The Obama Agenda: Much is riding on wind turbines
Abeline, Texas -- On the days he climbs the towers Rob Pellegrini wakes before 6 a.m. He leaves the house he shares with his wife, Jenn and drives his white company pickup truck 21 miles across Abeline. Nearly a mile from the entrance to his workplace, hundreds of white towers come into view, scattered about the slightly rolling hills. On the top of each tower sits a white, rectangular box, which appears tiny in proportion to its base, like a matchbook perched on the point of a chopstick.
For Pellegrini, the focus of his attention isn’t the towers or the boxes, but the fins protruding from the front of each of three white blades arranged equidistant around a central point, like the hood ornament of a Mercedes.
When Pellegrini crests the hill on highway 351, his chief concern is whether the Mercedes symbols are spinning. The movement of those fins around a central bolt is the entire purpose of the contraption, which those in the wind power industry call a turbine.
Depending on the day, the turbines may be spinning swiftly on top of the white towers. On others, the contraption sits idle, waiting for nature to initiate a rotation. A great deal rides on whether the wind pushes the turbines -- billions of dollars in private investment and government subsidies, the hopes of environmentalists who advocate green energy, and the production of electricity that can power thousands of homes.
The Lone Star Wind Farm, for which Pellegrini is the assistant operations manager, contains 200 turbines scattered across 40,000 of acres in the West Central Texas landscape just north of Abilene.
The farm is one of 21 operational wind farms owned by Horizon Wind, a renewable energy company headquartered in Houston. The farms are scattered across five states, with seven more wind farms in development.
From the ground, the Lone Star wind farm looks like the perfect promotional snapshot for skeptics who don’t believe that wind energy can coexist with established agriculture. Cattle graze in the pastures, moving up to the base of the towers before lumbering off in search for more grass. Along the drive, Pellegrini passes several oil wells scattered sporadically across the hills. Just outside of Abilene, new and old energy coexist with the cattle ranchers who have owned the land for decades.
At its peak, when the wind blows steadily across the Texas plains, the Lone Star Wind Farm produces enough annual electricity to power 60,000 homes for a year. On other days, when the wind doesn’t blow at all, the turbines are still, and there is nothing to do but wait.
A former Army captain who led soldiers on hundreds of missions at the height of the surge in Baghdad, Pellegrini is not one to sit idly by and wait for the wind to blow. After checking his emails at the wind farm’s small operations building, he prepares for his latest inspection.
“The turbine’s are serviced twice a year, and I personally do a quality inspection of 10 percent each year,” Pellegrini says. “The starting point of my understanding of services was in the Army. When you preventatively maintain things you mitigate the risk of this or that going wrong. It works.”
The Lone Star Wind Farm has 51 technicians who maintain the turbines, power lines and substations, but Pellegrini personally inspects each turbine, rotating through two each month. The early start has nothing to do with a lingering proclivity from his Army days that compels him out of bed before sunrise; Pellegrini likes to complete the inspection before the Texas heat makes physical activity unbearable and because he never misses the 9 a.m. staff meeting.
At the bottom of his designated tower, Pellegrini dons a hardhat and harness from his truck’s toolbox. He runs the webbing under his legs and over his shoulders, locking the straps through the buckles. The final addition is a simple mechanical contraption called an arresting descender, which Pellegrini attaches to his chest harness with a heavy clip.
From the bottom of the turbine, the enormity of the contraption becomes apparent. Each fin of the turbine is 83 meters long on older models, and 113 meters on newer turbines. When the blade swings towards the ground, the tip barely passes a third of the way down the tower, which is 240 meters tall, roughly the length of two and a half football fields rising into the sky. Peering up from directly underneath the top box, the blade is far from tiny, more like the size of a school bus.
Pellegrini climbs through a small door at the base of the tower. Inside, a thin ladder occupies the wall opposite the door, while a box to the right contains a complex series of switches, gauges and buttons.
“First, we stop the turbine,” Pellegrini says, navigating the buttons with ease. “We rotate the fins on their base so that they no longer catch the wind. That arrests the turbine completely, which will let us work on the mechanical parts.”
After closing and locking the control box, Pellegrini approaches the ladder and clips his arresting descender into a thin wire that runs vertically and disappears into a grated platform forty feet overhead. Pellegrini then starts to climb.
The ascent is cumbersome, given the small space between the ladder and the tower wall and the necessity to pull the descender up the safety wire. A 6-foot, 4-inch former defenseman for the University of Connecticut hockey team, Pellegrini pulls himself steadily up the ladder, aided by his powerful arms and legs, but greatly hindered by his size.
