MidAmerican plans world's largest wind farm in Iowa

Quad City Times ^ | March 25, 2003 | Kathie Obradovich

[newgeezer]

DES MOINES — MidAmerican Energy Co. announced plans Tuesday to build the largest wind farm in the world at a site in northwest or north-central Iowa to be selected in the next few months.

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The company, which supplies electricity to 41 percent of Iowans and serves the Illinois and Iowa Quad-Cities, said it also would seek to freeze electric rates to customers until 2010, a move that needs approval of the Iowa Utilities Board.

“It is indeed a brighter day for the state today,” Gov. Tom Vilsack said. “This will clearly put Iowa on the renewable energy map. We will then of course be the leader in the Midwest and one of the leaders nationally.”

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The proposed wind farm would include 180 to 200 wind turbines that would generate a total of 310 megawatts of wind energy, enough to power 85,000 homes. The first units would come on line by the end of 2004, with the project to be completed by late 2006, MidAmerican Energy Holdings Co. President Greg Abel said.

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The next-largest wind farm is a 300-megawatt facility in the Pacific Northwest.

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Vilsack said the plant would accomplish 75 percent of his goal of having 1,000 megawatts of renewable energy generated in Iowa by 2010. However, environmental advocates said Tuesday the actual output of the project is likely to be far less that its maximum capacity.

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Elizabeth Horton Plasket of the Iowa Environmental Council said because the wind doesn’t blow 24 hours a day, the industry typically estimates that actual generation will be about 30 percent of “nameplate” capacity. In the case of the MidAmerican plant, that would be 93 megawatts, she said.

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The company would not seek state funds for the $323 million needed to build the facility, Abel said. Instead, MidAmerican is seeking legislation that would allow the wind energy it generates to be allowed as credit toward the state’s renewable energy standard for utility companies.

Abel said the proposed rate freeze would extend for five years the current rate agreement with the state. “It effectively means there will be no increase for our customers through 2010 and it means 15 years of stable rates to MidAmerican’s electricity customers,” he said.

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Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller, whose office’s Consumer Advocate division represents customers in utility rate cases, said the proposed rate agreement means the state also could not seek a rate decrease before 2010.

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However, he said, the agreement includes a revenue-sharing agreement for customers that kicks in if MidAmerican’s rate of return on investment exceeds 11.75 percent. It also includes the opportunity for the company to seek a rate increase if its rate of return falls below 10 percent or if environmental investments exceed expectations. “There is just a little wiggle room for them,” Miller said.

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Abel said the facility would create jobs for construction and operation, as well as income for farmers, who would be paid for easements to have wind turbines on their land.

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John Sayler, whose consulting company, Sayler & Associates, has been working on wind-energy projects in Iowa and other states for 30 years, said he is happy to see MidAmerican end its past resistance to efforts to require utilities to purchase renewable energy.

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Abel said advances in technology have improved the efficiency of wind generation, allowing the project to move forward.

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In the 1980s, the cost of wind-generated energy was about 25 cents per kilowatt hour, according to Sayler. The cost of generating wind energy at the new facility will be about 6 cents per kilowatt hour, a cost that a federal production tax credit will reduce to 4.2 cents, Jack Alexander, MidAmerican’s senior vice president for supply and marketing, said.

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Electricity generated by a coal-fired plant like the one being developed in Council Bluffs costs about 4.1 cents per kilowatt hour, he said.

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The project makes a total of $1.4 billion in investment in new generating facilities for MidAmerican, including new coal-fired plants under development in Council Bluffs and the Des Moines area.

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Meanwhile, Iowa’s municipal utilities likely will decide in July whether to proceed with an electric generating plant near Fort Dodge that combines wind energy with an underground, compressed-air system that can store energy.

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Bob Haug of the Iowa Association of Municipal Utilities said cities in Iowa and Minnesota are awaiting the results of geological and economic studies before deciding whether to invest in a $215 million plant.

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The 300-megawatt-capacity plant would be the first of its kind in the world, Haug said, because it would combine wind energy with a system that would store compressed air in an underground aquifer.

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“The problem with wind is it doesn’t blow when you need it the most,” Haug said. The proposed plant solves that problem by allowing energy to be stored in the form of compressed air, which serves as a “big battery” to run the turbines when the wind isn’t blowing.

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The compressed-air system would still need natural gas, but two-thirds less than a coal-fired facility, Haug said. And even that might be replaced by renewable sources such as burning shelled corn, which could be substituted during times of high natural gas prices, he said.

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Kathie Obradovich can be contacted at (515) 243-0138 or kathie.obradovich@lee.net.

[boris]

"Fund this project? Use excess Social Security funds to loan to indusry for these windmills."

