the film
forum
library
tutorial
contact
Economic and dam related articles

BPA Stops Wind Power Generation
for the First Time in 4 Years

by Editor
KUOW, April 7, 2017

Wind turbines in Blalock Canyon, a few miles off I-84 near Arlington. Northwest rivers are running high as all that winter snowpack melts into spring runoff.

And that means the region is producing too much of a good thing: carbon-free, renewable energy in the form of both dam-generated hydropower along with electricity from spinning wind-farm turbines.

That's prompted the federal government to take an action it avoided during the last four years of drought conditions: shutting down wind power.

That's something the Bonneville Power Administration did each spring from 2010 to 2012, before more recent drought conditions kept rivers running so low that there was plenty of capacity on the power grid for all the electricity that Northwest wind farms could generate.

But there's one big difference between this spring and the region's pre-drought years: California's increasing supply of solar power.

Electricity suppliers in the Northwest used to sell a lot of their carbon-free energy from wind and hydroelectric dams to California to help it meet its renewable energy goals. But now, with more solar on the grid, California's not buying as much of the Northwest's surplus.

That leaves the extra power with little place to go. Dam operators curtail generation and send extra water over the tops of dams. Wind operators are made to stop producing power. Wind power producers lose money with each day they're not generating power.

Art Sasse, director of communication and brand for Avangrid Renewables, said his company is monitoring the situation and complying with the BPA's directives.

A lot of the reason the BPA tells wind power generators to shutdown has to do with snowmelt.

"In the Northwest, the timing of the runoff is a really important phenomenon," said Ben Kujala, a senior resource analyst with the Northwest Power and Conservation Council.

It's a tough balancing act. When rivers are running too high from snowmelt and precipitation there is only so much water that can be spilled over the top of dams, bypassing turbine generators. Too much spill can harm threatened and endangered fish.

Add to that springtime winds and there could be too much power on the grid. That could cause a blackout.

This year, BPA started the wind-power curtailments in mid-March, earlier in the season than ever before.

"One of the things we saw in previous curtailments was generation, where you're either going to take what you can get, or you're going to have to curtail some of it."

Kujala said it doesn't look like the rivers will be quite as swollen as during the largest curtailment in 2011.

"However, we definitely look like we're going to be on-track to do as much curtailment, if not more," he said.


Editor
BPA Stops Wind Power Generation for the First Time in 4 Years
KUOW, April 7, 2017

See what you can learn

learn more on topics covered in the film
see the video
read the script
learn the songs
discussion forum
salmon animation