Block Island wind farm construction
Ann Berwick writes in today’s Boston Globe that Gov. Charlie Baker has so far overlooked a huge potential made-in-Massachusetts energy source: Offshore wind. As Massachusetts has fallen behind Rhode Island, where construction is already underway on the Block Island wind farm, Baker has instead focused almost exclusively on fracked gas and hydro. Berwick isn’t opposed to hydro, but says that without offshore wind, Baker is negotiating from a position of weakness:
No question, if we can get more Canadian hydropower, we should. But will we be able to get it, and get it when we need it most?
There’s still hope for Hydro-Quebec’s Northern Pass project, designed to bring Canadian hydropower through New Hampshire to Massachusetts, but it has been stymied for years. It’s possible that other proposed transmission lines will not encounter the same difficulties, but that remains to be seen. And if opposition forces transmission lines to be installed underground, rather than overhead, the costs of Canadian hydro will increase dramatically.
And will we be able to get the power when we need it most? Quebec has a winter-peaking electric system, and New England’s system is summer-peaking. However, New England’s electric system is under maximum stress in the winter, when it has to compete for natural gas with the region’s heating needs. The unanswered question is whether Quebec will in fact be able to supply New England with additional electricity on the coldest winter days, when both their system and ours experience peak demand.
Given these circumstances, it is puzzling that the governor is focused on Canadian hydropower to meet the state’s climate-related requirements, to the exclusion of offshore wind. […]
Further, offshore wind is a local resource; Canadian hydropower isn’t. We currently ship overseas most of the billions of dollars we spend on energy. Granted, Canada is not Saudi Arabia, but why would we finance Canadian hydropower and transmission construction jobs in the northern New England states to the exclusion of local offshore wind? Meanwhile, building an offshore wind industry in Massachusetts would create jobs associated with both the construction of wind farms themselves and with the entire supply chain.
Pilgrim supplies over 80 percent of the state’s carbon-free energy. Even without its closing, the state was behind in meeting the climate requirements of the Global Warming Solutions Act. The fact is, we need both hydropower and offshore wind. We’d be far smarter to negotiate the price for Canadian hydropower with our own large domestic resource — offshore wind — in hand.
The Baker administration makes it sound like solar and wind are the only power sources that fluctuate output. But look at this chart of US hydro output:
Keep in mind this is smoothed across the entire United States, not just from one region as the Quebec hydro buy would be.
As Charley wrote, while Gov. Baker says he’s committed to supporting the Massachusetts clean energy industry, he’s so far failing to lead. The actual policies he’s introduced would subsidize out-of-state, polluting fracked gas and imported hydro power. Meanwhile, his proposal to lift the solar cap was weak if not outright insufficient, and Baker has yet to introduce any plan to support Massachusetts offshore wind.
The truth is none of these energy sources can solve our energy problems on their own. We don’t need a silver bullet – we need silver buckshot, using an array of small solutions to meet our big problems.
I’m not a fan of mega-hydro for environmental reasons. And I agree with “silver buckshot.”
But you skip over one of hydro’s attractive qualities, dispatchability.
Particularly with large projects that can stack many megawatt-hours of power behind a dam, the ability to decide when that water’s potential energy will become kinetic and then electrical is a considerable asset.
That chart shows not just seasonal availability but also seasonal demand.
Also, the discretionary quality of dispatch increases the value of distributed generation.
If the wind blows someplace on the grid and generate power, the dam can save that much water for another time.
In effect it is the holy-grail storage that wind and solar requires to be economically feasible.
Now if only it did not flood vast areas of wilderness.
We pay for capacity credit (what you call dispatchability). We’ll pay more to HQ because it provides more capacity credit. We’d pay less to DONG (et al) because it provides less (not no!) capacity credit. The difference in what we pay is sufficient to buy a pure capacity resource used for peaking. So that’s really a wash.
