REVVED RPMs
Wind energy sets another record
Wind power generation records are fleeting.
But another one was set on the Southwest Power Pool’s system Thursday morning, when it carried a record 16.38 gigawatts of wind-generated electricity to consumers within its 546,000-square-mile service territory.
Officials said wind-generated power at 7:40 a.m. was supplying 50 percent of the electricity being taken from its network of nearly 66,000 miles of transmission lines.
The regional transmission organization supplies power to utilities, cooperatives and other power consumers across Oklahoma and all or parts of 13 other states in the Great Plains.
Records related to the amounts of wind power the organization handles aren’t anything new.
The power pool, for example, announced one March morning this year it had set a record when 61 percent of the power it was carrying came from wind-powered turbines. And that was just the latest in a string of achieved milestones for the power source.
The amount of available wind power the pool can tap is about 20 gigawatts, and officials expect that to grow.
While it won’t all be built, there are studies underway within the pool’s operational area that are evaluating whether or not a significant amount of additional wind power could be added.
Pool officials have said before they’ve been surprised by the amount of wind-generated power successfully added into the region’s power supply mix the past 10 years. They attribute the organization’s success both to the build-out of transmission lines and the organization’s efforts to improve its load forecasts and reliability and pricing functions.
One of the organization’s key roles is to make sure power it supplies remains as dependable and affordable as possible, and its staff uses both human and computerized real time analytics to make those analyses.
Reliability, officials have said, is the first thing the organization must achieve.
That means the organization routinely taps other power sources such as natural gas-fired plants to be on standby to pick up slack whenever wind-generated power ebbs.
Bruce Rew, the pool’s vice president of operations, said Thursday the amount of installed wind capacity the
system can tap has risen steadily and dramatically the past 10 years, from 3 gigawatts in 2009 to the 20 gigawatts available now.
“We have repeatedly set and subsequently beat wind-peak and wind-penetration records over that time,” he said.
“As more wind comes onto our system and our operators and market systems continually prove themselves able to reliably dispatch it, we anticipate that we’ll continue to break wind and renewable records for the foreseeable future.”