synapse collapse

“When the builders of the Maple Ridge Wind farm spent $320 million to put nearly 200 wind turbines in upstate New York, the idea was to get paid for producing electricity. But at times, regional electric lines have been so congested that Maple Ridge has been forced to shut down even with a brisk wind blowing.” [NYT]

Grids are expensive, especially given current copper prices. Long-haul grids also consume a very large percentage of the power transmitted. “…The power lost is proportional to the resistance and inversely proportional to the square of the voltage.” [source] More simply put, the more voltage you transmit over a power line, the more voltage you lose in transmission.

This is why rather than building a bigger, fatter grid, we should be building more localized generation sources using things like wind, “clean” coal plants, wood pellet plants (considered carbon-neutral due to the ecological benefit of growing the trees to generate the wood pellets) and nuclear (not renewable, but safe and extremely efficient). Using current experience and knowledge, this is fully realizable and puts much less strain on the grid and greatly reduces risk of events like the New England black-outs that occurred a few years ago.

Bill Richardson’s opinion outlined in the NYT article, that our energy infrastructure has not been modernized enough to allow our full potential for renewable energy is correct. His supposition that the grid is the problem is not. Yes, putting wind farms in windy areas can be effective, but people will not be moving to the Dakotas for that. Putting those wind turbines closer to cities may not have the same yield in generation, but the cost of transmission is greatly reduced. I have not done the math, but I’m willing to bet those two come close to even.