Now I know you are either joking or nuts.

[Fellow Traveler]

Some real numbers for all. I worked at a site in west Texas. The plant is a combined cycle plant consisting of three gas trubines and one steam turbine. Two of the gas turbines are rate at 80 megawatts. The steam turbine is rated at 90 megawatts. The other gas turbine is rated at 40 megawatts. The plant was built in the late 80's at a cost of 450 million dollars. That includes a 20 year natural gas contract. The plant is a cogeneration project that provides steam to a nearby sheet rock plant. The total ouput amount of the plant is 290 megawatts. However it is available for about 11 months out of the year. The other month it is shut down for maintenance.

[biblewonk]

The economics will kill you. The reason is that wind is dilute. Intensity is the key to economies of scale. They (windmills) are simply a bad capital investment; you need to invest huge amounts for piddling amounts of power. A perfectly disinterested accountant would slay you for selecting wind over, say, nuclear. This is elementary economics.

I don't think you understand the economics. A million dollar windmill makes 150,000 dollars worth of electricity per year. There are no fuel costs. I can see that you just don't like them for some reason and love nukes.

[TomHarkinIsNotFromIowa]

Kind of like eatin donuts and drinking diet soda. Each one cancells the other one out. So you get the best of both worlds.

[Young Werther]

Of course, that accountant will factor in the cost of storing the spent fuel rods for 10,000 years.

Wind farms are getting awfully close to producing electricity at $.04 per kilowatt hour which is the cost of a coal fired plant!

Build enough windmills to close down the coal generation and you shut up the envirowackos who scream CO2 emissions.

The amount of wind energy that is generated from the daily solar input is something like 15,000 times the amount of energy generated from all sources.

when you look at the deset that India is becoming because many of its rural villages still gather wood for cooking and heating homes you can understand why alternative energy be it solar, wind, water and biomass offers cleaner energy.

[Ditto]

So. 93 MW of clean energy is good and the wind plants pay for themselves even without the subsidy.

Total BS. Without heavy subsidies, none would be built. You statement shows your ignorance. They only make money from the tax credits and the laws that force the grids to buy kwh that are far more expensive than any other source. Guess who pays for that?

Why Iowa only? Each state has it's own wind resource. N Dakota could produce 20 times what it needs.

LOL. North Dakota probably needs an installed capacity less than 1 GW to meet it's entire needs. There's one nuclear plant down the road from me that that sits on about 20 acres that produces enough power for a over 1.8 million people and produces it a less than 2 cents a kwh. The total population of North Dakota is less than 700,000! One nuke could supply the whole damn state of N. Dakota with plenty left over for export.

Wind also farms do absolutly nothing to replace the need for all the other plants in the grid, and they never will. Since their average availability is around 30%, even if you built enough wind farms to meet peak demand, all the other units necessary to meet that demand must be kept at the ready in order to supply the grid for the 70% of the time when the wind ain't blowing! All wind farms do in reality is to drive up the kwh costs of those other sources since they have less total revenue to cover fixed costs. i.e. bw, the more wind farms, the higher your electric bill will be.

As to the cost of a nuke, it would be about 3 times the cost of an equally sized CC plant or about 1/10 the cost of an equal amount of wind power. A 1000 MW nuke would run about $1 billion vs. around $300 M for a 1000 MW gas CC plant. The difference is the cost of the output. A nuke delivers MW to the grid at around 1/3 the cost of a gas fired CC plant, so the total pay-back time for the Nuke and the gas CC each plant is the about the same while the nuke would be zero emission and the gas plant will still be emitting CO2 and NOx into the atmosphere.

As to Price-Anderson, no it is not a subsidy. In over 50 years, it has never cost a cent of taxpayer money because there has never been a single claim against it. All of this while you are letting the envro-hucksters reach into your pocket every day with their wind farm and solar scams.

Maybe you are a wonk on the Good Book, but you don't know diddly squat about the power generation industry.

[biblewonk]

Maybe you are a wonk on the Good Book, but you don't know diddly squat about the power generation industry.

Yes I do and your arrogance doesn't change that.

[Ditto]

Yes I do and your arrogance doesn't change that.

Lets see. You are running around here all the time advocating that we as a nation spend several trillion dollars to switch to "wind power" that is only good 30% of the time.

Sure... you know a lot.

[boris]

"Of course, that accountant will factor in the cost of storing the spent fuel rods for 10,000 years."

The cost is negligible; the problem has been solved (vitrification and deep burial). The real problem is political, not technical. Comparing the mass of waste from (say) a coal-fired plant and a nuclear plant shows the absurdity of worrying about 'storage' costs. Oh, and a coal-fired plant releases more radioactivity than a nuclear one, as shown by the late great Dr. Petr Beckmann.