Not in the case of HQ, nope. Your scenario makes sense when the limiting factor is the total amount of water, the potential energy. In the HQ deal, that’s not the limit. The limit is the capacity of the HVDC transmission wire. Because the wire is the limit, the economic approach will be to fill that wire 100 percent of the time. If we install a 1000 MW wire, we will be getting 1000 MW more HQ electricity every single hour of the year. There’s no more “seasonality” with its dispatch than there is with Pilgrim nuclear.
I agree with the points you make.
I want to quibble with your final sentence. It is true that hydropower dams flood areas. It isn’t clear to me that that’s necessarily a bad thing.
Many of those dams are built where natural features created a bottleneck that is easy to dam. A purely natural rockslide or similar event can also create a dam in that same location. Would we view that as an environmental catastrophe? Maybe, maybe not.
Perhaps a different view is that hydro dams CHANGE vast areas of wilderness. Dry habitat is changed into marine habitat. New wetlands are created or relocated.
I’m not saying that this is desirable, I’m just suggesting that it may not be as catastrophic as opponents (not you) sometimes argue.
The chart is really unhelpful to this conversation.
Firstly, a massive amount of our (non-pumped) hydro comes from a small number of dams — and those dams have rather substantial seasonality and annual energy variations. Western hydro, a function of drought and snowpack.
Secondly, a large portion of our hydro comes from run-of-river dams — and those dams have both water flow variation and a host of environmental restrictions related to everything from agriculture to fish spawning to canoeing.
The HQ dams aren’t like that. There’s no shortage of water, or ability to pond it. The HQ dam output will be to fill the wire, all the time. Perfectly flat. It’s output will look nothing like the chart — so including the chart isn’t really helpful in my opinion.
I occasionally visit the Plymouth, NH area, where there is very strong, unified opposition to the construction of the high voltage towers needed to get Hydro Quebec’s power to Massachusetts. This mostly seems to be driven by aesthetic concerns; the towers would “ruin” the natural landscape.
Stomv, or other informed people,
Why is it necessary to construct large high voltage transmission towers? Could the same wattage be transmitted via underground cables? If so, why doesn’t HQ want to go that route? Is it just cost?
Thanks!
I live in a city that wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for onsite water power.
Loosely speaking — and local conditions matter quite a bit — HVDC costs:
$4M per mile above ground
$20M per mile below ground
Could the Tx go underground? You bet. I suspect if Northern Pass gets built, and will have some underground wiring. Just know that every mile of underground HVDC will cost each New Englander about a buck.
I really like this kind of analysis.
I don’t know how many miles are involved here, so let me just pick “ten” as an arbitrary number. So it will cost an extra $160M to address the aesthetic concerns raised by participants.
That sounds like a bargain to me, because of the value I place on aesthetics. I note, further, that since the costs of each are amortized across the lifetime of each, the annual “cost of ownership” is much lower.
Finally, I suspect that a significant factor in the cost delta is the cost of installing the underground conduits that carry the cables. During the lifetime of each alternative, the underground cable is far less likely to be damaged by weather and will therefore have far lower annual maintenance costs. When the cable does need replacement, the conduit is already there, so the replacement cost will be lower.
I think stomv has shown compelling evidence that the required cables should be placed underground.
Should? Meh. We certainly shouldn’t bury the whole shebang. We shouldn’t keep the whole thing above ground either. We need to make specific decisions case-by-case, weighing the additional cost with the reduced aesthetic harm.
Just know that the $160M of extra expenditure associated with your 10 miles of undergrounding could also buy a whole lot of something else — energy efficiency, rooftop PV, subsidies to get more wind turbines built, etc.
http://www.northernpass.us/project-overview.htm
I think you mean this Project Overview.
According to the link posted by merrimackguy, the Northern Pass is a 192 mile transmission line. That’s a lot of digging. 🙂
I guess my point is, as you correctly observe, that we need to make a series of tradeoffs. Aesthetics have value, and I’d like to see that value included in the spreadsheets.
I enthusiastically agree that the decisions should be made on a case-by-case basis for a project of this magnitude.