Energy Possibilities: Windows, Windmills, and Satellites

Twenty years after my last physics experiment, I was pleased to read Physics Today’s special issue on the Energy Challenge. Having some recent experience with a 300-MW wind farm on the Oregon–Washington border, I would like to add some comments from a utility’s perspective to Samuel Baldwin’s short treatment of wind energy (page 62 ). As the article suggests, the current generation of wind technology can be cost competitive with traditional thermal power plants.

Two issues that vex utilities considering wind power are the variability and the unpredictability of the resource. Power system operators must match demand and generation on a second-by-second basis. Adding to their systems a resource with wind power’s characteristics simply makes their jobs more difficult, so the system operators tend to oppose wind power on its face. However, they already deal with vast uncertainties from other generating plants that continually suffer complete and partial breakdowns and loads that fluctuate in significantly unpredictable ways. Demand is not fully predictable, either. Adding small amounts of wind power (perhaps up to 10%) to a larger system adds little to the system’s overall unpredictability and, as a practical matter, may hardly be noticed by operators.

Some strong preliminary evidence indicates that a customized mesoscale weather model does a good job of predicting the output of the wind farm on relevant time scales. On the whole, the future for wind power appears very bright.