"Build enough windmills to close down the coal generation and you shut up the envirowackos who scream CO2 emissions."

Let an endangered bird get chopped up by the rotors and listen to them howl for demolition. They started demolishing dams because they inconvenienced fish...

"The amount of wind energy that is generated from the daily solar input is something like 15,000 times the amount of energy generated from all sources."

Big deal. As I said, the problem is that both solar and wind are dilute and hence represent the worst possible investments for energy sufficiency.

"when you look at the deset that India is becoming because many of its rural villages still gather wood for cooking and heating homes you can understand why alternative energy be it solar, wind, water and biomass offers cleaner energy."

I note that no actually feasible or economically justifiable methods make your list. Hydro does not count, as all economically-feasible sources are already fully exploited. As Beckmann remarked, "the only reason Robert Redford favors solar power is that only Robert Redford can afford it!"

--Boris

[boris]

" I can see that you just don't like them for some reason and love nukes."

I don't like stupidity and wilful sillyness masquerading as practicality.

I admire practical, economical and workable solutions.

Some years ago the Harvard Lampoon ran a parody of 'appropriate' energy generation schemes. Two that I recall:

-- Scale up those bobbing bird toys that 'sip' from a glass of water. Make huge ones and line them up along a river; connect them with a shaft. Voila!

-- The Arboreal Turbine. Sink a turbine into a tree. When the sap rises in the summer time, the turbine turns v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y. But just think! Zero emissions and zillions of trees...

Note the similarity to wind, solar, tidal, and other marginal (noneconomic) 'sources'.

BTW, as a sanity check, be aware that California (for example), absorbs 40,000 megawatts 24/7/365.

--Boris

[biblewonk]

All of this while you are letting the envro-hucksters

Yeah, enviro-hucksters like GE and Shell.

[biblewonk]

You are running around here all the time advocating that we as a nation spend several trillion dollars to switch to "wind power" that is only good 30% of the time.

Your statement is wrong but pissing matches are pointless.

[chimera]

Wind mills alone will not be able to support the elctricity demands of society. Nuclear power is clean and efficient, but the development of new plants using better than the 1960's technology we currently use has all but been halted by the environmentalist wackos.

Actually, there are some very sweet Generation IV systems under development. I am working on a couple. Check out the PBMR concept, for example. General Atomics has a very nice modular high-termperature gas-cooled reactor that makes use of very advanced technology on the turbine side. Westinghouse has a water reactor concept (IRIS). All of these have features in common, such as passive safety, modularity, long core lifetime, and costs per installed kilowatt capacity on the order of gas-fired generation.

Low intensity and variability will always be the Achilles Heel of so-called "alternate energy" schemes. Solar and wind energy is very diffuse, so you have to spend a lot to capture a little (comparatively speaking). The sun doesn't shine at night and the wind doesn't always blow. Overbuilding capacity hurts in two ways. First, its wasteful and expense when you've got perfectly good energy sources that are much better in terms of availability and capacity factor. Second, if you're thinking about a grid-type distribution system (the most practical means of energy distribution and utilization for an industrialized, technological society), grid stability becomes a nightmare when you've got nothing but variable and intermittant energy sources available for dispatch.

[biblewonk]

I don't like stupidity and wilful sillyness masquerading as practicality.

A huge number of us feel that way about nukes and non-renewable energy.

[chimera]

Oops. Misstatement above. Generation IV designs target costs (that is, total costs, intsllation plus O&M) on a $ per kwhr basis, to be comparable for gas-fired generation.

[boris]

"A huge number of us feel that way about nukes and non-renewable energy."

Yes. We will always have innumerate fools among us.

Such individuals disgust me. They are as ignorant as savages as to how--exactly--the light comes on when you flip the switch.

Magical thinking. Literally, they wish magic to rule the world instead of physics. They want electricity without the messy necessity of generating plants; transportation without combustion; food and clothing without agriculture; plastics without petrochemical plants; metals without mines; ease without effort; wealth without work.

The big silver bird takes them over fly-over country; it is a miracle. Bernoulli? Never heard of him. But the big silver bird makes noise that they dislike (yet they persist in moving next door to airports) and emits pollutants they want to outlaw.

--Boris

[biblewonk]

Not interested in your mindless pissing match.

[TBall]

A gale at 2:00 am could be used to break hydrogen bonds?

[Ditto]

Yeah, enviro-hucksters like GE

GE Wind Energy.

Enron Wind

Siemens Wind

[boris]

"Not interested in your mindless pissing match."

Not surprising because I have numbers and physics and you do not.