News

NREL: 20% Wind for Eastern U.S. Possible by 2024—With High Costs, Challenges

A technical study released by the Energy Department’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) last week shows that shifting 20% or more of the Eastern Interconnection’s electrical load to wind energy by 2024 is technically feasible, but it would require significant expansion of the transmission system and system operational changes.

The two-and-a-half-year Eastern Wind Integration and Transmission Study (EWITS) looked at three scenarios for providing 20% and one for providing 30% of the electricity for the Eastern Interconnection grid—a massive area spanning the East Coast to central plains states, with the exception of Texas.

“To put the scale of this study in perspective, consider that just over 70 percent of the U.S. population gets its power from the Eastern Interconnect. Incorporating high amounts of wind power in the Eastern grid goes a long way towards clean power for the whole country,” said David Corbus, NREL project manager for the study.

The report concludes that wind power would be technically feasible, as long as it included 3:1 dispatchable generation. Among the report’s key findings is that without transmission enhancements, substantial curtailment of wind generation would be required for all 20% wind scenarios studied.

But though new transmission will be costly, it represents only a small part of the total annualized costs of the wind energy expansion, and it could be paid for by “reduced expenditures for fossil fuels,” the report finds. Costs of the three 20% scenarios are close, but the scenario with the lowest cost ($140 billion)—detailing “high quality” onshore wind mainly in the Midwest—has the highest transmission costs ($93 billion). That scenario entails 22,697 miles of extra-high-voltage lines.

Offshore wind farms will boost capital costs for those scenarios, NREL found. A hybrid of offshore and onshore projects costs about $143 billion, and one that relies more on projects in the East as opposed to including a Midwest mix would cost about $155 billion.

Assuming that the existing federal subsidy continues, the cheapest 20% scenario shows that wind power could increase the wholesale cost of power by 9%—and the 30% scenario would result in a 37% increase. The study also finds a much higher price for transmission than previous NREL studies—about $0.70 per watt of nameplate wind in the cheapest scenario. Scenarios were modeled on five to 10 west-to-east transmission lines of 800 kVDC totaling about 1,000 miles, as well as a network of 765-kVAC lines.

Sources: NREL, POWERnews, NERC

SHARE this article