Several comments have come in response to our second DailyKos article asking us to define stranded wind. Here it is, short & sweet.
Stranded wind is wind energy that occurs in a place where it could be developed but it is not due to the lack of population or industry nearby which can use it.
Here is Iowa's wind energy map. The gold area is the very best place to develop. We estimate there are 125,000 people and about 40,000 homes there.
A Clipper Liberty 2.5MW is the most advanced large scale wind turbine on the market today, producing a maximum 2,500,000 watts at full speed. A machine like this in the gold patch of Iowa will yield 34% or 850 kilowatts on an average basis. The typical home requires a single kilowatt on an ongoing basis, so 40,000/850 or 47 turbines should provide power for the whole area. Assuming business uses 4x the power of residential customers the whole area needs 250 megawatts.
The area has available 15.0 gigawatts of wind power and that is just the easily developed stuff. As this process gets rolling we expect the rest of the state to be developed as well - a total of about 150.0 gigawatts. We don't have the population to use it or the power lines to get it out so we're going to take it and use it in two ways.
The first use will be to break the backs of the oil companies in the realm of agriculture. We're at a tipping point where wind driven ammonia has begun to be competitive with the traditional natural gas production methods and this trend will only continue as natural gas reaches its Hubbert Linearization Peak of its production. Once oil gets dear enough it will also make sense to create ammonia for use as a liquid farm fuel.
The second use is for the relocalization of industry. Global oil production reach its Hubbert peak in either May or September of 2005 depending on which figures you consult. The price of having shipped our manufacturing overseas is going to become apparent very soon, as oil is going to dip on the Greater Depression we're about to enter due to the ARM disaster, then climb forever. China gets a little further away each minute in terms of energy cost. That link will stretch for a while, then snap violently, emptying shelves in big box stores everywhere. We must begin to prepare for this.
Hi SacredCowTipper--
In the course of my work I have used the phrase "stranded wind" to denote something else: windpower projects that are stalled because the developer cannot persuade the local investor-owned utility to purchase the electricity. You will come across this situation in rate-regulated states where the utilities rule the roost, such as Iowa (MidAmerican, Alliant) and Wisconsin (We Energies, Alliant, Wisconsin Public Service). This is a consequence of two conflicting utility tendencies. The first is the need to generate a return for shareholders, and wind turbines can certainly deliver on that score. The second is to avoid spending money on development costs. So utilities are perfectly willing to let developers put together a viable project with all the necessary land use and interconnection permits. Then they'll say to the developer, "we're not interested in any electricity you have for sale, but we'd be interested in taking that wind farm off your hands."
It's a much bigger problem in Wisconsin than in Iowa than in Wisconsin, because Iowa's resource is stronger. A multistate utility like Alliant can serve its Wisconsin customers with wind farms located in Iowa. Meanwhile, in SW Wisconsin, there are several fully permitted windpower projects that are literally "stranded" because (1) Alliant can't make any money buying electricity from them and (2) Alliant would rather own wind projects in Iowa than in Wisconsin.
The first Iowa wind farm owned by a Wisconsin utility is set to be placec in service this week. This 18-turbine project, called Top of Iowa 3, was developed by an independent outfit and then sold to my utility, Madison Gas & Electric, as a "construction-ready" project. It's located near Joice, north of Clear Lake. This won't be the first example of this: Wisconsin Public Service will announce plans to build and own a wind farm in Iowa later this week.
"EnergyGeek"
Fellow TODer and
Executive Director of
RENEW Wisconsin
www.renewwisconsin.org
www.renew-energy-blog.org
Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow!
King Lear, Act III, Scene 2
Fascinating stuff - do the interconnect, then get burned? I wasn't aware of this dynamic - adds even more to the plan to build large scale wind turbine farms to back manufacturing processes.
You've used the phrase that way, but please consider carefully what we are going with this. The phrase "stranded wind" is as short and sweet as the phrase "tar sands". Go and Google it - who defines the phrase? Right now it would seem that I do ... so, when people panic, which is inevitable as peak oil effects become more apparent, I want them bending every politicians ear about developing stranded wind :-)
Where are these orphan wind developments? Do we really need only add the ammonia processing to get started?