Putting wind-generated power where it's needed
Mar 29 - McClatchy-Tribune Regional News - Julie Wernau Chicago Tribune
The national push for more wind turbine-generated electricity could turn
Illinois into a transmission hub.
"Illinois is the crossroads. Historically, whether it's rails, shipping,
travel, O'Hare airport, it's a geographical midpoint, or hub, positioned
for all things moving west to east," said Thomas O'Neill, chief
operating officer at Chicago-based Exelon Transmission Co., a unit of
Exelon Corp.
But while regulators are paving the way for wind-farm development with
tax credits and loosened regulations, the key challenge facing those
developers is that existing transmission lines, substations and
transformers are inadequate to handle the amount of energy expected to
come from wind farms in various stages of development across the
country. There's already a waiting list for wind-farm developers who
want to hook into the existing grid.
"It's easy to be green and say let's build wind but we have to think
about -- how are we going to deliver that?" said O'Neill.
In the near term, companies are opting to harness wind power
closer to existing transmission lines, usually near urban areas, to
avoid the lengthy and costly process of building new lines. Aside from
pockets of strong winds in the midsection of Illinois, however, some of
the most powerful wind in the U.S. stretches from the upper Midwest,
south, into Texas.
In order to integrate and move that alternative power east through
Illinois, the grid would have to be expanded and upgraded, say
transmission experts and utility companies.
The estimated cost to move that wind power east could range from $64
billion to $93 billion in 2009 dollars and would require 17,000 to
22,000 miles of transmission lines to be built in the eastern half of
the country alone, according to the Eastern Wind Integration and
Transmission Study (EWITS) published in January and prepared for the
National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
While electricity demand has increased by about 25 percent since 1990,
according to the U.S. Department of Energy, transmission line
construction has decreased by 30 percent because of the lag time created
as developers justify costs and lay out the impact of new transmission
to regulators at the local, state, regional and federal levels.
According to the American Wind Energy Association, a typical
transmission line takes five years or more to be planned and built,
while a renewable power plant can be constructed in less than a year.
Exelon Corp. is part of the Strategic Midwest Area Transmission (SMART)
Study, sponsored by several Midwestern utilities, which is among dozens
of similar groups studying how a significant increase in the nation's
wind power would impact transmission and how and where new transmission
lines would need to be built to make such a build-out feasible.
These studies say it isn't feasible for businesses to pay costs
associated with the transmission upgrades required to hook into a
congested grid. Many withdraw their requests to hook in once they
realize the significant upgrades that would be needed, according to
Midwest ISO, the organization that coordinates the movement of wholesale
electricity in several states, including much of Illinois. Of more than
70,000 megawatts of generation waiting for permission to hook in to the
grid, 60,000 of that is generated by wind turbines, according to Midwest
ISO.
"You have a lot of projects fighting over the same capacity, how do you
delineate who gets to be first in line?" said Eric Laverty, director at
Midwest ISO.
Under Midwest ISO's auspices in Illinois, more than 30 wind projects are
seeking approval in roughly a dozen counties. Two more wind projects are
waiting in line with Illinois' other regional transmission operator, the
PJM Interconnection, which coordinates movement in all or parts of 13
states, including the ComEd area of Illinois, where Chicago lies.
"In many instances, interconnection studies indicate that adding a new
power plant would overload transformers and transmission lines hundreds
of miles away," the American Wind Energy Association and the Solar
Energy Industries Association concluded in a white paper published last
year. "...Its owners must pay to upgrade all of the transmission
equipment, often at a cost approaching or exceeding the cost of the
power plant itself."
The groups compared the situation to asking the next car on the on-ramp
of a crowded highway to pay to build an extra lane.
For that reason, several consortiums of stakeholders are pushing for
federal regulators to allow utilities to spread the costs of
transmission beyond the regions where those utilities are located. As it
works today, a wind developer would pay to upgrade transmission lines,
pass those costs along when it sells that power, and those costs in turn
are passed along to customers in their bills. Transmission charges in
the ComEd region currently account for about 5 percent of a customer's
electricity bill, according to Exelon. These stakeholders say it would
make more sense to spread that cost out among a larger region that
benefits from the high-capacity transmission lines that have been
proposed.
According to Exelon, the nation's extra-high voltage transmission system
stops at Illinois' doorstep, and significant upgrades are needed for
high wind development.
"There's an existing extra-high voltage system to the east that
essentially stops at the Illinois/Indiana border as you move east to
west," O'Neill said.
LS Power Group, which wants to build a 160-mile transmission line that
would connect three 345-kilovolt substations in Illinois and Indiana,
announced recently that it has begun the lengthy process of convincing
state, federal and regional authorities that its transmission project is
worthwhile enough to pass the costs along to the customers throughout
the mid-Atlantic region.
"It is difficult to develop transmission, and there's a lot of state,
local and federal permits that we have to apply for in order to move
forward with transmission," said Sharon Segner, director at LS Power.
The company said it expects it will take until at least 2014 to gain the
necessary permissions and financing, moves they say would open up wind
development in an area where development has been stymied because of a
lack of transmission lines.
"There is a definite need for new transmission in northern Illinois and
Indiana, with a significant backlog of interconnection requests in these
states," said Lawrence Willick, senior vice president with LS Power
Group.
jwernau@tribune.com
(c) 2010,
McClatchy-Tribune Information Services
|