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Energy Northwest going green power

For the last three weeks, the Northwest’s nuclear power producer has also been generating a tiny bit of
electricity from solar panels and selling it to the Bonneville Power Administration.

Energy Northwest is experimenting with a variety of “green” options in electricity production, including solar and wind power.

By LINDA ASHTON, Associated Press Writer

“We want Energy Northwest to be known as an environmentally conscious utility,” Dick Koenigs, director of the Northwest Energy
Innovation Center, the public power group’s incubator for renewable energy, said Tuesday.
But this is more than a public relations project, said Don McManman, an Energy Northwest spokesman.

“Vic Parrish (the utility’s chief executive) says utilities in the 21st century are going to be judged not on their capacity, but on their
‘carbonlessness,’ ” or the nonpolluting nature of their projects, McManman said.
The 38.7-kilowatt White Bluffs Solar Station is about a mile away from Energy Northwest’s 1,200-megawatt Columbia Generating
Station nuclear power plant, both on leased land at the Hanford nuclear reservation.

The White Bluffs Solar Station could light about six houses, while the Columbia Generating Station can power metropolitan
Seattle.
There are 242 midnight-blue photovoltaic panels, each about 2 feet by 5 feet, that absorb sunlight and produce electricity, which is
then transmitted to BPA, the federal power marketing agency based in Portland, Ore.
BPA also sells all of the electricity from the nuclear power plant, along with federal hydroprojects in the Northwest.

Electricity sources such as wind and solar power, which don’t generate at capacity all the time, can provide a nice supplement for
the BPA’s hydro system, said Mike Hansen, a BPA spokesman.
“We can buy that power and pull back on the hydro system and save that water a little bit,” he said.

Solar power stations produce during daylight hours, the peak demand time.
“We call it high-value electricity,” said Todd Foley, a spokesman for Linthicum, Md.-based BP Solar, which supplied the system for
Energy Northwest’s experiment.
“Right when we need electricity most is when solar’s working most efficiently.”
The national average cost of production for electricity is about 8 cents a kilowatt-hour, and solar runs 20 cents to 25 cents per
kilowatt-hour, he said.

The cost at the Columbia Generating Station, which went online in 1984, is 2 cents to 2.5 cents per kilowatt-hour. It would take a
solar station with enough panels to fill 25 to 30 square miles of space to equal the generating capacity of the nuclear power plant.
Right now, though, the White Bluffs station is able to generate electricity at a cost of less than a penny per kilowatt hour because of
the special financing that went with the experiment, Koenigs said.

“It’s worth testing — to see how this will work and how much are we actually going to get out of it, and is it worth pursuing on a
larger scale,” Hansen said.
Solar power can be sized relatively easily to meet the space and energy demands of the user, Foley said. It also has no fueling
costs, and means less power plant construction, he said.
Koenigs expects the cost of production to drop as solar power is used more. It has been niche-market electricity, with commercial,
industrial and residential applications.

“As we reduce costs and improve performance, we’re increasingly moving into grid markets,” Foley said.

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On the Net:
http://www.energy-northwest.com
http://www.bpa.gov
http://www.bpsolar.com

http://www.helenair.com/montana/9Z3.html

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