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On a recent flight I set next to an airline pilot on his vacation. When I mentioned that I was on business trip for wind power, he asked me why he flew over so many wind turbines that appeared to be standing still. I tried to explain curtailment to him: if the energy grid is receiving more energy than is demanded or than the available grid can handle, the wind farms are among the first energy producers told to stop energy production. It’s faster to shut down a wind farm than to take a fossil fuel or nuclear plant offline. So in America we’ve created a situation where we have big expensive wind farms that aren’t being used because the fossil fuel and nuclear plants are treated as the preferential energy source.
Texas is the nation’s leader in wind power capacity at over 16,000 MW at the end of 2007. The subtle danger in the previous sentence is “capacity.” The grid in Texas cannot handle the available wind power, and many of these wind farms in West Texas are being curtailed to 0 MW of production.
This is becoming even more common as more wind farms are being erected. Instead of using an increasing source of renewable power as a replacement for energy sources related to climate change, we seem to be trying to hold the current status of power creation and use wind power as an occasional frivolous extra power source.
We need to take wind power seriously today, use it as the preferred source of energy, and create additional ways and grids to get this power to the demand centers. The only solution to successful management of a variable power source is a smart grid. The faster this becomes a federal and state priority, the better for our world.
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