When people think of the Pacific Northwest they may think of Seattle and Portland and their associated populace. They may also think of volcanoes, the spotted owl, old-growth temperate rain forest, or the perpetual battles over dams and salmon in the Columbia-Snake watershed. While there are many things to be said about all of those topics, today I mean to discuss something that less associated with the region (in large part because it is generally an issue only in the sparsely populated Eastern regions of Washington and Oregon), wind power.
While many are probably aware of the presence of dams in the region and their importance to regional electricity generation (and their effect on endangered salmon), it is less well known that there is a growing wind energy sector in the high desert areas of central Washington and Oregon. While both hydropower and wind are generally thought of as "renewable" resources because they do not emit carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases, most dams are not as environmentally friendly as they are sometimes portrayed (and have a host of complications and serious effects on river health and aquatic animals and plants), though they are on the whole more desirable than coal-fired plants. In the Pacific Northwest the relationship between dams and wild salmon is particularly fraught, with long-running legal challenges and battling scientific evaluations pushing back and forth over which dams should be re-worked, which decommissioned and removed, and how much water must be allowed to flow through to facilitate both up- and down-stream migration of the anadramous fish. When America's inadequate and aging electric grid and an expanding wind sector get dragged into it as well it only serves to complicate all the issues further, but provides a valuable example of why we need to upgrade to a smart grid that is connected to a more diffuse electric generation system.
This particular issue began last spring when the Columbia River had unusually high water levels and the Bonneville Power Administration claimed that it needed to let more water through its generators than normal in order to keep river conditions suitable for newly hatched salmon fry heading downriver to the sea. Because of the way dams are designed, this meant any water let through the generators had to be used to generate electricity (spillways would not have worked in these circumstances the agency claimed because they would have caused too much turbulence for the fry to tolerate). This led to BPA hydropower surging into the grid which would have been overloaded had the agency not ordered local wind projects to suspend operations in an inversion of the usual order of operations (in which dams release more water to generate power during times when the atmosphere is too still). This, naturally, upset the wind project owners, especially since BPA did not make any efforts to direct surplus wind power to fossil fuel driven plants in the grid area, a practice called negative pricing, that is common in other areas of the country.
Now there has been a resolution to the dispute. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission ruled that the BPA was wrong in its actions and was required to rewrite its rules for handling future occurrences of surplus power. How the monetary damages will be distributed between the wind producers and BPA has not yet been finalized.
While having a truly national energy grid would be greatly helpful in eliminating these sorts of situations, where local production is so great that it threatens to overwhelm the system and cannot be exported because of transmission bottlenecks or other issues, that will not completely solve the problem or eliminate conflicts or risk. Denmark has had problems where its large coastal wind installations have generated so much power the nation's grid cannot absorb it all and it must actually pay its neighbors to take it off its hands. While this is rare in the United States and Canada, it can occur and is common in some areas (as I mentioned above). A national grid run by a unified, central system (whether governmental, intergovernmental, public-private partnership, or concerted private action) will largely eliminate the need for such practices except under the most exigent circumstances (though people still need to agree that power lines can and should be built and then decide where to put them so that they are effective but also do the least harm to both the built and natural environments). Additionally, we must continue to invest in research on ways to store energy produced during daylight or windy hours for use during off-hours that might still have high demands from consumers. This must include traditional ideas of storage like batteries as well as research on more innovative ideas like molten salt reserves, thermal gradients, repurposing, and other methods that may not yet have been devised. And, to show that I am not vilifying BPA, I'll finish by recognizing some of the innovative work it is doing in this area. While that doesn't excuse their behavior (and I feel justified saying that since the FERC smacked them down), or get them out of vigilant monitoring, there are far worse environmental and economic actors out there, especially in the realm of energy production. And it goes to show how complicated things can get when you start combining incredibly powerful and important agencies and laws with unexpected circumstances and infrastructure devised to serve the needs of a bygone era.
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