Does the Wind Blow Enough? Part Two
Still, Bentley said every kilowatt-hour of wind power would mean about a pound less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
“If we had a lot of wind turbines, which we don’t, they could run and reduce oil and gas consumption,” he said.
Bentley said the region would have a problem if it had a lot of wind generation but no other plants to cycle up and down. The studies he’s seen indicate a region does not have that problem until at least 20 percent of its energy comes from wind.
New England’s load is roughly 27,000 megawatts, Lamont said, and wind accounts for only a “tiny fraction,” in the neighborhood of 1 percent.
“You can’t think of this as a wind turbine being backed up with a battery and a power plant,” Bentley said. “This is a big mix. As long as you’ve got a big mix that can accommodate wind power, you don’t have a problem.”
Bentley also said that if there were wind towers all over New England, they would at least partly back one another up as some would likely spin when others do not.
Rich Sedano, a director at the Regulatory Assistance Project, a Montpelier-based energy policy think-tank, said emerging technologies can even help wind farms store excess energy from especially windy days.
“I think storage is going to be more functional the more development we see from wind,” he said. “That’s speculation, but there’s a lot of technology that’s been developed that’s waiting for a time when the market’s calling for it.”
Bentley said CVPS is getting ready to experiment with hooking car batteries into the power grid. Other areas are using batteries the size of tractor-trailer trucks to store excess power, letting it out as needed.
“These things are a little pie-in-the-sky right now,” he said. “They’re expensive. They’re not common.”
Utilities also can work together. The federal government is looking at where the best renewable resources are and building high-power transmission lines to them.
“It doesn’t have to be in Vermont, although it’s nice to have things locally,” Bentley said.
Regulation, though, makes the case a little less straightforward. Lamont said New England is part of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Program, a cap-and-trade system in which energy providers must buy emissions certificates for carbon they produce.
This fixes the amount of carbon produced in a given year.
“Whether you have wind or not, you still have 100 million tons (of carbon dioxide), or whatever the number is,” he said. “It’s a little bit difficult to argue wind’s going to displace carbon, because the cap is the cap.”
Difficult, Lamont said, but far from impossible. Again, it requires a look at the big picture. Additional wind generation decreases the demand for carbon generation, Lamont said, and the cap is not designed to stay at one level forever.
