By banking heavily on wind power, Oregon and the Northwest are building their future comfort and prosperity on air, both figuratively and literally. It's a risky proposition, as indicated by a couple of announcements from the Bonneville Power Administration. ...The need for better forecasting illustrates the fickle nature of wind strength and direction. As amateur sailors know, the wind in Oregon can't be relied on to be either steady or strong for a very long time ahead.

By banking heavily on wind power, Oregon and the Northwest are building their future comfort and prosperity on air, both figuratively and literally. It's a risky proposition, as indicated by a couple of announcements from the Bonneville Power Administration. On Aug. 4, the BPA said it was sponsoring a competition in forecasting the wind. It said two research teams, one from the U.S. and the other from Germany, were about to compete to see which can best predict wind shifts 36 hours ahead.

The winning team "will be in line for a BPA contract to develop a full-scale wind forecast model for the entire fleet of Northwest wind projects."

The competitors were to project winds at four Oregon and Washington wind projects based on 2007 conditions, the BPA explained. "Oregon State University researchers will assist a national peer review team in assessing the predictions against actual meteorological data."

The need for better forecasting illustrates the fickle nature of wind strength and direction. As amateur sailors know, the wind in Oregon can't be relied on to be either steady or strong for a very long time ahead.

Then, on Aug. 12, BPA revealed that six days before, on Aug. 6, its transmission grid had reached a milestone. On that day it carried "more than 2,000 megawatts of wind power for more than an hour."

The wattage produced by windmills in eastern Oregon and Washington was enough to "light all of Seattle and Portland for that hour."

This is terrific, of course, and it would solve the Norhwest's energy problems if Portland and Seattle didn't want to be lit the rest of the time as well.

Oregon demands that utilities get 25 percent from wind and other renewable sources. The utilities are striving to meet this goal.

But the law prevents them from investing in the most plentiful energy resource that is also reliable: Coal-fired generating plants.

The beauty of thermal plants fired by coal or natural gas is that they are steady and predictable. To a large extent they can also be started and stopped based on demand, which because of salmon regulations and droughts BPA can't always do with its other reliable power source, hydrodams on the Columbia River.

A summer heat wave of the kind we just had puts great demand on the electric system. It may also be a time when the wind doesn't blow strong enough to generate much juice.

No matter how successful the competition to predict the wind turns out to be, people in the Northwest may not want to risk their jobs, their safety or even their comfort on an electric supply system that depends very heavily on such predictions being right, or on strong winds lasting more than an hour.

We would not want a future in which the BPA or the local utility now and then has to announce: "Sorry about last night's brownout. We had predicted strong winds, but for some reason they did not come about."

Web link: http://www.democratherald.com/articles/2009/08/20/...