World Wind Watch | Green Energy News

November 13, 2005 – Vol.10 No.34

WORLD WIND WATCH.

The Independent System Operator New England (ISO New England) has announced that a review of stated contracts for natural gas held by power plants in the region might not be enough to guarantee a sufficient supply this winter. Rolling blackouts could be implemented during cold snaps to conserve fuel. Potential natural gas shortages would not affect natural gas supplies to homes, but blackouts would shut down home heating systems, regardless of fuel, for short times.

New England is also the home of the proposed Cape Wind, the 420-megawatt offshore wind farm. The wind farm, like many, is meant to be a peaking plant - supply power during peak periods. Wind energy has been shown to be a viable way to cut natural gas consumption by displacing power generated from natural gas-fueled power plants during the peak, late afternoon and evening, the time of day that’s also typically the windiest.

Cape Wind is not yet built but could help eliminate the possibility of blackouts caused by natural gas shortages in the future.

Now there may be another hurdle for Cape Wind to leap. Cape Cod vacation homeowner Senator John Warner (Republican, Virginia) has inserted an amendment into a Defense Authorization bill passed by the Senate to mandate study of wind power’s effect on military radar.

A similar concern over offshore wind turbines and military radar installations came a few years ago from the British Ministry of Defense’s (MOD). With testing, the MOD has recently withdrawn its objections and concluded that wind turbine builders could install some software solutions that will make the wind turbine’s radar signal easier to identify. Aircraft use transponders to identify themselves on radar. Wind turbines could do the same.

Further, in a 2004 memo, U.S. Air Force Maj. Gen. Douglas Fraser determined, according the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA), that the proposed location of Cape Wind near the Cape Cod Air Force Station (AFS) poses no threat to the operation of the large radar there.

The AWEA says that Senator Warner has proposed a solution for which there is no problem.

Senator Ted Kennedy (Democrat, Massachusetts) is also a Cape Cod homeowner and an opponent to Cape Wind. The bill now moves to a Senate-House conference committee to hash out differences. Visit Cape Wind at http://www.capewind.org/

The following findings are from a new independent study of wind resources in the U.K.:

--There has never been a time over the past 35 years when the entire country has been without wind.

--The wind always blows strongly enough to generate electricity somewhere in the country.

--The wind tends to blow more strongly when demand is highest, during the day and in winter months.

-- The chance of LOW wind speeds affecting 90 percent of the country only occurs for one hour every five years.

--The chance of wind turbines shutting down due to very HIGH wind speeds only occurs in around one hour every 10 years.

Summed up: The U.K. has the best wind resources in Europe.

The report by the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University and commissioned by the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), analyzed hourly wind speeds collected by the Meteorological Office at 66 locations across the U.K. since the 1970’s. It’s the most extensive research of the U.K.’s wind resource to date. For the study click http://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/renewables/ukwind