Page 16 RAIN July 1978 discovery: wind power puts a cap on rising electricity prices. Unfortunately, with all the vital hullabaloo about nuclear power, the supposed energy vs. environment trade-off, and the rising consumer tide against utility rate hikes and construction work-in-progress, this very important fact has been lost in the fray. The logic is as follows. • Nuclear plants cost more to build than utilities ever admit during hearings for site applications; later overruns doubling or even tripling those capital costs are now commonplace in the utility industry; the plants are historically less efficient (i.e. actually available to produce power less of the time) than the utilities and the federal government ever admit; decommissioning and hazardous radioactive waste storage costs are complete guesses since neither has yet been done successfully (i.e. without leakage into the environment as bccurred at Hanford); and the cost of uranium and the nuclear fuel made from it continues to increase rapidly under the influence of a ' uranium cartel similar to OPEC. At the same time, the'cost of electricity from large wind geneq1.tors located at the many .good wind sites already found in the Pacific Northwest has been shown to be lower than the cost of nuclear electricity; th~ capital costs of large wind turbines are dropping rapidly as non-federally funded (and non cost-overrun prone) innovators like Charles Schachle of Wind Power Products (WPP) Co. of Seattle get into the act; wind generators are massproducible and hence very likely to drop, or at least hold steady, in price, unlike nuclear plants which are still one-ofa-kind custom jobs even after more than 30 years of $15 billion in known governme·nt subsidies for which a utility actually receives a "learner's permit" allowing unsupervised "onthe-job-training" in how to do "applied scientific research" in power production; and wind energy systems have no fuel costs. Once installed, wind electricity costs are essentially constant. Put all this together and one finds that BPA and the Northwest's utilities should be economically insta\ling wind turbines now, just as Southern California Edison Co. (SCE) is doing in San Gorgonio Pass, where it has signed a contract with WPP to have a 3-megawatt, $1 million wind rriachihe (i.e. $3 33/kilowatt) installed by January 1979 and sending power to its customers by April 1.979; Long-Range•Forecasts: Who Needs 'Em? Ever sin,ce the energy debate heated up after the 1973 oil embargo, citizens and politicians have paid increasing attention to the often arcane and certainly confusing forecasts of future energy needs. the farther out into the future the utility, state government and local intervenor forecasts range, the greater the vociferous disagreement and name-calling debates. All of this seemingly useful activity is hut an effect of the supposed need to know whe"n to start building a nuclear plant which takes 10 to 12 years of lead-time to complete and bring on-line to provide power. With wind energy this could all be avoided and we could retread the long-range forecasters into very accurate, shortrange forecasters! For even large windpower plants not yet mass-produced take only 12 to 16 months to install. The famous pre-WWII 1.25 megawatt Smith-Putn·am of Rutland, Vermont, took only two years drawing board to grid operation; the 200-kw NASA-DOE Clayton, :N.M. machine did it in 19 months, and now SCE Co. has contracted to have a 3-mw wirid turb'ine 12 months after signing the purchase agreement. Such short lead times mean that electrical generating capacity can be added almost simultaneously with actual increases in demand. In a sense, the size of wind turbines makes them . very close to "load-following" and hence reduces the costs t'o .the utility and its customers of under- or over-building power plants. This is another way that wind power keeps consumer costs lower than can nuclear or other power plants whose much longer construction lead times create a spurious need for impossible knowledge of the future. This underdeveloped potential for smaller megawatt increment~ versus lead time to unit operation is vital to economic power production and should now be included in BPA, state energy office and utility demand forecasting. Snowpack, Streamflow & Windspeed· To bring into being the integration of wind power and the Federal Columbia River Power System.will require that EPA pay as much attention, or more, to getting comprehensive· wind speed data from thousands of anemometers across the region, just as it now automatically gets snow pack and streamflow information to guide the management of hydroelectric power. Fortunately, BPA has made an excellent start , toward such an expanded wind data effort due to previous work by the Oregon State University Wind Power Group. BPA now funds Hewson, Baker & Wade of OSU to continue their work installing wind speed measuring instruments at Northwest sites now numbering over 40 and analyzing the data received. Enter Senator Hatfield Thanks to Prof. Hewson's pioneering wind energy education efforts in Washington, D.C., Northwest citizens wanting to see wind power put to use more rapidly have a savvy friend in the U.S. Congress who has already done much fo,r us. Sen. Hatfield, with other Pacific Northwest legislators, worked to get the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Walla Walla District Office, to include wind energy in a study of future pumped storage sites. He also helped to increase substantially the nation's wind energy budget for fisc,al year 1979. If you like windpower and have th~ time, you might ask Senator Hatfield to work on ·3 more items of direct benefit to his constituents: • Expand the BPA-OSU wind data network by 200 new stations between now and December 1979 (i.e. 1 new installation every 2 days). • Direct BPA Power Management section to give immediate high priority to all studies, analyses and data acquisition relating to the regional integration of wind-hydro energy systems. • Direct BPA Contracts & Procurement office to acquire, by competitive bidding for immediate installation at already known excellent windpower sites, large wind turbines built within the region (Wind Power Products Co., Boeing). As Long as the Wind Blows We've come a long way from Woody's song about our big river. From bio-region consciousness to utility rates and BPA policy priorities, this has been a meditation on our water ~nd our wind working together. In such a practical vision the staff of the world's largest renewable energy agency has a most important role. Let's do what we can to help them bring it about for all of us. ■
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