07/25/08 Integrating Wind Power

Integrating Wind Power. I'm Greg Martin as Line On Agriculture presents the Harvest Clean Energy Report. Creating new energy sources is great. But how do you integrate those new technologies into the existing power infrastructure. Tom Karier, Washington's Representative on the Northwest Power Planning Council lays out the council's Wind Integration Action Plan. KARIER: To try to incorporate more wind power, more cheaply into the northwest power grid and the concept here is something that is very apparent to utilities and to power managers in the region but pretty invisible to most users of electricity. Karier says the point is to maintain a consistent level of power. KARIER: The power system is a very complicated, essentially a machine that's coordinated across vast regions and has to maintain a particular voltage level which means you have to match loads or demands with the supply of electricity minute by minute and even second by second. Keeping up with that level of power is difficult as there are numerous factors including having a coal fire plant or hydroelectric turbine go down. Even extremely warm weather affects power levels. KARIER: Power managers deal with this all the time. Wind simply introduces more variability and a different kind of variability because wind generators obviously produce only when wind blows. That may be at night sometimes, that may be during the day and because it's not exactly predicable, it requires more adjustments on the power side. So what we're doing for this wind integration group is trying to look for strategies that can kind of minimize those costs. And that means figuring out the most advantages way of integrating wind generated power into the grid. KARIER: One strategy we have is to coordinate among more utilities so that they can draw on more resources; that if you have one very small utility with a very small service territory, they have to respond and change their production dramatically every time the wind stops  and blows. But for the same wind site, if that's spread out over the entire northwest, that's a very small fluctuation. And that means lower costs for integrating wind into the system. For additional information on clean energy, visit harvestcleanenergy.org. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network. www.harvestcleanenergy.org