Edison lines can't carry all wind power

By Charles F. Bostwick Staff Writer

TEHACHAPI -- While millions of Californians worry if their lights might blink off at any moment, Hal Romanowitz wonders why his 120 electricity-producing wind turbines sitting idle.

Romanowitz, president of Oak Creek Energy in Tehachapi, can't get a Southern California Edison contract to hook up the windmills because the utility lacks the transmission lines to carry their power.

"I've got 10 megawatts I can't turn on. It's terrible. It's criminal."

Ordered by state government in the early 1980s to use "renewable" energy produced by private companies, Edison contracted with wind farms in Tehachapi and other alternative-energy companies to provide power.

So today Edison keeps on paying -- exactly how much, neither the utility nor the companies will say -- for energy it cannot use.

That means on windy days in spring and early summer, many of the 4,900 or so turbines lining mountain ridges visible from Highway 58 and Highway 14 turbines are turned off.

"It was always an embarrassment to us in the wind industry," said Paul Gipe, who was executive director of the Kern Wind Energy Association until 1995 and now is a writer and lecturer on wind energy. "What's the point of putting up windmills if you can't use them?"

Until two years ago, Edison resisted improving the transmission lines, saying it was cheaper to buy power elsewhere. Ten years ago, two of the largest companies built their own 75-mile, 300 megawatt line running from Tehachapi to Edison lines south of Palmdale.

And since early last year, Edison has completed two projects to ease bottlenecks in the transmission system -- one early in 2000 and the other just before Christmas -- stringing higher-capacity wires and replacing equipment at substations.

"We are working diligently to try to fulfill our end of the contract," Edison spokeswoman Alis Clausen said.

Last year's work is expected to beef up Edison's transmission capacity by 40 megawatts, to 310 megawatts, though the winds have not been strong enough since late December to give it a full test. The wind companies say their turbines connected to Edison lines are actually under contract to produce 345 megawatts, but the utility doubts they will produce that much.

Overall, the Tehachapi wind farms can produce -- though not necessarily transmit -- 650 megawatts -- enough for 650,000 homes.

Through the 1980s, Tehachapi was called the single largest and most productive wind energy area in the world, producing as much as much wind energy as the rest of the U.S.

That changed in the 1990s with wind-farm construction booms in places like Iowa, Minnesota, India and Germany. Tehachapi's wind farms are not built like newer farms, which have bigger, more powerful turbines that are spaced farther apart.

"This isn't a wind-power plant that would be built today," said Mary McCann of Enron Wind, successor to Zond Systems, one of Tehachapi's original companies.

Tehachapi's wind farms have more than two dozen kinds of windmills. Most resemble airplane propellers atop steel towers, but there are several hundred that resemble giant eggbeaters.

The biggest is Enron's 1.5 megawatt turbine, mounted on a 208-foot-tall tower with a 112-foot diameter blade. It can produce as much power as two small power plants.

The oldest turbines produce about 65 kilowatts, though many of those have been replaced by new machines or simply disconnected.

The wind energy association says the turbines can operate profitably at 5 to 7 cents a kilowatt hour -- more than the 4 cents or so utilities could pay elsewhere in the mid-1990s, but far less than the 30 cents an hour peak wholesale prices have hit over the last six months.

Edison pays the wind companies the cost of getting the energy elsewhere, about 5.5 cents per kilowatt hour last year. The rates now have soared to 18 cents a kilowatt an hour but the bills may never be paid with Edison facing bankruptcy.

http://www.dailynewslosangeles.com/archives/2001/01/21/new07.asp

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), January 21, 2001