Steven Lindenberg

Wind for the Next Generation

Special Issue By: Steven Lindenberg Volume A Number 1

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Steven Lindenberg is senior advisor, renewable energy, at the U.S. Department of Energy and team leader in the Wind and Hydropower Technologies Program at DOE.

For the last three and a half years, I've been working at the Department of Energy in the wind program. I helped prepare a report that the Department of Energy released in May of last year called "Twenty Percent Wind Energy by 2030."
It took me two and a half years to help write the report that looked at the economics, the environmental and the energy implications in raising the penetration of wind electricity in the United States to 20 percent of the power supply.

We looked at whether this nation could meet that kind of objective. We got together people from Sandia National Labs, the National Renewable Energy Lab, the Idaho National Lab and Lawrence Berkeley Lab as well as from various organizations in the wind industry, the utility industry and other non-government organizations.

Probably 100 people from about 50 different organizations worked together over an 18-month period, designing, developing and drafting the report. We asked Kansas City-based Black and Veatch, an architectural and engineering firm that does supply planning for utilities worldwide, hired by the American Wind Energy Association to bring their expertise to help us.

We used the Wind Development Systems model that was designed and developed at NREL. It tries to economically solve the problem of coordinating 384 balancing areas that make up the North American grid. The model has the definition of the load requirements, supply options and transmission transfer capabilities across the entire United States. We had a series of power supply options the model could use to balance load with demand.

We modeled a scenario with no additional wind build, so it was all covered by other energy supply, and another in which wind was built, based upon assumptions that we put into the model. We also looked at jobs that could be created through wind development.

We broke authors up into seven task forces, to work on individual chapters, to help to build the modeling process. We tried to get to an analysis of whether or not we could reach 20 percent wind energy in the United States by 2030.

Transmission and integration was at the top of the list of things we'd have to look at and be able to solve. We also needed to worry about performance and reliability of the equipment. We have fairly good equipment going into installation today, but there's still some things we ought to worry about. If we're going to build a large industry, we want to build with reliable equipment.

We had to worry about the entire cost of energy: operation and maintenance, the capital cost, that entire string of expenses. That's where we turned to Black and Veatch to help us out.

A chief consideration was that, in 2006, at least 40 percent of the equipment we were buying for the United States was being shipped from overseas. There are a lot of economic reasons why you don't want to buy everything overseas.

Other issues we knew we had to consider were workforce development, siting, offshore wind and the consideration of tribal and community development.

Wind energy in this nation is developing somewhat differently than it has in Europe where it's not unusual to see facilities of 20 and fewer megawatts, with two to five turbines at a site. We have sites in the United States that are building out to 700 megawatts with 500 plus turbines.

Finally, we needed to do the outreach to inform everybody about this, from governors to legislatures, public utility commissions, communities where these facilities would be built and communities where transmission lines would be constructed.

We asked "do we have enough wind energy to be able to accomplish this task?"
Through the center of the country, as T. Boone Pickens has pointed out, we're the Saudi Arabia of wind.

There are different classes of wind around the country and some have better capacity factors. A Class 7 wind is about 22 miles an hour average wind speed over an entire year—€”an extraordinary resource. Class 3 is about 15 miles per hour over that same time period. You have different costs with different classes and you have to make some estimation of what you're going to do about transmission.

We have a fair amount of wind energy that's in the $60 to $80 per megawatt-hour cost range including capital, transmission and integration so that we could make some estimation and put it into that model that's going to have to balance 384 areas. We guessed that 10 percent of the nation's existing transmission would be available to carry wind energy and that the remaining 90 percent of what we were going to build would have to be carried via new transmission.

We needed to get about 300,000 megawatts built out to reach what we wanted to have and satisfy demand. We're only in the roughly $80 per megawatt-hour range at that point, not including any production tax credit, which reduces the overall costs. We are delivering wind electricity nationwide today, at 4 cents a kilowatt-hour, including production tax credit, operation and maintenance.
The wholesale cost of energy nationwide is about 5 cents per kilowatt-hour, or $52 per megawatt-hour. That varies from region to region but on average, we're delivering wind energy at a competitive price.

We wanted to build slowly to a plateau and then add 16 or 17 gigawatts per annum so we would have 300,000 gigawatts in place by 2030. During this period we'll probably replace equipment that is already 10 to 15 years old.

If the demand for electricity grew, we'd have to grow the business a little bit to stay at 20 percent. We're already ahead of schedule. We expect delivery this year to be around 7,500 megawatts; last year it was about 5,300.

What will this look like nationwide? Some places have a lot of wind; in others it won't make sense. Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, are not good wind states. They're going to demand some other kind of renewable energy supply or a good transmission connection. Texas, Oklahoma, Iowa, Illinois and Minnesota will have a fair amount of wind growth. Today, Texas is about 6.5 gigawatts, California around 3 and its going to grow to maybe 10. There will be about 50 gigawatts built offshore possibly in the next five years, most of it north of the Virginia range, along the Atlantic Seaboard.

Can you really integrate this into the systems? We're talking about 20 percent; today four states already have around six percent—€”Minnesota, Iowa, Colorado and South Dakota. European countries like Ireland, Spain, Denmark and Germany all operate at levels of higher integration.
Wind facilities won't require a huge amount of land, but it's certainly going to get people's attention if the wind turbines are in their backyard—€”so that's a worry.
Transmission's the next aspect. Some already exists but other transmission is going to have to be built.
We've done a number of studies that look at what it costs to integrate wind into the electric transmission system. The general cost today is about $4 to $5 per megawatt-hour. We are selling energy today at about $40 to $45 per megawatt-hour. Market is $52, and we have to add a little bit for integration. So people are making money at this business because of the PTC, primarily.
But we'll have to build around 16,000 miles of line and that will cost about $60 billion. The question then comes to, what are we going to do to make that happen? Without any wind, it's going to cost about $2.5 trillion to build the energy supply we need to keep up with the electric growth. It's going to cost about $43 billion more to put 20 percent wind in.

What are some of the final values we get out of all of this? Energy security and a fixed price for electricity for 20 years and reduced electricity use of gas by about 50 percent. We will have reduced the electric utility use of coal.
By 2030, we will have reduced the emissions of carbon dioxide and other emissions from various power plants so that we have 825 million metric tons less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.