The New York Times August 28, 2003
Wind Power's New Current
By SCOTT KIRSNER
S TANDING on top of a hill in central Massachusetts, Jonathan
Fitch is surrounded by a grove of eight tall white windmills. He
regards them like someone eager to trade in an old car.
The windmills were installed in 1984 so that the town of Princeton
would receive at least a small fraction of its power from a
nonpolluting source. But now three of the windmills are broken, a
result of direct hits by lightning, and their manufacturer has
gone out of business.
Mr. Fitch, general manager of the Princeton Municipal Light
Department, is planning to upgrade his wind farm. The town-owned
utility is overseeing a $4 million project to replace the eight
older windmills with two gargantuan modern ones. The current
system generates enough electricity for about 1 percent of the
town's 1,450 households; the new one, expected to be in place next
year, is to satisfy roughly 40 percent of the town's appetite for
power.
The windmill replacement project in Princeton is being undertaken
in part because of major advances in technology over the last 20
years. Today's windmills - often called wind turbines - are
quieter and more reliable, and they generate more power at a lower
cost. Unlike the older windmills in Princeton, they are outfitted
with dozens of sensors and connected to a network that allows them
to be monitored remotely, from a PC or laptop.
"The efficiency of the turbines has gone up about 5 percent every
year," said Philipp Andres, a vice president for business
development at Vestas American Wind Technology, a subsidiary of
the world's largest manufacturer of wind turbines. Referring to
the rule of thumb for the steady doubling of the power of
microchips, he added, "That's not quite as dramatic an increase as
Moore's Law, but it is certainly significant."
Perhaps most important, the new generation of wind turbines are
bigger, a fact provoking controversy almost everywhere utilities
have proposed to put them up - most notably off Cape Cod, where a
developer called Cape Wind Associates hopes to build the nation's
first offshore wind farm, using turbines that will rise 426 feet
from the water.
Utilities and independent developers are nonetheless moving ahead
with plans to increase the generating capacity of older
installations and establish new wind farms. Michael O'Sullivan, a
senior vice president at FPL Energy, the biggest domestic operator
of wind farms, said that 2003 "will probably be the second-biggest
year in the industry's history, in terms of adding capacity,"
exceeded only by 2001.
As the country's electrical demand continues to rise, adding
capacity is of keen interest. And the power derived from wind is
power that a town like Princeton does not need to buy from sources
that rely on coal-burning generators or nuclear plants.
But the independence afforded by wind power is only partial. "You
can't rely on it every day," Mr. Fitch said. "You have to have
some backup contract in place." Moreover, in avoiding large-scale
blackouts like the one two weeks ago, wind power is not
necessarily a solution, because the windmills themselves generally
need a voltage supply to operate. While Mr. Fitch expects the more
modern turbines to provide the town with modest savings in energy
costs - perhaps $90,000 a year compared with other sources - the
environmental considerations are the main attraction.
The power generated by Princeton's aging wind turbines has
actually cost more than electricity from other sources, Mr. Fitch
said, but the new technology changes that equation. Unlike the
old-fashioned rural windmills used to pump water, which whipped
back and forth with every gust, today's wind turbines rely on an
electronic nervous system that allows them to predict the force
and direction of the wind up to 24 hours in advance, and adjust
the orientation of the rotor and even the pitch of each individual
blade in order to wring the maximum energy out of a passing
breeze.
Electricity is generated at the top of the windmills, in a boxlike
structure called the nacelle, to which the rotors are attached.
"The rotors can be as large as the wingspan of a 747," said Jim
Lyons, the advanced-technology leader for GE Wind Energy, the
biggest domestic maker of turbines. At the bottom of the tower
that supports the nacelle and rotor is a cylindrical space housing
the computers that collect data from throughout the turbine. The
collection of computers is known as a Scada system, for
Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition.
The Scada system can supply 200 or more pieces of data related to
the turbine's operation, Mr. Lyons said. Information about
higher-than-normal vibration levels or oil temperature can alert a
wind farm's staff to problems before they happen. Typically, the
wind turbines are connected by fiber-optic cable to a control
center. Many problems can be solved remotely, but staff members
must climb up through the tower to the nacelle on occasion.
