North by Northwest

There are some huge wind “parks” in the works that are coming to a state near you. Read on to find out about the latest developments in wind energy.

Clipper, BP Plan World’s Largest Wind Farm in S. Dakota

Clipper Windpower Plc (CWP.L) announced yesterday that it has entered into a 50-50 joint venture, with BP Alternative Energy, a unit of BP (NYSE: BP), to develop the Titan wind project, which if completed, will be the world’s largest wind facility–beating out the 4,000-MW project recently announced by T. Boone Pickens Mesa Power.

The farm will produce 5,050 MW with 2,020 2.5 MW Liberty wind turbines.

Website: www.clipperwind.com

Nation’s first offshore wind “park” in the nation’s “first state” Delaware

Bluewater Wind is developing the country’s first offshore wind “park” off the coast of Delaware. They expect that it will be barely visible or not visible at all.

A contract to build what is being called the nation’s first offshore field of wind turbines was announced Monday by a Delaware utility and a firm that will build the generators off the Atlantic coast.

Bluewater spokesman Jim Lanard said the power company will get about 16 percent of its electricity from a field of 150 wind turbines, anchored in the seafloor about a dozen miles off Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.

Bluewater has previously established an offshore “energy park” operating off Denmark.

Each turbine in the Delaware project is to sit on a pole about 250 feet above the waterline, where the ocean is about 75 feet deep. The poles are to extend 90 feet into the seafloor, and the units are to be constructed to withstand hurricane-force winds.

More details about the project here: www.bluewaterwind.com/delaware.htm

The DOE recently reported that it thinks the US can generate 20% of our electricity from wind by the year 2030.

For reference, today wind accounts for only 1% of the nation’s electricity.

Currently, fossil fuels generate 85 percent of American energy, and about 70 percent of our electricity. Renewables (outside hydroelectric dams) are only responsible for a couple percent of our current electricity capacity. However, wind power has been expanding rapidly, growing 45 percent in 2007, as its cost has become competitive with traditional fossil fuel sources.

Major business players from General Electric to oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens have gotten behind its deployment. Pickens, for example, is planning a $10 billion, 4-gigawatt peak production wind farm. A major driver of these investments is the price of oil, which is sitting over $120 a barrel, with long-term futures contracts also over $100 a barrel. The cost of natural gas is pegged to the price of oil, so rising oil costs make alternative energy investments more attractive. At the same time, scaling wind technologies is bringing their price down.

But there are major questions about the actual electricity production that wind farms put out. As many wind critics point out, four gigawatts of wind power isn’t the same as four gigawatts of coal because the wind isn’t always blowing, reducing their average watt ouput. Many grid engineers also think wind is a nightmare because it is so inconsistent, a problem that mass deployment of wind will make more and more apparent.

Yet among the current renewable options, wind and solar thermal appear to be the only technologies that could produce power at the utility-scale. Traditional solar photovoltaics have long payback times and are even trickier for the dumb electric grid to handle than wind.

Website: www.20percentwind.org

TransWest Express Transmission Superhighway Project

Project to deliver wind energy from Wyoming to the southwest is underway.

Dual 500 kV circuits will deliver 3,000 MW of electricity to SoCal and Arizona.

Website: transwest.azpsoasis.com

Texas to Spend $4.93 Billion on Transmission Lines for Wind Power

The Public Utility Commission (PUC) of Texas approved a plan on July 17 to build transmission lines to carry up to 18,456 MW of wind power from West Texas and the Texas Panhandle to metropolitan areas of the state. Back in April, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which oversees the state’s electrical grid, provided the PUC with four scenarios for transmission system upgrades, with the costs ranging from $2.95 billion to $6.38 billion. The most expensive option would have delivered 24,859 MW of wind power to the cities of Texas, but the PUC chose a less expensive option, Scenario 2, at a cost of $4.93 billion. The PUC estimates that the new lines will be in service within 4 or 5 years, at which point residential customers will be charged about $4 per month to pay off the cost of the transmission lines.

According to ERCOT, the selected plan includes 6,903 MW of wind power capacity that was either in service when ERCOT started preparing its report in September 2007, or had progressed to the point that its developer had signed an agreement to connect the system to the grid. For that existing and near-term future wind power capacity, the new transmission lines will provide greater access to markets, allowing a more efficient and economical use of those wind power resources. In addition, Scenario 2 will allow the development of 11,553 MW of new wind power. That includes 2,393 MW of wind power in the “Panhandle B” zone, which is where a company founded by T. Boone Pickens plans to eventually build the world’s largest wind power plant, with a generating capacity of 4,000 MW [not any more, thanks to SD (above)]. The 1,000-MW first phase of that project, the Pampa Wind Project, is expected to go online by early 2011.