pushing its members' message in Washington,
that it has succeeded in getting a considerable amount of
stimulus money out of the Obama administration, and that it
wants even more.
What is particularly galling to the
"storage community," as some who attended the Houston
conference now refer to themselves, is that AWEA has done
nothing for them.
Though storage is seen by others as an
adjunct to wind, theoretically helping intermittent wind
generation smooth out its ups and downs, those struggling to
push more use of storage say that AWEA is essentially
indifferent toward them.
(At the Houston
conference, which was put together by Platts, there was
consistent reference to a North American Electric Reliability
Corp.
assessment, which laid out the need for more storage.)
The attack from the storage folks was
actually more specific. They say that AWEA is afraid to support
storage because it would be admitting that wind intermittency is
a weakness in their cause. (Several noted how the wind industry
now prefers the word "variable" to "intermittent".)
On its web site, the wind association says
this: "The reality is that, while several small-scale energy
storage demonstration projects have been conducted, the US was able to
add over 8,500 MW of wind power to the grid in 2008 without
adding any commercial-scale energy storage."
AWEA says, "Similarly, European countries
like Denmark, Spain, Ireland and Germany
have successfully integrated very large amounts of wind energy
without having to install new energy storage resources. In the US,
numerous peer-reviewed studies have concluded that wind energy
can provide 20% or more of our electricity without any need for
energy storage."