Problems are increasingly rare, however. At FPL Energy, a
spokesperson said that the company's turbines were operating 96
percent of the time in 2002. And the Scada systems built into the
new generation of turbines achieve a near-autonomous level of
intelligence. In Hull, Mass., where the municipal light department
installed a single 660-kilowatt turbine on the edge of Boston
Harbor in 2001, the operations manager, John McLeod, said, "The
only time I go out there is to give tours."
One day last winter, the tiny cups on an anemometer that measures
wind speed on the turbine began gathering ice. The ice caused the
anemometer to spin abnormally slowly. The computer that governs
the windmill's operation was confused by the "slow" wind speed; it
seemed as if the windmill was generating too much power for such a
calm day. "So the turbine shut itself down," said Mr. MacLeod, who
runs the Hull Municipal Light Plant. "But the anemometer is
heated, and eventually the ice melted," and the turbine started
again. He added, "It diagnosed the problem itself and sent me a
fax letting me know what had happened."
The wind turbine in Hull, just beyond the end zone of the town's
high school football field, replaced an older model that had been
operating since 1985. (Windmills in Hull go back even further, to
the 1830's, when they were used to power a salt works on the
peninsula.) The old turbine was capable of generating 40 kilowatts
of electricity and was perched on an 80-foot tower; the new
turbine, made by Vestas, can generate up to 660 kilowatts of
power, and reaches 241 feet at the tip of its blades. It supplies
power for the town's traffic signals and streetlights, in addition
to meeting the electrical demands of as many as 250 homes,
depending on the day's wind speed.
Mr. MacLeod said he was planning a second wind turbine, possibly
an offshore model that would produce up to 3.6 megawatts.
To gauge where to erect wind turbines, developers put up
meteorological towers to measure the average wind speed and assess
whether it is high enough for electrical generation. In Princeton,
two towers have been collecting data since 2000. The information
is sent to a meteorological consultant under contract to the town,
using the same network cellular phones use.
As part of the plans for a wind farm off Cape Cod, a 197-foot
meteorological tower in Nantucket Sound takes readings of wind
speed and direction every six minutes for the developer, Cape Wind
Associates. Every 30 minutes, it captures information about wave
height and water currents. The data is sent to an office on the
mainland, where it is posted on a Web site (capewind.whgrp .com).
"It's on the Web to provide a service to the maritime community -
fishermen and recreational boaters," as well as ferry operators,
said Leonard Fagan, vice president of engineering for Cape Wind
Associates. The Web site also tries to influence the public, by
estimating how much "clean, local, renewable energy" the
prospective wind farm would be producing at any given moment.
The Cape Wind project has prompted some of the fiercest resistance
that any wind developer has encountered recently, although
projects in other parts of the country have been halted by
community opposition.
Even in Princeton, which has been home to eight wind turbines
since 1984, some residents oppose the installation of the two
larger machines. "The ones they're proposing to put up there are
massive," said John Bomba, who since 1988 has owned a restaurant
and banquet center that are within sight of the existing
windmills. "It's going to impact my business, which is mostly
high-end weddings. It will change the atmosphere."
Mr. Bomba, like the opponents of the Cape Wind Project, emphasized
that he was "for renewable energy, but we think there are
appropriate locations and sites for it." The Princeton windmill
farm is situated just outside a state nature reserve.
Despite the controversy, Mr. Fitch soon intends to dismantle and
sell his old windmills and erect two new ones. "We realize that
not everybody will like the look of it, but it's better than the
alternative, which is pollution," he said. He jokes that he is
competing with Mr. MacLeod to see whose town can generate more
power from the wind. (Currently, Mr. MacLeod has the lead, but Mr.
Fitch hopes to seize it next year when the two new turbines will
be capable of generating three megawatts of power.)
Better technology has prompted utilities and developers to
consider wind turbines, but another incentive is a federal tax
credit for operators of wind farms. For every kilowatt hour of
electricity generated, a wind farm operator can take 1.8 cents off
its federal tax bill. In addition, 13 states have established a
requirement called a renewable portfolio standard. It mandates
that utilities generate a certain percentage of their power from
renewable sources like wind.
In New Jersey, the standard requires that 6.5 percent of the
state's power come from renewable sources by 2012.
When wind projects were discussed 20 years ago, "you could safely
say that they were science projects," said Steve Zwolinski,
president of GE Wind Energy. "They've come of age now, and they're
really a viable technology."
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