The New York Times
By Kate Galbraith
Published: February 10, 2009
A document released yesterday by operators of the electricity grid in the Midwest estimated that building transmission lines to take wind power from the middle of the country to the Northeast and other population centers would cost between $50 billion and $80 billion. The variations in the numbers stem from differing estimates of the amount of wind — from 5 percent ($50 billion) to 20 percent ($80 billion) of the United States’ electricity supply — and the document emphasizes that more study is needed.
Currently the country gets only around 1 percent of its power from wind turbines, but the Department of Energy has laid out how the country could get to 20 percent wind by 2030.
Some of the potential recipients of the wind power, however — including grid operators in the Northeast — have questioned the usefulness of the Midwest transmission initiative.
A memo issued last week by Gordon van Welie and Stephen Whitley (chief executives of, respectively, the New England grid operator and New York grid operator) expresses concern. First, Mr. van Welie and Mr. Whitley point out, New England may get wind resources more readily from Canada. As it happens, Hydro Quebec, a major dam system, is expanding into wind power.
The Northeast memo also notes that the Midwesterners assume a growth in coal, which the Northeast, with its carbon cap through the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, is trying to reduce in electrical generation.
Seth Kaplan, vice president for climate advocacy at the Conservation Law Foundation, an environmental group, said that the answer may lie somewhere in the middle.
“We probably need to do both local development and have capability to ship power across the country, but building transmission blindly and precipitously could undermine our goals by providing dirty power from coal in the Midwest with new markets,” he wrote in an e-mail message.
Also on Monday, researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory released a report on wind power transmission and its costs, which found that median transmission costs would amount to 15 to 20 percent of the cost of building a wind project.
For original article, click here.