![]() in wind capacity, with more than 20 gigawatts installed. Texas and California illustrate the challenge. Unlike conventional coal, natural gas and nuclear generators, wind turbines and solar panels strongly react to the weather, adding a big variable that changes every day of the year. But the rapid scale-up of wind and solar power plants is forcing planners to greatly boost the grid's weather smarts, Bloom says. Typical planning boils down to ensuring the system can deliver during those hairiest hours of the most extreme weather days. Heat waves and cold snaps produce the peak strain on a region's grid. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Colo. ![]() To be fair, weather has always informed grid design but only to a crude degree, says Aaron Bloom, who manages the Grid Systems Analysis Group for the U.S. “We haven't done that yet,” says Charlie Smith, executive director of Energy Systems Integration Group, an industry association dedicated to managing variable power generation. Such a system could ship gobs of renewable power across North America to link supply with demand, whatever the weather throws at it-allowing, for example, surplus wind in the Columbia River Gorge to help Minneapolis keep humming when Midwestern winds stall, and vice versa. What is needed is weather-smart grid design, directed by meteorology and built on long-distance transmission lines that can manage the weather's inconsistencies. “We're trying to ram the square peg of renewables into the round hole of the existing electric system, and I think we're heading for a train wreck,” Sharp says. If builders continue to ignore weather-driven variability, future grids will become increasingly precarious. Experts such as Sharp peer ahead to a day of reckoning for states, cities and businesses planning to switch to carbon-free electricity. The same story is repeated across the U.S. ![]() Does it have an impact on the system and its ability to manage lots of wind? Absolutely. “Did we assess that variability when we were thinking about building those wind farms? No. But everyone, he adds, ignored the weather and climate variability. Sharp says developers designed the wind farms for maximum annual output at lowest cost, and Bonneville beefed up transmission lines to carry that output to market. in meteorology by studying the region's rich winds, he spent seven years at energy developer Iberdrola Renewables (now Avangrid Renewables) mining that resource with turbines, which currently feed Bonneville's grid. Sharp knows this situation well because he helped create it. So Bonneville sometimes shuts down the wind farms, squandering some of their clean energy. Spilling water over the wall without generating power would waste the potential energy while filling the river with excess air and killing endangered salmon hatching there by “giving them the bends,” says Justin Sharp, a Portland-based energy consultant. The dams need to operate flat out because the reservoirs behind them are brimming with meltwater. Managing the grid is even more dicey in the spring, when power output surges from the Northwest's massive hydroelectric plants. For Bonneville, it is akin to a big nuclear power plant on a dimmer switch, with power swinging up and down. The wake from the split meanders through the gorge's wind farms, causing output to spike and slump. The havoc is multiplied by Mount Hood, which towers over the gorge and divides the prevailing winds like a big boulder in a stream. Changing weather shifts winds across the broad span of turbines, creating huge power swings. The carbon-free energy, however, regularly causes migraines for operators at the Bonneville Power Administration, based in Portland, Ore., who manage the regional electricity grid. Engineers packed the gorge with thousands of wind turbines that power two million to three million homes. The wind power boom in the Pacific Northwest's Columbia River Gorge is both a renewable energy success story and a cautionary tale.
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