At the first grated ceiling, Pellegrini unhooks from the safety wire and attaches the clip to the bottom of the ladder. His first points of inspection are the bolts that secure the first section of the tower to the second.
The smooth, interior wall of the tower broaches horizontally into a lip where two sections of the tower are joined. Sixty-three bolts, each the size of a fist, ensure that the sections remain securely linked. The contractors who constructed the tower drew lines with a marker, delineating the original position of the bolt. During regular maintenance inspections, contractors mark positions as they tighten the bolts, each mark in a different color. On the lip close to the ladder, a small legend shows the line colors with their corresponding dates of inspection.
On the way to the top of the tower, Pellegrini stops to examine the bolts. “We wouldn’t want the tower to completely collapse on us, now would we,” Pellegrini says.
As he climbs higher, the temperature rises until the top section of the tower is stifling. The sweat now cascades onto his T-shirt and the empty space below.
Before he can climb through the hatch at the tower’s top, Pellegrini heaves a hernia-inducing door, locking it into place, and climbs into the bus-size box above. The large interior is so stuffed it barely holds three people. To the left is the turbine’s rotor, the central point that anchors the three 83-meter long fins.
As the wind blows and pushes the fins of the turbine, the rotor turns a shaft connected to a gearbox. When the gearbox cranks, the attached generator produces electricity, which is passed through a controller and eventually is transferred out of the tower.
The 200 towers in the Lone Star Wind Farm were designed and manufactured by Gamesa, a Spanish company that is one of the world’s leaders in wind energy manufacturing. Each costs more than $2 million to construct, a price that makes any discussion of subsidies and grants high on Horizon’s list of priorities.
Passage of a comprehensive energy bill that contained significant provisions to combat climate change was one of the top priorities during the Obama Administration’s first year. During the 2008 presidential campaign, then Senator Barack Obama stated that renewable energy would be one of his top priorities to combat climate change.
“America can be the 21st century clean energy leader by harnessing the power of alternative and renewable energy,” Obama said in a statement on his campaign website, “ending our addiction to foreign oil, addressing the global climate crisis, and creating millions of new jobs that can’t be shipped overseas.”
In May 2009, Democrat Rep. Henry Waxman of California, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, introduced House Resolution 2454, known as the Cap and Trade Bill. After markups in the Energy and Commerce Committee and passage through various other committees, the bill came to the floor of the House of Representatives on June 26, where it passed by a 219-212 vote.
One of the key provisions of the Waxman Cap and Trade Bill is the creation of a Clean Energy Deployment Administration “to aid the domestic development and deployment of renewable technologies,” including wind energy.
While the potential subsidies and grants overseen by the CEDA will aid wind power companies in their funding and development, industry experts indicate that the laws directly combating climate change will make it difficult to obtain maximum monetary support.
“With some of our staunch opponents, if it weren’t for the climate change provisions, we might get more support for the renewable energy fund,” said Vanessa Kellogg, director of project development at Horizon Wind.
Yet, even with the climate change language creating controversy among many members of congress, Kellogg acknowledges that government subsidies are crucial to helping renewable energy companies maintain a profit.
“Renewable energy competes with existing energy producers, so why, without any impetus, would they buy our energy when they can produce there own?” Kellogg said.
“Without any subsidies, we make roughly $32 per kilowatt hour,” Pellegrini said. “With federal subsidies, that number goes up to about $90 per kilowatt hour, so it’s a tremendous difference. Without the subsidies, we’re barely breaking even, and with them we’re virtually guaranteed a profit.”
One of the benefits of CEDA is supposed to be easy access to credit and capital for new, renewable energy projects, which legislators hope will create jobs. Opponents of the bill argued that the economic affects of the cap and trade legislation would harm the economy in the midst of a recession.
According to a study released by the conservative Heritage Foundation examining the economic impact of the Waxman bill, “the total GDP loss by 2035 would be $9.4 trillion. The national debt would balloon as the economy slowed, saddling a family of four with $114,915 of additional national debt. Families would also suffer, as the bill would slap the equivalent of a $4,609 tax on a family of four by 2035.”
While the House bill passed through the Energy and Commerce Committee and came to a vote in a relatively short period of time, the same has not been true for a Senate bill.
In September, prominent Democratic Senators John Kerry of Massachusetts and Barbara Boxer of California introduced a bill in September that contained many of the provisions in the House bill.
