Wind energy faces daunting challenges

McClatchy Washington Bureau

Led by billionaire Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens, pioneers in the emerging wind-power industry are touting their product as The Next Big Thing as they chart a course to produce at least 20 percent of the nation's electricity in just over two decades.
But reaching that goal won't be easy. The most daunting challenge centers on the fundamental question of how to get the product to customers. That will require building thousands of miles of transmission lines to carry electricity from turbines clustered on wind-swept prairies in America's heartland to distant cities and towns.
Industry leaders are calling for a national commitment to wind power on the same scale as the Eisenhower administration's commitment to constructing the Interstate Highway System. Erecting a transmission grid for wind-generated electricity, they say, would require up to 20,000 miles of new lines at a minimum cost of $60 billion -- and possibly much more.
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Most of the nation's turbine farms are located in the "wind corridor" stretching through the center of the country from Texas to the Canadian border. Texas, with more than 4,000 turbines, is the biggest wind producer, surpassing California for that title in 2006.
But wind power is also what experts call a "location-constrained resource," meaning that it can't be transported like coal or oil and is thus dependent on a network of lines and towers to reach a market often hundreds of miles away. It is thus burdened by a "chicken-and-egg problem" -- wind farms don't want to locate in a site without transmission lines, and utilities don't want to erect lines where there are no wind farms.
Additionally, Pickens told a Senate committee, "long-distance transmission is only economic if it is built to high capacity, which means that there must be a large amount of generation capacity in one place."
Lindenberg, who participated in a briefing on wind energy for congressional aides, said existing lines are capable of carrying only a small amount of projected wind power, thus requiring an ambitious plan to construct new lines and towers. Walker pegged the cost at $60 billion but Pickens projects a cost of about $200 billion.