January 1978 RAIN WIND'S UP-LET'S GO! To say that there was ·electricity in the air at America's 3rd 1 Wind Energy Conversion Systems (WECS) Conference held recently in D.C. is neither a stale joke nor ah understatement. The three days of tightly-scheduled slide present;ations and workshop sessions, sponsored by the former Energy Research & Development Administration,(now the Dept. of Energy) Sept. 19-21, 1977, was the best-attended, most informative and most harmonious to date. From impromptu soccer games behind the Shoreham-Americana Hotel to brainstorming together over beer at nearby bistros, the 500-plus participants often seemed to be sharing in su'Ch a new-found camaraderie at a delightfully festive occasion as to mark an important coming of age for windpower around the world. Indeed, the undercurrent of thought was "Hey, we're really onto something good! ... When will the public wake up to it all?" For, in probably the most cost-effective res~arch, development and, yes, manufacturing programs for electric power : production since Edison's early research center in Menlo Park or Charlie Steinmetz's lab ·at General Electric, large and small companies and high schools the world around have quickly produced, with updated technology, working wind-electric systems along an entire size spectrum for uses ranging from the (megawatt) utility gr1d to the large corporation, the small business and the individual home. (ERDA/DOE's wind energy program has not yet spent $100 million, even if one includes funds disbursed by the National Science Foundation before ERDA existed or $35 million in funding was authorized by Congress for 1978. Th~ exactly $55.3million spent amounts to less than 3%·of the $1.93 5 billion spent in 1977 alone, nation's nuclear fission-electric program, which produces ' power that is not only not "too.cheap to met€r," as promised us during the "Atoms for Peace" in the late 1950s, but rather produces a Gorgon's knot of expensive, not-so-peaceful problems for both us and the next generation of Americans: radioactive waste storage; the dismantling a~d entombment of reactors even now wearing out faster than anticipated from "crud" in pipes and metal embrittlement; global nuclear proliferation to more, smaller and often unstable countries; and atomic terrorist blackmail.. And this $55.3 million is also less than'13%'of th/$420.9 milli~n spent in 1977, of no use to America until 2025 according to sci'entists working on it, on the nation's nuclear fusion development program. Indeed, it seems we're now seeing the same excessive expenditures for fusion that we.saw for fissiqn and getting the same "pie-inthe-sky" propaganda that went down like honey under Pres. Eisenhower. Yet, unlike then, windpower is on line and ready to go, and go quickly. Because·of this new situation, many energy observers, worried that we have had too many eggs ip. the atom basket for too many years, are suggesting that budgets for the breeder and for fusion be given over to wind energy. Electric power can then start coming back to us imtnedi-• ately, or at least in the 1-1/2 years or less it takes to build a large WECS, rather than waiting for who knows what that may be too late in 2025. In fact, this same general view is set forth in a major-and controversial- new draft study for the Dept. of Energy, which asserts that wind power carries the greatest potential longterm benefits among solar energy systems, and that the government may be over-emphasizing more costly demonstration • projects for other sola.r technologies. The analysis, prepared by SRI International (Menlo Park, CA 94025) for DOE's Solar Working Group, appears to run contrary to public and Con- • gressional opi_nion, which has placed more emphasis on "direct" solar energy applications as an important replacement for fossil fuels in the next century. But rather than this continuous debate and whip-sawing of emphasis, staffing and funding between solar, wind and bioconversion, let's increase them all . to realistic levels with dollars from that messy dinosaur, nuc_lear power. _Among the most impo.rtant and interesting tidbits at the conference, especially for grid-connected WECS, was a single paragraph and a simple algebraic equation from a paper,titled "Directional Guidance for Tariffing Power and Energy to and from Small Power Generating Equi·pment Rated Below 500 kw" by Denmark's electric utility association, The Danish Association of Electricity Supply Undertakings (Vodroffsvej 59, 1900 Kobenhavn V, BENMARK). This is the section under "energy accounting": Thi energy supplied by the utility is accounted for according to the tariff being used if the customer. had no generating equipment himself Energy supplied to the power grid from the customer is accounted to a price corresponding to the savings of the power company due to the decrement in production. The savings are calcu,lated once a year as an average fuel-price for the year considered (b Dkr/Gcal) multiplied by an average fuel consumption per'kwh (2500 kcal/kwh) and finally corrected for electrical losses saved (14 percent). Thus the price becomes: 2500x 1.14 x J0-4 x b = 0.285 x b orelkwh = 0.00285 x b Dkrlkwh This means a Gemini Syn~hronous Inverter owner putting wind, solar or wave electricity into the grid gets paid what the utility pays to generate electricity (i.e. the wholesale price) plus an extra 14 percent due him because he is saving the utility that amount of electricity which. would otherwise be lost during transmission and distribution if the utility had to send its own electricity to other customers at or near that point-of-use. All 'in all, a much better deal than Con Ed's treatment of the 52nd Ave. tenement in NYC (an $18.00/ mo. connection fee for supplemental service, even if no electricity is needed) and a useful fair precedent·we should work hard to get adopted into law by state public utility commissions. During the conference the American Wind Energy Assoc. board of directors met and a number of new directions and activities were announced: 1) AWEA will expand its concerns to include those of medium and large WECS designers, re-- searchers and manufacturers, and to that end will invite a large WECS mal).ufacturer on the board; 2) the 7th annual AWEA Conference will be in March 1978 at Amarillo, Texas, with trips to visi·t the 200 kw Mod OA at Clayton, N.M. ;' 3) the Win•d Technolo'gy Journal, edited by Herman Drees, would be. a quarterly publication available for $15/year to AWEA members ($20/year to non-members), $40/year to institutions, from WT], Box 7, Marston Mills, MA 02648. Samples of the first issue, an excellent start, were well-received by conference .participants. Watch for future announcements that the proceedings are available by summer 1978. -Lee Johnson
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