In early November, Republicans on the Environment and Public Works Committee boycotted the bill's markup, but Sen. Boxer, the committee chairwoman, proceeded, and the bill passed out of the committee by a vote of 11-1. As of December 16, with the Senate embroiled in the health care debate, the Kerry-Boxer Bill is not on scheduled to come to the Senate floor for a debate.
Companies such as Horizon Wind look forward to more direct subsidies in the cap and trade bills, but the cap and trade picture itself is murkier. The bulk of each bill establishes pollution tradeoffs that attempt to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases and slow global warming; how the House and Senate bills regulate cap and trade differs and each could have a different impact on renewable energy companies.
The House bill establishes Renewable Energy Credits (RECs) issued to companies and industries that produce renewable energy. According to the bill, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission will issue one REC for each megawatt hour of renewable energy produced in new facilities and three RECs for each megawatt hour of renewable energy generated by an existing facility already producing and distributing energy. After the establishment of a market to buy, sell and exchange the RECs, renewable energy companies can sell the credits to energy producers that emit large amounts of carbon into the atmosphere.
For companies such as Horizon Wind, the impact could be enormous. The two sections of the Lone Star Wind Farm alone generate approximately 400 megawatt hours of electricity, and each year, Horizon’s fleet of wind farms generates approximately 2,700 megawatt hours of electricity. Under the House bill, FERC would give Horizon approximately 8,000 RECs to sell the polluting companies. While the value of each REC is unknown, the market has yet to be established, the result could be millions of dollars in revenue.
The Senate bill establishes quarterly auctions, the first in March 2011, to sell carbon allowances to manufacturing and power companies that release carbon into the atmosphere. The initial price will be set at $10 per ton of carbon released and will increase and 5 percent above inflation to encourage lower carbon emissions. Companies such as Horizon Wind can sell their credits to the polluting companies; however, until there is a market for the credits, their value is unknown. What is clear is that credits afforded to companies like Horizon will become valued commodities as it becomes increasingly costly to release carbon, and the profits for renewable energy companies will likely increase with time.
Horizon Wind has a substantial presence in the New York region, operating three wind farms in upstate New York. In 2005, Horizon bought the Madison Wind Farm, a seven turbine facility that was New York’s first commercial wind farm when it opened in 2000. The Madison farm can provide power to 3,000 homes annually.
Horizon also owns and operates the Maple Ridge Wind Farm, which sits 75 miles northeast of Syracuse. The Maple Ridge Farm’s 140 turbines can power 68,000 homes annually. Horizon recently expanded Maple Ridge to include another 55 turbines.
While national lobbying plays an important role in Horizon’s acquisition of subsidies and grants, most of its lobbying and government interaction occurs at the state and local level.
“Each wind farm plugs into the grid of the state it’s in, and each state has different regulations for transmission and grid management,” said Kellogg. “In Texas, where they have the largest wind production in the country, if you have generation, they’ll build the transmission for you. Transmission is socialized.”
Yet, even with Texas’s generous transmission policies, Horizon has run into substantial roadblocks to expansion of their power production.
Because energy from the Lone Star farm feeds into the existing Texas power grid, the electric Reliability Council of Texas sets policies on how much energy Horizon’s wind farms must deploy into the grid. During times of little or no wind, when the farms do not produce energy, the grid can become imbalanced.
“There are times that they need more energy for the grid to balance out the entire picture,” Pellegrini explained. “But there are some times when the wind just doesn’t blow. So whereas a coal plant or nuclear reactor can just speed up the operation, we have to wait for the wind to blow again.
The ERCoT’s solution was to order Horizon to retrofit its substations to burn off excess energy to balance the grid. The retrofitting is expensive, and hurts the company’s bottom line.
“From our perspective, this isn’t the best thing for private industry,” Pellegrini says. “This is a growing industry that’s actually producing jobs. I would hope they would want to protect that.”
By the time Pellegrini completes his inspection and climbs down from the tower, the sun has risen over the hills and the temperature is already 90 degrees. He stows his gear, makes notes in his docket and drives back to the farm’s operations building.
A squat, one story building with a large open office containing five desks, Pellegrini and his co-workers can manage the entire farm from this room. On the wall next to his desk, Pellegrini looks at two flat-screen televisions. Vertical sets of lights flash red and green and numbers update every second. Pellegrini makes notes about the energy being produced.
On this morning, it’s not much. He looks glumly at the monitors, which specify and elaborate on what he can discern from looking out of his window. On some days, the three-finned turbines spin steadily from their lofty perches. On this hot day, fewer than a dozen turbines spin steadily, and most don’t move at all.
“There are big wind days and no wind days,” Pellegrini says. “We just have to hope tomorrow the wind is moving.”
