Full Title: The Potential Rate Effects of Wind Energy and Transmission in the Midwest ISO Region
Author(s): Bob Fagan, Max Chang, Patrick Knight, Melissa Schultz, Tyler Comings, Ezra Hausman, and Rachel Wilson
Publisher(s): Synapse
Publication Date: May 1, 2012
Full Text: Download Resource
Description (excerpt):
Wind as an electricity supply resource has been getting steadily cheaper, and its technical performance characteristics continue to improve as larger turbine sizes and higher hub heights capture both economies of scale and more of the passing wind.1 Simultaneously, the projected cost of coal-fired power has begun to climb; the increasingly global coal market has given rise to higher coal prices, and many existing coal plants will need to be retired or retrofitted with new environmental controls to comply with stricter regulations being enacted by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
These trends in electricity supply costs are particularly relevant in the Midwest ISO (MISO) market area. Today, more than half of the MISO generating capacity consists of coal-fired units. MISO also contains effectively inexhaustible supplies of the most economic wind power available to the nation. Over the past five to ten years, this low-cost energy resource has begun to be tapped in ever-increasing quantities. As of December 2011, wind installed in the MISO region had risen to 10 gigawatts (GW). However, the inadequate capacity of many segments of MISO’s transmission grid, coupled with the inflexibility of much of the baseload incumbent generation has given rise to operational complexities and system constraints. This leads to costly congestion and uneconomic curtailment, or spilling, of available wind. To relieve the bottlenecks and capture the economic and environmental benefits of more electricity from wind, investments need to be made in the region’s transmission system.